Further – I hear you on the dissatisfaction front. I think a lot of gaming is just ‘maintenance gaming’. When you (as we do) assemble a bunch of wannabe writery designery types, there’s this constant side topic about could have been better. How could the system have better supported us, how could we have made better choices, what would have been better timing for that bang..

Role-playing games are so complicated (not just procedurally, but in terms of the sheer volume of obvious and non-obvious choices that are happening at all times) that there’s limitless surface area to chew over.

I think partly it’s part of an ongoing learning process, wanting to do it well, but I do think it interferes to a degree and produces a sort of dissatisfaction. When the session is just “cold pizza”, it’s still pizza!