I can definitely relate to the author/actor line, too. I have thoughts on this that might either be germane or derailing. One was the recent experience of a BW game that completely slid out of the fiction. When any roll could be a) resolving the action at a wide spectrum of scales, and b) that allows us to neatly incorporate story-pacing concerns, if you don’t solidly ground things in established fiction, play can morph into an OOC negotiation of which two outcomes would be coolest.

The other thing is that I’m a ‘mastery’ player, but in a particular way – I want to accomplish things and for them to feel complete, and then to exult in what I’ve done. When the game system is a machine that produces drama at some ideal rate, it can have the effect of neglecting these strategic accomplishments. You can still find system mastery, but it’s in mastering the story-related concerns, rather than developing and making use of campaign capital.

This is a little like the on-the-fly randomly generated dungeon, where I can’t shake the bleed that delving deeper is what’s making more dungeon, not getting me closer to my PC goals of conquering it.

It’s also like the tit-for-tat advancement/difficulty climb you get in CR-appropriate challenges, where finding a +3 sword just makes you able to deal with the next crop of monsters, whose AC is ~3 better.