Comment on “At Least It Runs”

You point out that there are the games that are awesome but get tinkered on to the exclusion of actual usage -- design in a vacuum -- and those that are not as sexy but which see actual play.

It is just as crucial to learn not to over-design as it is to learn to design, lest you prod and poke and overhaul one little corner of the big ecosystem so much that you never advance the state of the thing as a whole. Actually running games provides valuable feedback as to what is needed to, well, actually run the game, and which things can rest unsatisfying but serviceable for now (I won't quote your own examples at you.) This feedback mechanism is vital if you are someone who has this enormous design vision and just wants to spend all the time trying to achieve it. The actual play keeps the design grounded in the "bigger picture" of, say, advancing the roleplaying game as an art form.