"A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied."
- Oscar Wilde
One attractive thing about playing role-playing games that I rarely see talked about is that they are instances of irreproducible, fleeting fun. Everyone who goes to the theater for the newest Star Wars or Marvel movie will see the same movie, but the game you play at your table is a singular, ephemeral instance that will be different from all other games.Your estimation of a film might differ from someone else's, but you saw the same movie. Not so with role-playing games. Even if you're using a published setting or prewritten adventure, other tables playing through the same material will have a different and equally unique experience. We might all start with the same rulebook in hand, but where we end up is, by the nature of this type of play, inevitably distinct.
This, to me, if one of the hobby's greatest selling points. In an age of homogenized entertainment that is engineered to be fairly smooth and frictionless for a global market, the game at your table is an experience that can't be bottled, isn't test-marketed, and wasn't birthed by committee to hit a target demographic. It is a transient, ephemeral, and personal thing--you literally had to be there to really "get it." It's also a part of the hobby resistant to the forces of monetization and professionalization: you own it, collectively but only ever temporarily.
