Players: Corinne, Drew, Drew, Kevin

This time we got to really see the dizzying novelty of 1001 Nights in full display, as we dived three levels deep into stories. Drew started us out with a story about stealing fire, which ended on a fun twist where instead of stealing the fire, the gods give the fire to the "hero" and tell him to say he stole it. I followed up with a story about the same "hero" a villain trying to murder a sultan under duress from an Infrit, which Corinne hijacked to tell the story of why the Infrit wanted to kill the Sultan (casting me as the "evil magician" who tricked that Sultan's ancestor into betraying the Infrit.) Seeing the trickery, I found an opportunity to steal the story back, telling a modified Arthurian tale of slaying a dragon. We then had to work our way back up out of each one of them, resolving the Arthurian Legend, the Infrit's tale, and then back to the story we started.

Watching known myths and legends go off the rails when you throw Players into them is delightfully entertaining, as was finding common ground between our characters by mocking the northern "Barbarians" who came up with the ridiculous idea of deciding Kingship by whatever peasant manages to pull a sword from a stone. The diving into story after story is a bit dizzying and it's easy to get lost between story threads; it might be a good idea to use Meg's suggestion of limiting the number of stories deep you can go.

Last time I had some dislike for the mechanics, and I was glad to hear another group's thoughts. Here are some minor of the modifications I'd recommend:

• Instead of requiring the storyteller to collect 8 dice before they can end a story, the story teller can end the story at any time, unless 2 or more Players insist that the storyteller continues. (If you earn NO dice for the scene, you don't need to roll for Safety, since you made no progress towards your other goals.)
  
• Eliminate the "win" condition. When someone earns their ambition, the group should decide if they want to end the game there or keep going; characters pick a new Ambition after accomplishing their first one.
  
• The asking of questions wasn't nearly as distracting this time around, and I think this is because instead of starting off with the first scene as the facilitator, I had someone else lead the first scene, so I could demonstrate the question asking mechanic.
  

I have a few thoughts around more fundamental changes, but would need to test them before advocating them.

tl;dr: 1001 Nights is much smoother now that I know what to expect, and you can get rid of the most frustrating parts of the rules by simply ignoring them with little to no impact on the way the rest of the game plays.