JcDent

At one point in 7E, I read fandexes (fan army lists) for fun and all of them were garbage where rules, unit and power bloat runs rampant and still fails to catch up to the awful Mary Sue-filled fan lore.

The one programmer is their buddy

Their buddy that coded the engine in a way only he understands

But most importantly, he's their buddy

I think in an effort to make video games more realistic, protagonists should stop constantly talking to themselves about puzzle solutions and should instead remain totally silent until they eventually say "is... have I had my shirt on backwards all—god dammit"

In an effort to get around a similar issue in miniature wargaming - namely, to not present strength-testing objectives that an intelligence-focused team wouldn't be able to do - Pulp Alley requires you to draw a card and then see what stat challenges apply to the objective.

So imagine if Indiana Jones swaps out the gold idol for a weighted bag of dirt like an intelligent guy, maybe a more agile/dexterous dude might just swipe and leg it while a strong dude may push the altar out of the spot.

The card doesn't tell you the fluff of what happened when your character used their good stat to resolve the objective, so you can come up with that explanation yourself.

It neatly solves the issue where, say, in Necromunda, a Goliath team would deffo fail an Intelligence test (...and who raises Intelligence anyways?) while in infinity, the list of special qualifications that allow a trooper to Press The Button (that's how we call activating/interacting with an objective) is expanding to to ridiculous proportions.

One caveat: I guess it wouldn't be OK in a game like SIGNALIS to just be able to blow up puzzle-locked doors, but open-world RPGs like Starfield that have no stakes or narrative themes should definitely allow you to do that.

While these may not be the definitive reasons why the game didn't survive, I could take them.

When your game has basically two factions and one of them has more off table support options than other has unit choices total, you have fucked up. The three Skinnies units looked weird even when flipping the book in a vaccuum.

And then the game itself is imbalanced, which is a comolaint we make in every episode. No surprise it died.

They're barely in the book. They can be anything you wants as long as they're not identical to MI/not able to take them on 1:1. Putting three units and making them the weird tribal faction suuucks.

At the same time, if you draw units for the Federation from every incarnation, maybe you have to consider the same for the bugs? The book gave them weapons because they were very-nonracistly red Chinese.

Maybe it was a good time to give them weapons that Skinny allies bolted onto some of Warriors or Tiger Warriors?

Just do anything to have a game where one of the factions has all the options, the other has five sculpts total, and the third basically doesn't exist.

For a GW metaphor, it would be like a game of Space Marines vs. Votan vs. Ynnari (using only models released as Ynnari)