I'm back again with a new bit of game system analysis for the finale game of Friends at the Table's Palisade. They're playing Questlandia, which is a game designed for simulating kingdoms where "your society is failing" (quoting the itch.io page, the book says "failing society").
I did this analysis because I was surprised by the number of listeners surprised that things were going poorly, given that the game is designed with a slow decline in mind. I wrote up a little simulator and ran it for 1000 games to demonstrate this. The red dots are the median case and the darker the dot the more common it is. As you can see, the norm is that after six scenes (where the published recorded finale is now), we'd expect to be at 2 additional troubles. This is less than the FatT crew's total troubles but it's well within the expected distribution. The game is working as intended and it'll only get worse from here.*
*assuming they don't hack the game partway through or swap over to another system
