My personal theory on “take-backs” in tabletop games. If:

(a) There is no new information; and

(b) the game has not changed

Then a move can be changed.

In more complex games, we are also generally pretty relaxed about retconning standard maintenance tasks that get overlooked as long as they don’t impact ongoing events. (So you can’t say, “Oh, hey, I forgot to add a reinforcement to this province that’s about to be attacked.” But it’s probably okay if you say, “I forgot to grab $300 for occupying Yu-Shang.”)

The writing is really bad.

This is the biggest problem. Voyager regularly deals up truly horrendous episodes at a pace roughly equivalent to the Original Series, but it doesn’t surround those episodes with the highs of TOS (which produced some of the best episodes of television ever made).

The acting on the show is also incredibly problematic. There are several performers who are just flat-out terrible. Others are crippled by the bad writing. The cast notably lacks the stellar talents like Shatner and Stewart: The best actor on the show is Robert Picardo, but it’s really difficult to run a show out of sickbay. (Which is why most of the series’ best moments come after the Doctor gets a portable holo-emitter and Jeri Ryan joins the cast.)

Coming back to the writing, though, we can also note that the writer’s room was burned out: The same basic team had produced hundreds of episodes of Star Trek at this point and they were just running out of ideas. There’s a lot of rehashed Trek fan-fiction taking the place of original science fiction ideas. (And if you peek behind the scenes, you’ll discover a surprisingly large number of rejected scripts from other series getting dumped into Voyager.)

Finally, the show embraced ideologies that were curiously antithetical to a lot of the futurism that the franchise had previously fanfared. For example, “Measure of a Man” is one of the most celebrated episodes in all of Trek, so it was weird to see so many episodes of Voyager endorsing Janeway’s position that the Doctor (and other forms of artificial life) weren’t actually sentient beings. Voyager is also where the Prime Directive reached bat-shit insanity.

What might have saved the show would have been to embrace the long-running story arc with meaningful continuity that its premise inherently promised. But meddling from above repeatedly prevented that from happening.

Nail in the coffin: The entire series hinges on Voyager being stranded in the Delta Quadrant. The writers accomplished that by making Janeway an asshole; misinterpreting the Prime Directive; and then executing a plan that makes no sense. (Put your bombs on a timer!) The entire series got off on the wrong foot and was based, ultimately, on some really stupid writing.

I want a self-driving car so badly it hurts.

But there’s one frequent claim I often see from proponents of self-driving cars: That they’ll usher in an era of autonomous taxis which will cause the personal ownership of automobiles to drop off a cliff.

That’s possible. But I think it very unlikely. I think we’ll see a dramatic increase in the number of single-car families, but it won’t be because they’re ordering autonomous taxis (although they may from time to time). It will be because they’re able to time-share a single vehicle without needing to physically be in the same place.

The argument for autonomous taxis and the abandonment of personal vehicle ownership hinges on the appealingly simplistic vision of “cars waiting in parking lots”. Since each of us only need our cars for a narrow slice of each day, it would make more sense to essentially share vehicle time with other people. The economic logic of this will mean that using autonomous taxis will be so much cheaper than owning a vehicle that people won’t do it.

What this analysis ignores, unfortunately, is that a significant majority of vehicles are used to commute to and from work. And the majority of those commutes happen at the same time for the vast majority of people. The fleet size required to support those commuting needs will be large enough that the businesses involved won’t see any substantial economy from the communal model, which means the costs won’t be significantly lowered compared to owning your own vehicle.

If you’re looking for what the tack-on effects of autonomous vehicles will be, my prediction is the second great suburban sprawl: When commuting means napping or watching TV or reading or working or otherwise being entertained/productive, the commuting times people will be willing to accept will increase significantly. That’ll push development further out from the city centers.

Pheasants are really stupid birds. They’ll go into a potato patch, dig up a potato, and start eating it. But if anything distracts them enough to make them look away from the potato, they’ll drop the potato. “Ugh!” they say. “Someone’s been eating this potato!” And they’ll move along to the next potato until… “Oh! Gross! Someone’s been eating this potato!”

You end up with a whole line of potatoes with one or two bites out of them.

In my personal little headcanon I like to imagine zombies do the same thing: “RAWWWGGHHH!! DELICIOUS FLESH!!!! MUAAARGHHH… Oh. Gross. This one’s dead. Let’s get another one.”

Query: “My PCs were drugged, captured, tortured, and put on a slow boat to their execution. The villain comes in to interrogate them and they just toss one-liners and empty threats at him. How do you get your players to take your villains seriously?”

Kill them.

I’m not saying you should capriciously seek to slaughter them, but if the logical outcome of the PCs’ actions is lethal then let the dice fall where they may and don’t protect them from the consequences.

A lot of GMs shield their players from the negative consequences of the actions they take… and then wonder why the players keep engaging in bad behavior. (One common reason for this is that the GM is protecting the railroaded plot they’ve predesigned. But it just demonstrates how the railroader’s desire for rigid conformity actually just creates a compounding fragility which makes it ever more difficult to achieve the conformity.)

Conversely, I’ve played in games where PCs had explicit script immunity and had great experiences. But it requires the players to erect a rigid wall between their metagame knowledge and the actions of their characters. If the characters start acting as if they knew they had script immunity things go bad very, very quickly.