Rogue Trader’s companions are garbage (and why I love them)

polygon.com:

It’s a common trope in role-playing games for the protagonist to have a party that follows them around, bolsters their skills in combat, and provides different perspectives on the world. Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is no exception; as the titular Rogue Trader I can take a retinue with me wherever I go. This can include a rare, trusted few, or I could go hog wild and recruit smugglers, criminals, dangerous psykers, and mysterious xenos.

What makes this experience so delightful is that all of my party members share two things in common: They suck, and they all hate each other. I feel like a bus driver carting around a bunch of terrible students who are all slap-fighting in the back seat, except instead of being students, all of these people are incredibly deadly and blessed with high-caliber weaponry and brain powers.

It’s a delightful contrast to Baldur’s Gate 3, which has a cast of well-rounded and fully realized companion characters who slowly become more sympathetic over the course of the game. You start off as a bunch of hostile strangers, but you eventually become a proper adventuring party that stands shoulder-to-shoulder against the apocalypse. Sure, every Baldur’s Gate 3 companion has their own issues, and there are a couple of instances where they’re at each other’s throats, but deep down they all have the potential to have a heart of gold.

In Rogue Trader, everyone starts out as an asshole, and then undergoes trauma that makes them even worse. Let’s start with my Senechal and the party’s MVP, Abelard. As a Senechal, Abelard is meant to help me out, run certain parts of my voidship, and herald my arrival. There’s just one problem. Abelard? More like, Enable Hard. This guy never says no, and if I bring him