Rewrites and Cul-de-Sacs

See, the context actually does matter there; while "lack of mechanical support for storytelling" is a meaningless criticism in the abstract because nobody can agree what we actually mean when we say "story", let alone what it entails for a game to support having one, with respect to Lancer I strongly suspect that they're saying "story" in the way that folks who've mainly experienced tabletop roleplaying via Dungeons & Dragons and its various imitators say "story" – which is to say, as a shorthand for "literally everything other than combat"; and by "combat" in this context we mean "things that happen when you're inside a giant robot".

(The problems with treating "story" and "combat" as disjoint sets are, of course, beyond the scope of this post!)

It's a frequent complaint regarding Lancer that the framework of play doesn't give a shit about anything that happens when you're not actively stomping around inside a giant robot, and it's not an unfounded one. Heck, one earlier first-party supplements straight up yanks out all of the non-giant-robot mechanics and replaces them wholesale with something more suited to that supplement's particular milieu and it basically doesn't affect the gameplay loop at all; that's how severe the disconnect between giant-robot play and non-giant-robot play is.

The Bad News Bears (1976)

The screenplay was written by Bill Lancaster (son of actor Burt Lancaster) whoi drew his inspiration for the film from his experience playing Little League baseball with a leg crippled by polio. "We were a terrible team. Truly horrible." he said.

Tatum O’Neal’s father, actor Ryan O’Neal, had previously prevented his 11-year-old daughter from accepting any lead roles until the age of 16, after her debut performance in Paper Moon where she won an Oscar and he didn't even get nominated. However she was offered (a then staggering sum of) $350,000 with eight percent of net profits, and Ryan relented.

Director Michael Ritchie had to shoot double the amount of film he had expected to (more than his previous two movies combined) because of the difficulties in controlling the large cast of children, who often went off script and swore way more than they were supposed to. Walter Matthau and Ritchie frequently mentioned the children’s proficiency in the use of foul language, particularly that of Tatum O’Neal.

Paramount, concerned that the baseball aspect of The Bad News Bears would not be easily understood by many foreign audiences, added a five-minute animated baseball primer at the beginning of the film. It was dubbed in five languages and featured characters that resembled the cast members of the movie.