Elders' Scrolls
back on my first design job, i got assigned to make some NPCs for this contract content designer we'd picked up to help write some storylines for marquee characters on City of Heroes. Straightforward enough I thought. But then the story was super psychedelic, time travel was involved, fighting over a nuclear missile silo. And the writer always has these crazy ideas like "OK you're fighting Arachnos soldiers, BUT, they're not actually real - they're a figment of your imagination. Can we make them... sparkle?" and at first I'm always like "no that's impossible, we can't make NPCs sparkle" but then I think about it and say, ok, what if there's a periodic dummy effect with a shorter duration than period, and we add conditionalFX to that effect line, maybe that'll work..."
and anyway that's how I became friends with Michael Kirkbride, who wrote a swath of TES games including Morrowind and a significant part of the TES lore
and the moral of the story is that sometimes it's actually super fucking important that your enemies randomly have a chance to sparkle for 0.2sec every 1.5 sec, much moreso than that their grenade hits for exactly 470 damage