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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1993 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 24, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Warlockracy (whose channel I've been binge-watching) has come up with the theory of bimodal difficulty of combat encounters. He classifies them into three tiers:

  • trash fights, requiring no real effort to win
  • "captcha" fights, just hard enough to make you pay attention
  • challenge fights, that require you to come up with an ad-hoc solution

The theory is that "captcha" fights are bad, and you mostly need a combination of trash and challenge fights in your game. Weak encounters make you feel powerful and reinforce the theme of the dungeon. Strong encounters force you to master the combat system. But medium-strength encounters should exist only as an onramp to the next challenge fight, teaching you the new mechanic. Yes, players can complain about too many trash fights, but turning half of them into captcha fights will make the game worse off.

It sounds like BG3 has too many captcha fights.

This is what I find annoying about Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: the incredibly swingy damage formulas mean that a trash fight can become a captcha fight and even a challenge real quick, so the optimal way to play is to treat encounters that 99% of the time are trash as if they are about to kill you. The trash/challenge fights both work well (autofight is very quick, and the challenges are good), and it's often the case that multiple trash monsters create combinations that you have to take seriously, but imo the game would be much better if the RNG variance was toned down so that the types were more clearly distinguished.

bimodal

three tiers

ಠ_ಠ

Yes, tiers 1 and 3 should be more common than tier 2.

I think this depends on the style of gameplay. Trash-fights can be fine in real time, rtwp and auto battle types of games; because you get through them very quickly and with almost no effort or input from the player.

In turn-based it's unacceptable to me, the floor should at the very least be captcha, because there is so much required busywork to get through encounters and they take practically as long as a captcha encounter.

Trash fights in Rogue Trader were fine. The navigator had a great AoE ability that would kill most trash mobs in her cone of sight outright, leaving you with only a couple stronger enemies to mop up.

Cassia had one job in my party: cast Lidless Eye.

Bit of a hijack, but the theory sounds intriguing to me as someone who only has D&D experience from behind the DM screen. To any players here, is this something you actually feel during tabletop play? (Emphasis on tabletop)

I run a beer-and-pretzels game for friends, and have felt increasingly compelled to juice up encounters from the books as they happen, so they are more engaging for a party of munchkins power players who are less interested in the RP aspect of the game (thankfully so; I'm not good at roleplay) and are mostly here to kill shit and commit heroic atrocities, with a martial-heavy party fairly well-optimized for such.

Given that four of us, myself included, are big no-lifers enjoyers of Path of Exile I can definitely understand the appeal of trash fights; the "captcha fight" term would probably fit many of my adjusted encounters, since I try to take the murderhobos up at their game to keep it fun and engaging. My justification for juicing encounters is that by the books, many crumple too fast to five martials (most with long-range options); the players seem to actually like judiciously spending resources and having to strategize together around unexpected counters like walls of force or unlucky save-or-suck hits (they fondly remember and eagerly retell their moments of so doing); and trash fights IMO are less well-suited for tabletop where any combat still briefly grinds the game to a halt as we unpack minis, draw the arena, roll initiative and go one after the other.

Why not combine the approaches? Have trash enemies mixed up with a few serious ones. Lancer does that with Grunt-type mechs and Exalted has "extras".

Especially in tactical turn-based combat games trash fights have a bad tendency to still have a high floor of complexity you have to jump through. I guess by the theory that turns all trash fights by default into captcha fights, which makes them bad.

See my reply to @Ioper. A trash fight lets you click almost mindlessly: the tank self-buffs and moves forward, the DD spams the strongest free ability, it's over in two turns. A captcha fight goes like this: "oh, damn, this is one of these mind-control guys, so I need to put the other amulet on my tank and keep everyone else out of his range; oh, and the summoned thingies have too much health and no vulnerabilities, I need to actually proactively heal my tank, shame it's the same setup as the previous fight, except with three summoned thingies instead of two, hope two of them don't crit in one turn, or I'll need to reload." Basically, you already know what to do each turn, but you still have to pay close attention.

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