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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2868 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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I posted the original in last Sunday’s small question thread, but posting my reply here.

Thanks you to @Thoroughlygruntled, @yofuckreddit, @MathWizard, @Hieronymus, @charlesf, @erwgv3g34, @Vollerei, @KingOfTheBailey, @orthoxerox, @Rex, @TowardsPanna, @chooky, @WhiningCoil, @ulyssessword, @birb_cromble, @aqouta, and @ToaKraka for the computer game recommendations. Before this post, I was already playing Skyrim and Baldur’s Gate III. I also bought The Long Dark.

I have a lot of work to do if I’m going to get through these. I’ll keep you all up to date. As @yofuckreddit said, it would be best if I was unemployed for a whole year so I could play them.

Does the combat in BG3 ever become less of a chore?

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.

It's interesting to me that he doesn't consider the point of captcha fights to be attrition - ideally to me, an RPG should be slowly grinding away your resources as you approach the boss, maybe even forcing you to withdraw and come back another day, refreshed and re-equipped.

That seems to be a bit of an uncommon view, though, and a lot of games don't encourage it -- 5e both tabletop and adaptation pay lip service with long vs short rests, but in practice...

The channel looks interesting. Is this combat encounter theory in his BG3 video or is there a combat theory video? They are very long so it will be hard for me to scan them.

I think its interesting that the internet has such diverse opinions on BG3 combat. Many (especially 5e veterans) say it is extremely hard. The min-maxing community considers it easy. Most people consider Larian's other hit, DOS2, to be a lot harder. I recently finally bought XCOM (2012), and that is truly an old game because it is hard.

I would say BG3 combat feels unrewarding -- it leaves me wanting more. That is similar to "feels like a chore." I think part of the issue is the game is schizophrenic, meaning it can't decide if its a narrative game or a combat game. Narrative gamers think the combat is hard, and a chore; Combat gamers think combat is easy, and lacking.

If you spend multiple hours straight doing quests, social encounters, and reap a lot of progression and quest rewards; and you don't like combat, you're going to find the combat is a slog. That's because it's not a combat game, and you can progress quite well without fighting at all. If your goal is to experience the story, then passing the conversation checks is quicker and less effort. In some sense, the combat feels like a slog because the rest of the game spoils you without requiring the player to play anything.

On the other hand, a true combat game would be structurally designed to condition the player to feel rewarded by the combat, making it fun, even if all the fights are captcha fights.

It's in the Pillars video, IIRC.

One of my favorite RPGs series replace basically all trash fights with captcha fights: the SMT series (including Persona). Unless very overlevelled, and even then, you're not expected to auto-battle your way through any fight, and if somehow you are able to, you probably messed up by overoptimising to make it possible to do that with that specific enemies (for instance, enemies with physical vulnerabilities) and made yourself extra vulnerable to others in return. When you first enter a new dungeon/area, all fights against new enemies have to be treated as challenge fights until you figure out a reliable sequence, which will usually involve spending a scarce ressource (MP). Once you have your strategy to beat all the enemies in an area, it's a matter of balancing ressource spend and taking risk in fights with those enemies as your goal is to reach the boss with enough ressources left that you stand a chance as you probe and figure out a strategy against them.

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.

Dunno. The thrill of permadeath makes trash fights captcha fights. Swingy damage only makes it more...exciting? Or its supposed to be like that at least.

Tab fighting in DCSS is great though. But I miss the old days of carrying rations and food, it gave the game more character.

There's no thrill of permadeath whatsoever in fighting a quokka, most derived undead, something you outlevel significantly, or whatever (a rule of thumb for me is "can I safely melee this as a caster? trash fight"). Though you always have to watch for anything walking onscreen while you're tabbing the quokka. What I don't like are the situations where, for instance, your character is at a point where you can mindlessly melee a komodo dragon or a troll one-on-one almost all the time, but suddenly a series of rolls go differently and now you're scrambling to escape this one scrub (early game is awful for this too but that's WAD I guess, early game is supposed to suck). Tying GDR to AC instead of body armour was a big improvement, and I suppose the converse is that characters can escape when they should absolutely die due to the enemy rolling low. My thinking on DCSS's design is that many enemies are meant to be unchallenging one-on-one, depending on your character, so that they can create interesting challenges when they show up in combination with each other, without those group fights being impossible to overcome without luring.

More generally, and I know I always bang this drum, I think a game which can accidentally double player damage without anyone noticing, during a tournament needs to take a long hard look at its philosophy around damage rolls. It also creates a pretty boring version of optimal play (and I say this as someone who can win pretty often, currently have an MDFW tearing up Zot), where you are focused on minimizing your exposure to 1% chances of death. Honestly I don't think you need to play like that to win regularly, just to play as well as the best players, but the devs seem obsessed with taking away boring tools for optimal play without ever asking "why does our design philosophy push players towards this path".

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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