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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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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.

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.

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