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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2431 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.

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.

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