Personally, I never used autopause or other of these options. I never had the impression of not knowing what exactly killed me in an encounter. After some practice you know which spells are deadly and what opponents you should keep at bay. Sure, to be able to analyze the battlelogs may be helpful but it never was so difficult to figure out without this option in my opinion. It even enhanced the adventurous feeling of the game not to know exactly how the game's mechanics work. I always appreciated that the game doesn't beat you in the face with all the statistics and abstractions.

To me, the point of playing an RPG (as opposed to, say, an action game) *is* the mechanics themselves. I *hate* it when a game hides such information from the player; the whole reason I play RPGs is those statistics.

(With that said, I think the BG series has too many statistics; the mental stats could be eliminated entirely without loss, and the physical stats could be reworked so that every point matters (there's no difference between 8 and 15 Strength except in terms of carrying capacity, a mechanic that could be eliminated without hurting the game, and which I think does hurt the game as is). The fact that you can nearly *double* a stat and not have it matter is rather ridiculous.)