Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion Pacifism, Revivify and Raise Dead

So, non-leathal approach in BG3 is... well... it sucks. Let's just get this over with.

As it stands currently, the game treats knocked out characters as dead and more often than not, does not take into account player actions. And it's not one or two examples either, there are plenty of cases, where knocking character unconscious serves no purpose, here are a couple of them:

-Mayrinna's brothers. If you tell them the hag killed them, you get approval with Wyll, Karlach and Gale. Wherass, if you knock them unconscious, they are still treated as dead and no approval gets added.
-Goblin leaders, you still need to kill them for the Tieflings to be able to leave.
-Any random enemy, who you could in theory interrogate in a normal tabletop, but can't be implemented in BG3 for obvious reasons.

The only exception to this is for the Dark Urge origin, where you knock a certain NPC to prevent their death. However, it's very metagamey option that I hate to use, due to a quest being softlocked in later parts of the game due to that.

And this is where another thing comes into play. We can't resurrect anyone, except our companions and only if they weren't killed in a cutscene or by a choice. Examples of that:

-Laezel to Tieflings in Act 1, she stays dead.
-Karlach gets killed by Wyll, stays dead. However, due a bug, you can revivify right after a bug, which will be probably patched. However, I wouldn't mind being able to trick Mizora: "Well, Karlach died, but she didn't stay dead, so Wyll did his part of the deal."
-Arabella's parents, especially with Wither's powers.

Just to name a few from the top of my head. The only time the game wants the player to use a non-leathal approach is in ACT 3 and often way too much, especially for a mechanic that had barely any purpose in the first 2 acts.

Now, I don't expect every random mook, npc, etc to be to come back to life. However, there needs to be a way for the player to know, which characters can be saved and have an effect on the plot or not.

One of the ways to do that is adding a special conditions for the NPC in their stats: Saveable, Revivifyable, Can be Raised from the Dead. Just placeholder names to get a point across.

So, if you examine an NPC, you can learn if that is a case or not. It's not a perfect solution, but it's hell lot of better than it's current implementation.

Special Mention goes to Raise Dead, which can bring someone back from the dead, if they died less than 10 days ago. Now, for obvious reasons it's hard to judge that. After all, there are many builds that can solo the game or just breeze their way through it with barely any rest. So, you could in theory finish 2 acts with like 2 Long Rests, which breaks the game and story due to current implementation of nightly cutscenes.

We can't exactly work around that, but letting the player know there is an option like this would go a long way of actually trying to keep others alive a meaningul choice. As it stands, you are better of killing basically all hostile npcs.