Arabella. The goblin kids outside the goblin fortress. The goblin kids inside the goblin fortress. The tiefling tyke thieves (I assume, since I haven't raided the refugees yet). No matter what route you take, chances are you'll probably witness (or commit) the murder of a child. One dead kid? Fine. The scene with the snake should you fail the dice roll is fantastic and has its intended emotional impact (well done, seriously). But at a certain point in my playthrough, it all began to feel somewhat gratuitous. Like, "Hey, look! Unlike Skyrim, we have ALL the killable kids!" And this is only the first act, which makes me terrified for when we arrive at the city which will of course have more children.
The kid killing is especially jarring when playing as a good character. (I tried and failed to play evil, since the evil routes to tadpole removal all seemed highly suspect--why the hell would I trust a witchdoctor with a tadpole in her own head to remove the one in mine? Or a hag who has a lair filled with her backfire cures? There's amoral self-interest, and then there's stupidity.)
I adore the original Baldurs Gates and DOS2. Have played . . . way too many hours of the BG3 EA, and overall love it! But I'm also a kindergarten teacher (which may make me oversensitive to this, I admit, since I love children). It feels wrong that I have to slaughter them in order to not suffer gameplay repercussions. Hot take: child murder (even goblin child murder) probably shouldn't be rewarded, and companions should respond negatively to it (at least Shadowheart, Gale, and Wyll should? Vampire and Gith probably wouldn't care overmuch.).
So can we have more options on how to deal with children? For example, an option to intimidate the goblin kids into silence when rescuing the druid. Maybe conk them out and lock them in the druid's cell so that they don't warn their entire camp? Cast a sleep spell on them? I want more options than "let them escape and bring the wrath of every goblin down on my head" and "backstab a seven-year-old." If I must kill children for the sake of practicality, at least let me resurrect them after the fight is over. (If there are actually more solution options to rescuing the druid, and I'm simply dumb, could those alternate routes please be made more obvious?) Note, I'm not asking to remove the ability to murder children. I'm not trying to mess with anyone's "immersion." I would just like more options to not kill kids.
(On a side note, I'd also like to be able to offer Anders and Raphael the "soul coin" you get from foiling that bugbear assassination. I get that it probably isn't the same as a fresh soul (is it?) and that the offer would probably need to be rejected for plot reasons. But I still want to try. And, as someone already posted, a helmet toggle because character creation is fantastic.)
