Why is everyone killable?
This seem like odd question ...
Why should they not be killable? O_o
You are meeting mortals, and one of major feature of such creatures is being "able to die". O_o
For myself it was realy releaving that we are technicaly "able" to kill anyone and screw our story completely. :-/
I HATED it in Skyrim or new Fallout, that "cruicial" characters are just knocked down, seemed exhausted for few seconds, and them just stand up with full HP attacking once again. O_o
Its nice to see that developers are actualy creating consequences for our decisions, and they have to count with that in story creation that litteraly every character can die, not just bcs we kill it, it simply can ... its dangerous world out there. :-/
Can you imagine DM telling you
"nah, you cant attack that guy, i need him for story i prepared" or even worse
"you would kill him, but i need him for the story, so he survived three shots in the chest, decapitation, poisoning, and burning his body to dust" ... and still concidering that being a well handled plot? O_o
Why do you always get XP from it?
I think the real question here is how many XP you get and how relevant they would be in the end.
Bcs so far as we know, Larian is allready working with level cap system ... first anounced cap was level 10, now we know that level cap will be slightly above, no one really knows so far how much above, but somewhere around 10 ...
So you definietly will not getting another levels for killing everybody, you might get that last level a little faster tho. Important question here is: How much faster.
Since if you get for example 20 000xp total for killing everyone in Act 1, but you would need 150 000 000xp for geting level 10 ... its actualy kinda negligible.
(
i know the numbers might seem ridiculous, but please remember that our main XP source are quests, and if you get 50 000xp for quest, there is no problem in needing 150 000 000xp for level)
Why are there no major consequences?
How do you know there arent?
So far we only have seen Act1, and multiple NPC allready told us "see ya in Baldur's Gate" ... so its quite safe to presume there will be some content if they survive and therefore there is ensurance that there will be consequences, if they dont.
Why is there now a built-in way to fix the minor consequences that may have existed for doing so?
I presume you are refering to Speak With dead now ... funny enough, there isnt.
Most corpses refuse to talk with their murderer, and there is a lot of other bodies you can hear out to find out some juicy tidbits ... as far as it seems, corpses are unable to lie.
For example:
In tollhouse, there is corpse laying on the ground ... if you talk with it, you find out that those paladins of Tyr are something entirely different.
However, I think setting non-combat NPCs (the innocents of the world) to 0 exp would probably be a good thing.
Im affraid there is no non-combat NPCs ...
Sure some provide harder challenge than the others, but the only civilians i have found are Tiefling refugees and they dont give you almost any XP anyway (1 or 10 per kill if i recall it corectly).
Everyone else is perfectly able to defend themselves, and therefore any XP you gain, is earned.
