Hey there! First time posting so forgive me if I'm a little bit fresh in these parts, but I was looking for a place to leave some feedback that might be helpful for the game's development but this one could be a real doozy if incorporated across the board for all sorts of other encounters (which may in itself be the reason for it's lack of implementation, but I'll explain in a moment).
So the scenario is this: I was trying to play a roleplay-like game as a Paladin when I ran into Auntie Ethel in the Druid's Grove. After talking with her, she suggested I go to her place which is exactly what I did first thing, so I bypassed the blighted village basically headed straight down there with the assembled party. When we encountered her and the brothers, I failed my insight check to tell that she was lying so the good roleplaying Paladin I was, I came to Ethel's rescue. Here's where things can get potentially complex for the game though.
I wasn't going to kill these guys for looking for their sister and being obviously distraught. Obviously something was wrong and I wanted to calm things down, so I turned on non-lethal attacks and knocked the two of them out. Keep in mind, at this point I haven't rested yet (short nor long) and head straight to her tea house. The conversation with her yields no additional dialogue options to account for the fact that the brothers weren't dead. Basically Ethel treated the situation as though I had killed them (and one of the brothers reacted similarly with his dialogue cry when I knocked the other one out while in combat). The closest I could get was a deception option where I said that Ethel was the one that actually killed them, but if the brothers are indeed dead then it wasn't by the hand of this Paladin.
Esentially what I'm looking for is the game to recognize when I use non-lethal knockouts for certain situations. If I choose not to kill a character (which is a function built into the game for what I assume is good reason) the game shouldn't be treating me as though I had. Now if you're looking for a storywriting suggestion to account for this particular encounter: You could add it where if you knock out a brother instead of continuing combat the other brother stops going hostile to check on his other brother. Then you can add a little bit more with Ethel giving your character a chance to go "back on the rails" so to speak for the rest of the encounter. The conscious brother is then able to give a similar conversation that occurs if you never fought in the first place and Ethel disappears as normal.
What this could do is now leave the lone brother a choice where the player might be able to influence the outcome: Either they take their brother back for some attention/rest and let you handle the hag and Mayrina or he decides to charge off and get himself killed as usual/who knows. I just feel like this could add a lot of depth to this encounter, and there could also be potential secret content down the line by doing stuff like this; because if you take a very nuanced approach to the game maybe later in Baldur's Gate you run into the whole family and they give some type of special reward since everyone walks out alive kinda idea. Like I said in the beginning though, I recognize that this potentially causes a problem game-wide rabbit hole of how to handle "saving" a number of characters that normally might die during most playthroughs. It's also asking the game to recognize and distinguish between who's actually dying and who's getting knocked out... Because there's going to be some guy (probably me) that then decides "HEY! I'm going to play the pacifist game where I never kill anyone and I only knock people out."
It's a can of worms... But potentially a really fun one for players. However, with release apparently in August I don't know how much time is left for this kind of stuff. Potential payout though is having something from the very beginning of the game yield fruits way later when the player least expects it. With so many characters in the first act heading to Baldur's Gate it feels as though we may run into them again someday. A workaround I had kinda figured in my head that might be relatively easy to implement as a "bandaid" to account for non-lethal attacks changing the outcome of scenarios (and this is a game/story-wide suggestion) is during certain dialogue encounters where things are about to go hostile, you could add lines from the narrator essentially reminding the player that non-lethal force can be used. My worry for doing this though is simply that you spoil the outcome somewhat by doing so by offering the player a choice for it instead of keeping it low key.
Anyhoos that's pretty well all I have to say on this for the time being. Thanks for reading!
- Mike
