We don’t yet have any info about difficulty modes as far as I’m aware, but it would be extremely surprising if there weren’t any. Personally, I’m not fussed about an Ironman mode, and though I confess I did it the first couple of playthroughs I no longer find any problem avoiding save scumming when that’s going to spoil my immersion. But I know it’s something that comes up reasonably frequently, so while I’m not quite sure how you’re envisioning it working, if there were a mode that people could use to disincentivise reloading on a bad dice roll then there could well be a demand.
With respect to illlithid powers, I’m happy to wait and see what consequences Larian have in mind for the full game. It seems to me that they must be planned, and if we wish to avoid becoming a True Soul then we’ll probably need to ration use of the powers even more over the course of the full game. I feel that there’s enough indication that using the powers might be problematic that, from a roleplay perspective, it makes sense that many of my characters would use them only infrequently if at all, and as each character can use them only once per day then unless we long rest spam there’s a limit in any case. I personally like that we have plenty of options to use the powers so we can pick those occasions which make most roleplay sense for our characters, and don’t have any problem not using the powers when I don’t think it makes sense for my PC. And I definitely want options for solving problems without combat wherever possible to give me the flexibility to play the game in multiple ways. So as long as there are appropriately interesting consequences for either using or not using the tadpole in the full game, I wouldn’t want the game to limit opportunities to avoid combat.
