Anyone know why this keeps happening? The army in nashkel keep attacking my party everytime I enter it and I continually lose this battle.

What is your party reputaion? In certain areas you will immediately be attacked by guards, bounty hunters etc. if your reputation is below a certain threshold. In Nashkel this is 4. Also, in some areas, you may be able to talk/bribe your way out of fights, provided that your NPC reaction (CHA) is high enough. Bottom line: go around being a jerk and you pay the price.

Yeah I did kill a few sleeping dwarfs...

First time I ever played I attacked a cow to see what would happen. What I learned was that in Baldur's Gate you DON'T FUCK WITH THE LOCALS! :O

:) Baldur's Gate seems similar to some of the older Ultimas... When the locals get upset, whoops! There's a bunch of guards to slaughter the party. Unless the party is leveled up quite high. Never found a point continuing at that point anyhow. Has anyone played BG's through with very low rep? :)

Oh yeah, you didn't fool with the guards in Ultima3. Compared to them, Dragonslaying was relaxing.

I wonder if anyones had a game, gone all the way through, murdering everybody.

In Baldur's Gate that would be impossible, if you mean literally *everybody*. Your level 1 character wouldn't stand a chance, without cheating.

Not at level 1, no, but the mere thought of catharsis of being able to obliterate everyone after hitting the xp cap is making me consider trying to play just so I can send everyone to meet Minsc.

For additional sadistic fun, make sure you have the boots of speed, bow proficiency and all the detonation arrows you can carry ;)

It's funny that if you do that in Candlekeep, the guards won't come after you, but stealing that gem on the second floor of the inn is worth them chasing you and taking all the gold you're carrying. Maybe thats why the PC doesn't alert the guards after the assassination attempt, he/she knows the guards only care about borderline worthless gems. If the guards consider stealing a gem more serious than premeditated mayhem then they deserve a few arrows of detonation to the face. ;)

I don't know what mods you have installed, but if you gratuitously attack people in Candlekeep everybody except Jondalar (his script re. training overrides this) will turn hostile. If you attack a guard, the guards will turn hostile. If you attack a tutor, even Imoen and Gorion turn hostile.

Yup, that's exactly what happened, maybe I wasn't too clear in my previous post in what I meant. The difference between stealing the gem and attacking an NPC was that, if you steal the gem, a guard enters the area you're in and confronts you. They activley come after you in this case. Kill a random NPC and the guards will do nothing until you enter their FOV. In this case, you have to go to them before they confront you. I just thought that the idea of having them come after you for something trivial like stealing a gem worth (IIRC) 14 gold but for murder, they will just wait around until you show up a little silly. I hope that cleared things up a bit.

I guess it does seem a little silly, but you have to remember the game mechanics here. Stealing from a container (including NPC pockets) is basically a trap, and that's why the guards 'appear', but killing is not a trap, and not subject to guard summon scripts. That would be unworkable.

Unless the trap made witnesses hostile as opposed to having the guards come in, or they wrote a script that summoned the guards on killing innocents in town if anyone saw you or the first blow didn't kill them. Personally I would have preferred not implementing the trap at all, as it is rather poorly coded (witnesses need not be awake in order to alert the guards, for instance). Either way, I think we can agree it's a rather silly inconsistency.

Traps do make witnesses hostile, but in a video game the guards must be summoned when innocent witnesses have absolutely no defense -- the alternative is to allow the gratuitous destruction of all unarmed NPCs. That's not what gaming is about. You have to stop comparing rpg games like this to real life comparisons.