But Imoen can be brought back, which demonstrates that Bhaalspawn can be brought back; if Bhaalspawn can be resurrected, then why not your PC? Arguing that the plot demands something is one thing, but when it actively clashes with the established rules of the setting without any real in-story explanation, it just comes across as lazy storytelling.

Now that I think of it, if Bhaalspawn can be revived, then where are the stakes in the whole affair? If one dies, they can just be brought back, and since BG doesn't use the AD&D rules for resurrection (number of possible lives limited to the character's original Constitution score, rolling to see if your character survived the process), the villain's plot could be delayed almost indefinitely by reviving those whose bodies haven't been gibbed. Having any Bhaalspawn be revivable at all in the game raises far too many questions like this.

According to in-game lore (or at least based on the 'game over' cutscene, and the BG1 ending cutscene) Bhaalspawn disintegrate upon death and thus cannot be brough back by any "normal" means, (see Sarevok for the exception) they are gone forever.

Imoen is a special case; I don't think she was planned to become a Bhaalspawn in BG1, and that's why she can be resurrected in the first game. In BG2, initially she was to be killed off for good in Spellhold, (which also explains the lack of party banters for her in SOA) but due to the reactions of fans to that idea Bioware decided to keep her as a joinable NPC, at which point there was not much to do, obviously a non-revivable NPC would not have been much use to the player. So yeah, Bioware really messed this up for themselves.

the Imoen "problem" is called ludonarrative dissonance and you get it a lot in a lot of games. normally people don't bother with it (probably due to the the willing suspension of disbelief we partake in) but in this case you are so hung up on the quicksave/quickload thing that this... disturbance... fans out into other closely related things.

Well... The issue here is that they're videogames, and as such they are limited. Whatever happens in an RP game, DM can always react, accomodate the situation so players can still proceed, stuff like that. In an actual game of DnD, when DM obviously wanted us to talk to a certain character, we have opted to kill him mid-conversation. That would be 'game over' in a videogame as it can't react - DM just improvised and threw the needed exposition our way in a different manner.

Well, I'd say the actual issue is that lumin doesn't want to play the game the way Bioware intendet it to and then devoted almost two decades of brooding and thinking to this thing instead of just fixing it in that incredibly easy way that is doable and that entails nothing more than just not loading and saving apart outside of starting/shutting down the game and starting over when CHARNAME dies. I know people who've done that in BG1&2. Even with solo runs. I don't see the appeal myself but then again I'm like super lazy lame. xD

Not helping is that they used AD&D as the basis for a computer game. Look, I've been reading up on AD&D 2E for a Planescape campaign I'm currently trying to get started, and I get why people like it, namely that it provides a lot of flexibility with regards what a player can do at any point in time with the DM exercising judgment over what they think should happen. In a computer game, however, no looseness in the rules can be tolerated, and the software acting as DM needs to be able to apply the rules consistently. In a 2E PnP game, if the player wanted to do something unconventional, I could either use the rules as a guideline or just make something up, whereas a computer can only allow the players to do things that the rules explicitly take into account (leaving no room for a PC to, say, silently climb a nearby structure and drop down onto the enemy to cause extra damage).

All BG does is rigidly reproduce the battle mechanics from AD&D, and even then it seems to change things almost at random (Chromatic Orb gives targets a +3 on their saving throws, nixing of resurrection limitations). All other aspects of the game are either oversimplified (the remaining thief skills) or just flat out slashed (missing thief skills, nonweapon proficiencies). While it is true that a computer game will always differ from a PnP session by virtue of unskippable scripted events and a campaign that cannot be derailed, I sincerely wish that they had waited until the release of 3.5 before making BG; say what you want about it (please do, I have), but at least it's a more rules-intensive system that would lend itself more to automation than 2E.

The problematic way that the game implements 2E, coupled with the bonkers pathfinding AI and the mind-boggling decision to have the game unpause by looking at the inventory (along with a few other problems OP mentioned) pretty much guarantees that your characters will often die for the stupidest of reasons. Save scumming is pretty much required, because otherwise you would risk entering into a cycle of going to and from the same temple to get people raised without making any progress; you could try to actually use the special potions you pick up, but given that you probably have everyone armed to prepare for things that they will almost certainly face (healing potions and antidote, mostly) with room for maybe one extra potion in your belt (assuming that you aren't using Minsc or carrying a wand/scrolls), you have to either pray that you were smart in having a lightning resistance potion on standby and that the enemy wizard will not use a fireball instead (which usually isn't the case), fumble about in the inventory for that fire resistance potion you left in the backpack in favor of lightning resistance (which will likely result in at least one party member death), or save scum and quaff the appropriate potions before the wizard is onscreen in the first place (which is the cheapest sort of metagaming).

tl;dr: maybe the designers wanted the game to not be played with save scumming or otherwise metagaming, but the poor implementation of AD&D as an automated system and other quirks that cause bullshit PC deaths pretty much require it.
See my prior post: because most of the deaths are due to a faulty implementation of the rules, AI glitches, the inventory management system, etc. I'm not a fan of "iron man style" on long games, but I'd be more on board with it when restarting was due to the player not acting smartly or quickly enough as opposed to the game misbehaving or the player not cheesing the game by using out of character knowledge.

Paying an "ironman" variant is all well & good, but I wouldn't try to pretend that it's a superior method of enjoying the game. I personally reload whenever I've screwed up badly, like some fiendish boss manages to kill everyone in my party who knows Resurrection. Sure, I *could* drag their corpses to the nearest temple, but between the headache of getting there & back and retrieving all the dropped gear I'd rather save myself a lot of time instead of trying to prove a point about hardcore play. Plus a lot of stuff in the series gets broken even if you revive a character- most glaringly, romances end, and certain characters who were previously content to whine about your reputation will refuse to rejoin the group mid-dungeon if you restore them from stone.

That actually sounds pretty realistic to me. Dying or getting turned to stone would sour most romances and probably make you question why you're adventuring at all. :)

It's really more of a lack of patience than anything else. I think a lot of gamers have gotten accustomed to games that require no downtime whatsoever. In Diablo 3 it's action all the time, you can instantly join up with a friend in the field. In Guild Wars 2 you can instantly teleport anywhere and death in all these games means instant re-spawn 10 feet away.

See, I don't mind having to trudge back to town each time to rez a party member, I just mind having a big glaring button there tempting me to take the easy way out when things go wrong. It's a psychological thing really. I don't see many people complain that Dark Souls is super hard, deliberately so, by making the game save automatically. Yet if it had been designed with a "save/load whenever you want" feature I wonder if people would be complaining that they would hate it if they had to trudge all the way back to recover their lost souls/humanity. Sometimes I think it's simply a matter of perspective - if it's designed to be easy, people complain when someone suggests it should be made harder, yet we heap loads of praise on games that are brutally difficult and often frustrating like Dark Souls.

Resting after every fight or in dungeons goes right along with this. There ought to be some penalty or restriction for resting literally every 5 min.

By the way, extra kudos to the guy who gave me the link to the "No game over screen when main char dies" mod. It works fantastic and makes the game far more enjoyable for me. This mod alone helps reduce the cheese factor by allowing me to use ALL of my resources each and every battle without the fear of it ending prematurely.

Those "friends" you've been running around and recruiting aren't friends. They are just narcissistic assholes traveling with you because you benefit them. They'd rather let you decompose than waste the money and pay for your resurrection.

If these were Evil aligned PCs, maybe. Even then, a smart evil PC will try to keep their meat shield/living distraction for monsters alive, even if that means sinking some money to resurrect them.

Except letting someone stay dead isn't an evil act.

True, but Evil alignment tends to be indicative of not caring for the wellbeing of others, which could manifest by leaving someone dead instead of raising them due to being miserly. Setting aside alignment, I find it hard to believe that some companions would be that dickish; Imoen was a childhood friend, Khalid and Jaheira are your guardians after a fashion, Minsc is almost cartooish in his goddy-goody attitude, and Dyaheir is slightly less so.

Actually, trudging to a town to have characters resurrected also goes against the workings of the pen-and-paper D&D. The problem is that resurrecting people is hard, and as a result it requires both high-level spellcasters and great amounts of money (about 1500, 5500, 11000 and 35000 for the 3.5e spells IIRC). Effectively, the option of just sodding off to a town to resurrect someone for a few grand and returning to where you left off is already a big red button of temptation in its own right, and I perceive reloading a quicksave as no bigger a crime.

I agree that the notion of a party resting in the middle of a corridor of an unexplored cavern complex strikes me as odd, but I agree with Jonesy89 in that the lack of a Dungeon Master inherently skews the game against you - the game restricts your actions to a great deal, and as a result I don't see a problem in trying to exercise whatever freedoms it does allow. Besides, in the campaigns that I play and the one that I run, the parties usually do rest after every or every other encounter, not to regain spells but because that's usually how long the characters can go on without fatigue. Because of the mechanics of Baldur's Gate, you explore your surroundings at a pretty breakneck pace and hence end up using spells at a greatly increased rate.

It's all an act to make you believe they care.

That makes way too much sense. The overblown alignment based RP of the other characters was because they were dopplegangers who had never interacted with another human being before. Well, except for Jaheira, she's enough of a hardass I could see her suggesting that I not be raised.