It's bad design because there is no way to gauge an encounter before committing to it.

What game actually allows this? In WoW first guilds who take upon boss need to figure it all out by themselves and wipe hundreds of times before getting is all good.

Stuff like the Basilisks in one corner of the map. All of a sudden, surprise! Hope you were clairvoyantly prepared to deal with petrification.

There is first level spell called protection from petrification. I mean you could actually figure this out but maybe it isn't obvious. But even then... it's like complaining if you would stumble into spider and say you didn't know he could web you and kill you.

Or stumbling on Bassilus. The damage spikes for just roaming around the map are all over the place."

Game doesn't lock you in the room with him. You choose to engage when you saw him, I don't get what is the issue here. I put WoW again in perspective, if you walk out of City and venture into level 60 zone as lvl 10 you will get destroyed too, is this bad design? Yes you have level indicator but in many other games you are allowed to vendture as far as you like and its ur choice to take upon beefy guy if you want to

Or Shoal the Nereid in another encounter. Enter dialogue, she kisses Charname, game over. Time to reload. It sucks because it feels like save-scumming, which is lame, but save-scumming is baked into BG until you memorize stuff (or consult a walkthrough online, which is also lame).

Yes this one kinda sucks...

Basically, you would have had to have played some of the encounters before or know the dialogue paths to have a chance to succeed. It's trial & error gaming.

Same as first point. Either read guide or discover things yourself.

Then there are other weird rules like RNG hit point rolls on levelling up, or RNG spell memorization pass/fail, which are sort-of weird slot-machine gaming mechanics just shoe-horned in there. Both of these you can work-around, but it seems like they shouldn't have been in the game to begin with.

This is just D&D based game so you need to embrace the rules. Also you can just change this in baldur.ini file to always be max if you don't like cheese reloads.

A lot of care & content went into the game, and beneath all the awkwardness it is fun, but the design/mechanics feel rough at best.

Maybe I'm alone but I feel game is perfect as is, would love more content though which is what beamdog will give in next 10 days.