So I decided to delete my first save and restart with my newfound knowledge of what perks I wanted to get and what skills I wanted to train really quickly, and I ended up going the “Stealth takedown or kill everyone I could in Skalitz” approach as I wanted to make an assassin type Henry. This caused one very large issue during the sidequest, unexpected visit: revenge on deutsch, which caused the quest to come to a halt and never progress past the fight, leaving everyone involved unable to move, report crimes, or die once they surrendered. It only became apparent at what caused it when I reloaded my save to after talking with father to see if I could do it again, and it revolves around killing the hag in the blue and white dress that’s usually hanging out by the barn down the tavern path near Deutsch’s house as this causes her (obviously) to be unable to fetch the catchpole to break up the fight. While I should mark this as a bug, I think it’d be beneficial gameplay knowledge for anyone having a rough go at the game as it doesn’t effect any other part of the game and doesn’t effect your ability to escape and eventually go serve Kobyla, especially if you keep running into groups of cumans or the bandit knights, this would give you an easy way to gain some levels in a variety of skill trees, which might even get you past that one really tough part you just couldn’t do before as you lacked the proper stat levels. If you ask me, on a scale of 1-10, how game breaking this is, I’d give it a 2, sure it feels like a cheap way to gain quick experience and levels, and it trivializes the need to equip weapons that you can actually handle properly, but it’s not really game breaking, it’s just a means of better preparing your character and getting the perks you want in the trees you level up. It won’t help your stealth skill, you’ll have to knockout the other villagers for that, and trying to level archery off of point blank shooting an arrow into Fritz’s back is also a bit redundant as it doesn’t gain much xp (even if you’re far away with the correct trajectory, it still pays out next to nothing)
Basically, if you’re having a rough time at any point in the game, you might want to consider starting anew and trying this as it really does help and opens up more choices for how you go about playing the game and building your ideal character, as well as making it much more enjoyable when you can feel confident about your perks and stats, but don’t get cocky, you DO still need Bernard’s perfect block and eventually parry training to stand a chance against most of the tougher enemies, or when you’re outnumbered. One last bit here, just remember that even with this gameplay “exploit” you won’t become a “god among men” and you’ll still die plenty of times, sometimes by cumans or bandit knights, and other times by that one random armed peasant who caught you fast traveling while heavily injured after a tough fight. As they say, your best option when outnumbered or outclassed is to “Run away - live to fight another day” unless you WANT to have to reload from your last save, possibly 10-20 minutes ago or longer, depending on if you got save wasted
This little trick is easy to ignore if you just play the prologue normally, and it has no adverse effects on the game past that point, so those of you afraid you’d lose your save after certain quests for doing this can breathe easy
Hopefully this helps out whoever reads this whole thing with character building or getting past certain tough points in the game, even if it is a little cheesy