It's not that hard. Baldur's Gate 1 can be easily soloed with a Fighter/Thief, while Baldur's Gate 2 with a dual classed mage. My favorite combo is Swashbuckler, Mage. After you get the Robe of Vecna and Time Stop, you can kill anything.

One thing nobody mentioned here is that there is an "early NPC" mod for Baldur's Gate, which has been incorporated into the Tweaks Anthology pack. I consider the Tweaks pack a necessary mod, particularly the inventory stacking component. It is the successor to the ease-of-use mod.
https://gibberlings3.github.io/Documentation/readmes/readme-cdtweaks.html

If you want. I find creating characters a bit boring. When i get to character 3 of 5 (or 8) i get so sick of it i just would take the defaults. Make 1 custom character? Sure. Too many and i just don't care.

I think that the original Final Fantasy and SaGa 1 and 2 have a good approach to handling this. At the start of the game, you choose from a relatively small number of choices for each character (6 for FF1, 8 for both SaGas), and that's the only choice you make, other than name, for each character. (Later remakes of FF1 additionally have the option to choose random names for each character, so you don't even have to think of those names! I wish that feature were standard in RPGs with character creation (and am disappointed that games like Stranger of Sword City and Pathfinder: Kingmaker don't offer this feature).)

There's an interesting difference between these games. Final Fantasy has you choose a class, which affects the character's abilities for the entire game, and the only other long-term decision to make is which spells you'll learn (as you're limited to 3 per spell level, in a game where casters work similarly to BG2's sorcerers, except that you still have to buy spells). SaGa 1 and 2, however, use your choice as a starting point and to determine the mechanics by which your characters grow, but provides freedom after that point; hence, you do have build decisions to make (though it feels different than it would with a traditional leveling system), but they're delayed.

For an in-between case, you can look at Dragon Quest 3's remakes, where you choose a class and gende4r, and get 5 (or sometimes 6) stat seeds to distribute, which then influences that character's starting personality (which affects stat growth).

I think the idea of having very limited choices at character creation, but then being able to shape a character's growth over the course of the game, to be ideal; it gives you freedom with party composition, while not frontloading character decisions (a problem that D&D based RPGs tend to have).

Well i don't mind complexity to a degree, but there's like 12 things you need to do when doing a D&D-like game. Gender, model/portrait/name/voice, then assigning stats, deciding on classes, feats, skills, etc. A little too in depth.

Actually i rather liked how they did it in Shadowrun on the Genesis, you get 3 options, which is just a starting kit of things. You could go enhanced with wolverine-like claws, you could be a hacker with a minimal cyber hookup (and useless until you upgrade) or you could go as a shaman who can start working down the magical route. Everything else is upgraded when you use karma to upgrade your character.

I tried once, before there was Icewind Dale, which was intended for that. Also tried a fighter-thief that often explored on its own. Customized to look like Rurouni Kenshin XD Ah the times

I can relate to that... Once I did a five character group and left the last slot to a companion I kept cycling just to complete as many quests as I could. It was really fun, I'm thinking of doing the same with an evil party now :)

Depends on which Dungeons and Dragons the game is based on. Third edition or later you have tons of choices. Earlier editions not so much.
The Gold Box games used first edition. You just picked gender and class and rolled for stats (or just maxed them out on creation). The only other choices you had were picking spells for mages on character creation (you could also find scrolls) and on level up.
Baldur's Gate I and II, plus Icewind Dale I used 2nd edition, and the only addition to the above was adding weapon proficiencies.
Pool of Radiance II:Ruins of Myth Dranor was supposed to be 2nd edition but they changed it to 3rd edition late in development, so you didn't get a whole lot of choices. IMHO it was done stupidly, there was no reason why they couldn't have let you pick skills and feats instead of assigning them automatically from tables, but once again, the only choices you made were class and spell picks.

Contrast that with games like Dragon Wars or the Exile/Avernum series which is classless. You can make jack of all, master of none characters that are very high level but very weak. The key is to specialize in doing one or two things well.
Both games I did poorly on the first time because I made some bad builds. I had to restart and make a better party.
I often feel overwhelmed by those choices, especially when you can't make a party to take all the skills since I have no idea what skills are important and what are useless. Temple of Elemental Evil is another example as I don't know which skills I'll really need and I only get to pick 5 of 11 classes and even taking both a rogue and bard I can't pick all the skills with more than 1 rank unless I start with 5 rogues.
Buck Rogers:Countdown to Doomsday was another early example of too many skill choices, not enough skill points and you don't always know which ones are vital and which ones you don't need.

You also picked race, though worth noting that by Pools of Darkness the only viable race is human due to racial level caps. (There's also a gender-based strength cap that unfairly penalizes female characters relative to their male peers; I'm glad that this was removed in 2nd edition.)

Also, in many games based on 1e and 2e, it's possible to dual-class a human, changing their class. One big catch, however, is that you need to have high scores in certain ability scores to do this, and those ability scores are basically fixed at creation, so if you don't plan ahead, you may find yourself unable to dual class when the time comes. (Also, note that not every 1e/2e game implements dual classing; Pool of Radiance and Dungeon Hack do not, for example.)

Edit: Also worth noting that not every 1e/2e/3e game gives you spells at level up. Dungeon Hack and the infinity engine games do not, for example, which results in wizards being possibly less useful depending on the whims of the developers (or the RNG, if we're looking at Dungeon Hack); if the game has sorcerers, they *do* get to choose their spells, giving them a significant advantage in such games (most prominently IWD2 and IWD:EE).

Not *entirely* true:
* In Dragon Wars, most skills don't provide any benefits past a certain value. Also, some late game weapons, typically swords, provide such a huge bonus to hit that your skill level isn't really relevant. The only character I found heavy specialization to be worth while is whoever is going to learn the Inferno spell, as that skill becomes really good if you raise your Sun Magic skill high enough. (There's only one copy of this spell, and none of Wrath of Mithras.)
* In classic Avernum (not the more recent remakes), the higher a skill is, the more expensive it is to increase it further, so it's much cheaper to become decent in a secondary skill than it is to become really good in a primary skill. The only situations (in Avernum 1-3) where it's truly worthwhile to raise a skill to higher values are the magic skills (since higher skill gives you more powerful spells) and the Luck stat (at 19+ luck, you have a 95% chance to survive fatal damage, making it very hard for the character to die).

Incidentally, I actually prefer the way games like the SaGa series and the Elder Scrolls series typically handle skills; you're not constrained by class, skills improve through use, and lower level skills are easier to increase even if you're at a high level. In other words, picking up a new skill on a character is significantly cheaper in these games than it is for games that use skill point mechanics or similar.

By "Classic Avernum" do you mean the Exile games? Because I played the first three Exile games on a PowerMac 6500/300 25 years ago and I do not recall an increasing cost for skills. I could be remembering wrong, and I can't check as said PowerMac (my only Macintosh) died in 2008 and I didn't think it was worth tracking down the proprietary part to fix it. I haven't actually played them since at least 2008.
The games I played are actually now freeware from Spiderweb software (but good luck finding the Nethergate download, I think they took it offline). They were quite good back in the day, but aren't compatible with modern systems. You need period operating systems to play them.
http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/productsOld.html

I wasn't aware there were two versions of Avernum, just Exile and the Avernum remake.

Now I'm going to have to download the Windows version, install it on my Win98SE computer and try it again.

I'm certain there is a Baldur's Gate forum.

The first 3 games in the series have gone through 3 versions each:
1. The Exile series, each with a subtitle (for example, Exile: Escape From the Pit). These are the original iterations of these games, support 6 character parties (as opposed to 4 like in later versions), and the Windows versions are 16 bit (so won't run natively on 64-bit Windows). Also, note the top-down view, rather than the isometric view of later versions.
2. The old Avernum games, which don't have titles (for example, Avernum 1). These are 32-bit, isometric, and are the only versions to have the increasing cost for skills. It is these versions that are found in Avernum: The Complete Saga (along with Avernum 4-6, which have no older or newer versions, and which use a more modern game engine).
3. The new Avernum games, which have the Avernum name, but also have subtitles (for example, Avernum: Escape From the Pit). Aside from the newer engine, these games changed the skill system completely, and also added some of the special abilities you could get by raising weapon skills in later Avernum (6 and maybe 5?).

I remember getting Exile: Escape from the Pit under a 32-bit Linux VM using WINE, though that was some time ago. If you're on Windows (and don't want to run Linux in a VM or WSL), you could try a piece of software called OTVDM to run it, and see if that works.

By the way, my comment about high Luck applies to the Exile series and Avernum 1-3, I believe (though not sure about 3). It does not apply to the newer remakes (though, with Luck limited to 5, it wouldn't be as game-breaking, as a 25% chance of surviving a fatal blow wouldn't make you nearly invincible the wauy a 95% survival chance would).

I think you could also choose race, but it was more a cosmetic thing with a few handful of abilities being present (low light vision, minor changes, etc).

Reminds me, Shadowrun leveling was also really refreshing. You earned Karma points which you used to level up, which you'd pay either N, N+1 or N*2 depending on the complexity of the skill. N being the level of the skill already. Example you could level up handguns, shotguns, or thrown weapons for N+1, but you could get ALL of them for N*2.

More passive skills (Like reputation) was straight N.

Naturally it also goes into the mechanics of exploding d6's and difficulty levels. Which is interesting to read and use. Too bad that system isn't used more... OVA was sorta close in the method.

Actually, race affects a few other things in these games:
* Your stats are limited depending on your race.
* Class options available depend on race. Furthermore, only non-humans can multiclass. Dual-classing, in games that implement it, is restricted to humans.
* Racial level caps apply. The impact depends on the game; it's only a minor factor in Pool of Radiance (Half-Elf Clerics can't reach the Cleric's level cap, for example), but a crippling factor in Pools of Darkness (non-human non-thief characters are capped at a level that's lower than the level that humans start at, making non-humans completely useless and non-viable, essentially making it a non-choice, since there's only one non-trap option).

Forgot about that. I heard someone (maybe a youtuber) commenting about that, like elves the cap is 8 or 10...

Well i guess there's Lindybeige.