User blog comment:Madman97/You know what really grinds my Wabbajack's? S3E1: I can't kill these guys/@comment-25109952-20131025182427/@comment-1600847-20131106051924

Yes, Bethesda wants NPCs to be unkillable. This is because it's much easier to just make them all un-killable that to make them killable after a certain point. What if an NPC dies because your proposed system bugs, as Bethesda games do very, very often? Guess what, you have restart the entire game. Tough luck. It's much easier to make them never die under any circumstance. Again, this is most likely due to Bethesda's laziness, not a "casual gamer" conspiracy.