your character, a single LV1 bard
What?
versus three LV3 thugs guarding the bridge that you need to pass through.
That means "go back and grind some". Like a man. Also, "don't play poofter classes".
The problem, I imagine, is the widespread dogma that combat has to end with a single victory state, that is, with all of your opponents lying dead in a puddle of blood. Now, you could say that all of this is already solved by the dialogue trees, but my counter to that would be that a) dialogue trees are not gameplay, they're boring to "play"; and b) you cannot replicate them cheaply, each dialogue has to be uniquely written by the writers and you cannot hope to make every thug have a fully-fledged one.
You can see the example of this in Fate: Gates of Dawn, where you have 100500 various options to choose from in every encounter that does not turn into combat at once. Tragic fact: it's even more boring than dialog trees and it doesn't really work. There are only 3 universal end states: either you succeed and the encounter is gone, or you fail and get attacked, or you semi-fail and go back to square one.
I'd rather deal with encounters via combat than with a magic button that sometimes works. At least combat gives you xp. The "Remove encounter...maybe" button is not gameplay.