This might sound incredibly specific, but since I'm playing as a sneaky thief, it's not that out of the question that this sort of situation may arise quite often.

Basically, if you sneak (or use invisibility) over to an enemy group that will initiate dialogue before attacking you, then attack them with just that one character without the dialogue triggering, combat starts with them but not the rest of the party (this is how it should be, of course).

The problem is that if you then bring the rest of the party over, they don't enter the battle. While the enemies and your sneaky character are stuck in turn-based mode waiting for the next move, your can just use the rest of your party to kill the frozen enemies at your leisure.

[Linked Image]

In the above screenshot, you can see that only one of my characters is flagged as being in combat, and my other characters are next to the orc and able to attack and kill him without reprisal. I'm not sure if this is unique to the above fight or would work in any other situations where NPC dialogue leads to combat.