Fleeing is an option. Not steeling wooden spoons is also an option.
NPC AI is not going to be completely immersive in any RPG for the foreseeable future.
For D:OS 2, improvements are being made to the generic AI and the security system added, etc, but it is never going to hold up to NPCs in a particular situation acting realistically all the time.
Fleeing is not an option. As far as I understand, if you provoke someone into combat, then it's over. You can't just run away and then engage them as an NPC again. They will attack you on sight. In some game this has the potential to cause even worse bugs.
Imagine an NPC that that turns up at another location. They join in a dialogue talking about how they want to help you. Once the dialogue finishes, suddenly the game engine remembers that the NPC wants to kill you. Once again the NPC enters into its suicidal death match, potentially dragging nearby NPCs into the same state. I remember having a similar experience in one of the KOTOR games after a friendly was accidentally hit by an AOE and then later in the game he reappeared, dragging other NPCs into his aggro, ruining quests and breaking the game.
We've talked about how Larian is designing D:OS2 so that you can kill everyone and still finish the game. What are the chances that they'll design the game so that you can finish it without killing the NPCs, even if they all want to kill you? I'm guessing those chances aren't great.
I like that they got creative with this in the video example I included. The problem is that while you do get a chance to talk your way out of the situation, the only outcomes are 100% forgiveness or 100% bloody death match, which all rests on the outcome of a single persuasion check. You're either best friends or worst enemies and there's no middle ground.
You know, she could simply take her wooden spoon back and then refuse to talk to you again. (If you keep stealing her spoons, then cue bloody death match.) It's not a particularly difficult outcome to design. There are plenty of much better ways to implement consequences, but this one is cheap and much more effective than murder.
