Ok I know this has been covered but it really doesn't make a lot of sense. This morning I was in Solitude when an Ancient Dragon dropped (iiterally) out of the sky and before I could do anything killed three NPC's. Two ordinary people and one of the Bard's from the Bards College. None of these particular NPC's needed to die, their not guards, they weren’t armored, they weren’t carrying weapons, so it doesn’t make sense they would run up and start fighting a huge winged lizard that breaths fire. I understand innocent people die when dragons attack, and when your outside a walled city it's logical that they would want to defend themselves but in a large city such as Solitude, it makes more sense for them to run away and let the guards handle the situation until there are no more guards.

Also why doesn’t the dragons attack when you’re not in the city, have you ever gone to a city and see a dead dragon laying there or a bunch of bodies after the fight, no so it just shows you that it's not realism they were going for.

Nords are not people who flee before an enemy. Sorry but I don't understand why dragons shouldn't attack when we are in a city. When dragons attack, it's not you specially that they attack, they want to kill as many humans as they can. Apologies, misread your line.

This is why I wish that some of the NPCs (mostly essential NPCs) would respawn when they died, kinda like in Red Dead Redemption where when you kill a quest-related NPC, they would just respawn the next day.

i don't use console commands , but when dragon kill quest npc i resurrect him/her .
skyrim real action video , people were running from the dragon , but in game they fight.
i think they should hide and leave the fighting for guards

I just reload. It always saves before fast travel.

I hate this. I had to reload in Riften around 7 to 10 times because of this bs. It isn't something specific to dragons. In Riften someone called out theif and the whole town gang [censored] his [censored] and he was dead before I could even catch site of him. So clearly this is something to do with their AI so Radiant isn't exactly perfected yet or Bethesda was to lazy to program in better AI.

I usually don't care unless they are somehow related to quests, in that case I just reload

i heard dragons burn things to the ground and eat people. why would they leave people alive?

in all honesty ive said it before and ill say it again run to a house (reload inside the house if need be) and wait for a few hours the dragon will be gone with no-one dead.

There will be a mod to fix this more likely after the CK is out...

But I do believe Xbox players should get a fix for this as well.