I just had a thought. There was an example of radiant story about a child being taken to a dungeon somewhere and you have to rescue them. How do you get them back? Do they then become a follower? Because then, can you just take them around the world and get them attacked by monsters and things? That would be a rather dramatic conflict with their distaste towards the concept of child-violence.

Interesting point. in other games when npcs have done their part in a quest like "save x from cave", they say their words and then vanish all of a sudden. In Tes I don't see that happening, so yes I think they become companions for a while. I guess it's down to us if we exploit this or not.

AI probably just doesn't attack children, that's all . They run and hide whilst you get owned?

The way I see it: the npcs are suposedly more believable this time around. They sometimes accompany us to show us the directions for quests. When they give us such a dramatic task, I believe they will lead the way to the cave and will wait outside. It would be ridiculous to see them stay in town and possibly continue doing their daily chores while their kids are in the bandits hands. I guess once we clear the camp/cave, the parent will show up with a cut scene and we don't get to have the kids as companions.

Yes, assuming that:

The example will literally happen in the game and wasn't just something invented on the spot to illustrate the system.
Anything can actually harm a child; ie children have stats like NPC's and monsters that can be harmed.
The child will become your follower and not just run ahead once you exit the dungeon.

Given Bethesda's policy on the matter, I think we can safely assume that children can NOT be harmed. I could see us either having the child temporarily follow the player around, but be invulnerable (However, I'd assume that children will either run and hide if attacked, or enemies will ignore them in favor of the player, so you wouldn't be able to exploit this to gain an invulnerable companion.) or will simply run off once it's safe and return to the parent. This is, of course, assuming the example in question does in fact happen and was not made up just to illustrate the concept of what Radiant Story is.

In Fallout these quests were usually handled in one of two ways: Either the player talks to the npc and they become a temporary companion until they have left the dungeon, or the player must kill all creatures in the dungeon before talking to the npc, who then proceeds to run off on their own. So this could be the way Skyrim will do it, but who's to say?

As for children I'm sure they will be invincible and run/hide at the first sign of danger.

This.

Fallout 3 had a quest where you rescued some little rascles from some slavers. If memory serves, they either took cover while you were attacked and rejoined you once everything was clear, or they ran ahead and waited outside the slave camp. Either way works, though them simply taking cover makes more sense than to have then just book it through the crossfire, be them demi-gods or not.

On a side note, I hope there will be a few child npc's who are interested in our stories of past quest, and we get the option to tell them about our stories. That was my main reason for loving that town that was just for children in...Camp Lamplight I believe? You could tell a girl named Knock Knock what you had done in the main quest so far, and she'd comment on it. It was rather interesting, and I'd like to see that expanded on. It made it felt like people really were interested in what I was doing and what I was going through while trying to find my father, instead of them just sending me out into the radiated yonder just to kill stuff for them.

There is nothing worse than invincible/invulnerable anything in a video game (unless the story explains it that the being is some kind of god or something...). I, for one, am disappointed that they are putting children in the game. Yes, it is unrealistic to not see any children existing in the world, but no less realistic than a city with only 30 people living in it. The world is representational of what the reality of it would be, its not to scale. It would be better just to assume the existence of children as we have done in the past installments instead of explicitly including them if they can't be included in a realistic way. In other series that have children and have them invincible, at least usually they then stay in "safe zones" and aren't put in situations where it is harder to believe no harm would come to them. If they are just playing in the streets of a idyllic hamlet where no monsters or baddies ever come, its a lot easier to ignore they are invincible, because you would have to attack them yourself to discover this... and why would you do that? If the child goes into a cave full of heartless undead and insidious traps because of Radiant AI/Story... its a lot harder to swallow that they would be unable to be harmed.