There's an area in my dungeon in which the player must act alone (and can open another route later to get the followers back). The problem is, I'm running out of ideas. I can't think of a reason why the follower couldn't come with the player. It would be easy to make some hard to pass terrain but that would just be plain stupid. Any suggestions how to implement this?

No navmesh?

Hehe, well, that would be the easiest way to do it, but the player would need some kind of explanation why the follower wouldn't suddenly take another step.

Oh sorry, I read your post a bit too fast, thought it was a technical question.

Well it would be easier to answer you with a bit more information about your dungeon, its type, its backstory...
You could involve fear (spiders!) or religious superstition (especially in nordic tombs)
Problem is the player and the follower could be anyone, so it's hard to find something which would always works...cavein?

How About a scripted trap that only gets the follower. "you go on without me, I'll only slow you down"

There actually is a spot where there is no turning back, but the player could send the follower to go first. The part that the followers can't access is a standard cave and the cell itself is a mix of pretty much anything, mostly cave, mine and imperial. The questline or backstory don't really have anything to use here, except that the dungeon is unaccessible by default. I was considering of a lift or some other simple mechanical device that could only allow one person to pass. A good thing would be a lever or something that the follower would have to use to let the player in, but then the follower would be necessary.

That might be a good idea. I'd just need to make it so that the trap won't get the follower on every visit to the dungeon...

You could make an L_NavCut collision sphere/plane/cube, then enable/disable it as desired.

You could separate that area and put a door in between, just use the "DefaultNoFollowDoorScript" for the door that leads to that area. Once the follower tries to use the door, the player will see the default "Your follower cannot accompany you here." message.

There are that kind of doors in the game without explanation? How lame.

Of course you can create a custom message to be shown once the follower activates the door. Just choose your own message as property in the script.

Or, have a door that needs two levers pulled together in order to open it.

Open the door and drop a grille trapping your follower. You can open up another tunnel for the follow to take so he/she can plausibly meet the player outside.

Something like that would probably be the best solution, but it would prevent the player from entering the area alone. (I personally never have followers.) Then again, the said area is actually optional, so I might just do this if no better way is found.

Nobody else in tamriel is the Dragonborn. How about using that stone thing from the vanilla game that glows with the dragonborn symbol when the player walks near. Then have a message pop up saying "Only those with the blood of the dragon shall pass!". Using an alias, you can script the follower (if there is one) to say "go on without me, I'll wait outside"

Would that work?

- Hypno

Just an FYI, mods like UFO that allow multiple followers are very popular--so a solution that only takes care of one follower may be insufficient. And in past games like Morrowind/Oblivion/Fallout3, teleport rings or the like for followers were very common, so I expect we'll be seeing those again in Skyrim before too long [looks guiltily at signature]. So if the player shouldn't bring followers into the area, I'd suggest trying to find some immersive way to tell the player that, because trying to block it from happening mechanically is very tricky.

What about this: If an actor not being part of the dungeon or the player, is detected, the fat price at the end of the dungeon will dissappear and never, ever, will appear again. Make the player know this (put it clear various times during the stages at which followers are allowed) and it's granted no follower will enter the part of the dungeon you can't followers in. Any other move simply won't work for all followers.

Maybe you are not planning to give the player anything valuable, but you surelly will give the player a good reason for going into the dungeon, so adapt this idea to the circumstances of your mod.

A rockslide trap that knocks the PC out blanking the screen so you can remove the follower or followers and update the quest to reflect the new situation?

This is also what I'm afraid of, I've been trying to think of the situation with multiple followers because of this but I never considered teleport rings. Does this mean you can "summon" the followers? I'm not actually worried about summoning in general. The problem with followers is that they will most likely get killed in the area, it's filled with traps and requires fast movement and agility. It's also a surprise to the player, so it's quite tricky to tell anything in advance.

The dungeon also has a special key room in the beginning and an unlockable shortcut before that, so I might resort to something cheesy like "only the strong with the key item may pass"... The player could come and get the follower(s) after making it to the other end of the shortcut, it wouldn't matter at that point. The area might have to be made sealed forever after that though.

Anyway, if the player is "cheating" with other mods, there's nothing I can do to prevent it. There's no way to know what kind of mods the players have installed or how they are using them. The vanilla game isn't safe either. The worst thing for my mod would now be something that allows the player to enter forbidden areas by levitating or something. Then again, it's even easier to ruin the experience using console commands.

Have an enemy show up in a far corner of the room or something so that all the followers go into attack mode. Then have that enemy run away down a hallway, or something, and rockslide or lock a gate behind them so player has to go another way. Problem would be archers who may not follow right away, and excited players. Could have a trigger to spawn the enemy around a corner, and then force followers to attack that enemy through scripting (if that's possible), and/or just take off screaming down the hallway (again if that's possible), or just space magic I guess

Set it up so it works for one or two followers. There's no point in worrying about people who play with dozens of followers, any more than there is about summon spells, mark-and-recall or any of that stuff.

That said, one solution might be to have a ghost that unlocks the door, who says "Beyond this point, you must go alone". Then you can use SKSE to iterate over the cell occupants and if any of them pass the IsPlayerTeammate test, the ghost refuses to open the door. Once everyone is dismissed, the door unlocks - or better yet have the ghost teleport the player into the solo area.

It'll still be vulnerable to players who teleport help in, but you can't help that. Best you can do there is note that there's a player solo area in the mod and that you recommend players not summon help. Tell them they'll know it when they see it.

I've decided I'll use a magic effect to force the followers to be immobilized. However, I have no clue how to do this. Is there any simple way to, say, make the follower(s) kneel/yield and then release them later with a different trigger?

Try this:

Create a sub-quest you can start when the player enters the area.
Give the area (say) a dozen idle markers. Use the kneeling captive marker from the DB quest
Give the quest a dozen follower aliases. Select them from the local area, with keyword IsPlayerTeammate. Make sure they're all optional
Give each alias a UseIdleMarker package linked to one of the kneeling markers, and conditional on one stage in the subquest.

When the quest starts, the followers should execute the package and use the idle markers. To stop them kneeling, advance the stage of the quest, or stop it.

You may need to unset teammate status when they kneel. You can remove it in the package's start fragment and re-add it in the end fragment.

you might want to take a look at http://geck.gamesas.com/index.php/IsPlayerMovingIntoNewSpace

how would we use this? It seems like a very useful function but when I searched it in creationkit.com http://www.creationkit.com/IsPlayerMovingIntoNewSpace came up. Is there a papyrus/ck condition equivalent?

- Hypno

http://www.creationkit.com/OnLocationChange_-_Actor, perhaps.