Over the course of some quests, the player will sometimes enter an area or have the area they were in rendered inescapable until they progress further into the quest. This would naturally conflict with any mods that allow the player to leave those areas in ways the developers did not intend, as doing so would probably break the quest involved, possibly rendering it incompletable.

So, in the interest of avoiding such a conflict, I'm wondering if there's something that is common to all of those areas/quests which can be detected by scripts. From what I remember, some or possibly all of those areas prevent your followers from coming in with you, so that's a possibility. Does anybody have a better idea?

You could not allow them to fast travel from your area.

You mean prevent them from using mod made teleport spells and whatnot? Not much you can do. That's why I always say on those mods, that it can break things. If the dev intended you to not leave and you leave, you shouldn't complain if things break.

You could always have a quest script running that moves the player back into your cell if they leave during that stage. It would be super intrusive, but it would FORCE the player to stay there and annoy the heck out of anyone who tried to leave. xD

Mmm... that works for the vanilla game, but it would be nice to have a coping strategy for mod provided Mark and Recall spells, extra-dimensional player homes and what have you

I'm not asking about how to make an area teleport proof, I'm asking if there's a way to detect whether a vanilla area should be teleport proof. Hence my question about whether there's any common factor those areas have that might be detectable by a script. I'm not sure if every area like this disallows followers, but from what I remember it seems to be the case. If it is and it can be detected by scripts, then it might be a good way to do it.

Probably not.

For instance, one case where you shouldn't TP out of a dungeon is if the exit door is scripted to advance the quest. You TP out, you break that. And if you can't get back in it stays broken. The Mystic Dawn cultist dungeon was like that in oblivion, I seem to recall.

Thing is, how can you detect that? You'd need to scan for quests that were advanced by items in the level and then somehow decide if they were teleport-safe or not.

And I'm sure that's not the only reason why you'd want to stop players 'porting out.

What could work would be a location keyword DoNotTeleport that you could add to such areas. Then you could make a teleport that honoured the keyword. You'd need to identify the locations and add the keywords though, and it wouldn't help with third party spells.

That's a shame. I suppose I could try to make a list of every dungeon that does this, but there are probably way too many to feasibly do it that way.