[LE] How would you make a follower not appear in a cell?

[TomTesoro]

I've been trying different things for hours now with no substantial results. I need any player follower, no matter where they've come from, to not enter a specific cell with the player during a certain quest stage. Is there any real way to handle this? I've tried using the follower alias from the DialogueFollower quest to disable and dismiss them, but that doesn't cover followers controlled by other quests. The Dark Brotherhood initiates and Cicero, for example, have all of their follower actions controlled by the DarkBrotherhood quest, so that solution doesn't work with them. That also doesn't account for any follower mods that use their own quest to control the follower. I've tried putting a trigger at the entrance of the cell that disables the activator, but there's no way to retain the information on who the activator was to enable them again. Overall I'm at a complete loss here on how to get this done. I've also tried looking at the Waking Nightmare quest to see how it's done when the player enters the dreamstride, but I didn't see any code even remotely related to that.

 

I'm going to try the DefaultNoFollowDoorScript now but I'm not too sure how that will work in this situation since the player is teleported to this cell. Update: Yeah, that didn't work for that reason.

 

Any ideas?

Edited April 11, 2018 by TomTesoro

[cdcooley]

The easiest solution is to provide absolutely no doors between that cell and any others. Place a marker in the cell and another one for the return and use the MoveTo script function to move the player to the markers at the appropriate time (either from some quest even or when the player activates some object).

 

That still won't prevent custom followers that have a "warping" script from following and you also won't be protected from followers or follower framework mods that provide a spell or hotkey for summoning followers to the player. People have tried all sorts of complicated strategies to keep all NPCs away and some are more successful than others but experience shows that trying to prevent absolutely every NPC from following isn't really worth the effort.

 

My recommendation is to just use the no door trick and then make sure the players know they shouldn't be bringing followers along at that stage. Then don't worry about it because ultimately it's their decision and problem if it breaks something or spoils their fun.