How to make party members appear and move to begin a conversation scene?

Question

A common conversation starting trope in JRPGs, when the party is represented as a single character, is for the characters to come out of the player's position and begin talking with each other and the original character. Essentially they appear in the player's position and then move to a nearby square either one at a time or simultaneously. Then they start talking in classic JRPG fashion with one message box after another from one or another character.

What's the easiest way to do this in RPG Maker MV?

Is there a way to do it so the characters appear at the same time and move to their conversation positions simultaneously? Or is that not worth the trouble?

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Answer 1

The way I do it is to have events for the party members (except the lead character, since they'll already be represented by the player). In the event that triggers your conversation, first do a "gather followers", then "change player followers" set to off, followed by setting a switch to make all the individual character events visible, and start moving them (it can be helpful to have a script that can set self flags on other events here, so you don't have your list of switches or variables cluttered up with a bunch of things that are only used for single conversations). If you can't predict where the player will be, then move the events while they're still invisible, then make them visible and start moving them to their final position. When the conversation ends, just reverse the steps.

The events that represent the party members should be set to an empty page by default, and should have a page with a condition for their actual appearance.

You have to do "gather followers" first, otherwise you don't know where the followers are when you need to put the events that represent them in place.