#also kind of funny because as an essential npc he has the plot armor now

[rohirric-hunter]

@isi7140 so last night when I was playing Skyrim with Radanir he displayed a weird propensity for. Putting himself physically in between me and enemies I was facing. Which is not something I have ever observed in a Skyrim NPC before.

Other followers will push past you to get to enemies, but what Radanir was doing was quite distinct. We cleared out a couple of dungeons, and Radanir would regularly abandon fights he was already having in order to go and place himself between me and an enemy. One time I ran away from a fight by dropping down into a pond in the bottom of a cave, and the bandit I was fighting started to run through a series of twisting tunnels to get to where I had landed, and Radanir abandoned the other bandit that he was fighting to chase the one that had gone after me. But he didn't start fighting him until he had gotten in front of him, blocking the narrow tunnel and preventing either him or the other bandit from getting out of it. Another time I ran away from a fight with a single bandit to heal. When I started to run away, Radanir was on the other side of the bandit from me. But when I turned back around, he was again between me and the bandit. I let the fight play out a bit before I rejoined it and Radanir did not move from that spot.

Once or twice is a random coincidence, but this happened consistently over the course of about three hours. With Skyrim's vanilla followers, this never happens. They move around way too much and their only clear intention in fights is to get to the enemy, or get a clear shot at them. The only time they get into a certain spot and don't move is when you walked into a tiny little room, at which point they'll stop in the doorway and refuse to move to let you back out of the room. (To be entirely fair, Radanir did this too.) Occasionally they'll do a thing where they'll circle around an enemy, typically when the enemy is blocking and they're waiting for the block to drop, but again, they move based on the enemy's position, not the player's. And when Radanir did this, more often than not he would stop between me and the enemy, even when the block was still up and he had plenty of space to keep moving.

This actually isn't the first time I've noticed this behavior: all three Rangers also behave this way with each other. A lot of my testing and learning with the Creation Kit is done by simply spawning a bunch of bandits or some trolls into the camp and watching how they handle the ensuing fight, and I'd noticed that when one of them enters bleedout something similar happens. IDK if you play Skyrim so quick explanation: when an NPC is tagged as essential, meaning they can't be killed, and their health bar reaches zero, they enter "bleedout," where they fall down and cannot move or act for a little while (longer if they keep getting hit while they're down) until eventually they'll regain a little health and either rejoin the fight or run away, depending on if their AI is set to "Foolhardy." You'll occasionally see non-essential NPCs enter bleedout, but not very often because usually a hit bad enough to send them into bleedout just kills them.

Back to these specific NPCs: if all three of them are in a fight and one enters bleedout, the other two will go and stand over him until he gets up again. If more than one of them are in bleedout, they will make their way towards each other and huddle together. I thought this was odd, but didn't think anything else about it, because I assumed their behavior was influenced in some way by their relationship: as far as the game engine is concerned, they are all siblings, and I haven't experimented with how vanilla Skyrim siblings behave in dangerous situations, so for all I knew it was normal. (Typically NPCs in bleedout don't move at all, much less make their way towards... anything, really, but I haven't experimented extensively with it.) However, them behaving that way towards the player is very odd, since they aren't siblings with the player -- the player is noted simply as a "friend" and their relationship status is actually as low as it can possibly be while still having them available as followers. So any vanilla follower in the game is going to have at least as good a relationship or better -- and yet none of them do this.

My current theories are limited: either I changed some setting while customizing their AI that made this happen and didn't realize I had, or it has something to do with enabling dual-wielding or the custom classes I made for them, which are the only things that I consciously and intentionally changed that set them apart from vanilla followers. Or. Maybe my custom Skyrim followers are becoming self-aware. Always a possibility, I guess.