Me and My Pals - Selective Combat And Story Party

Inspired by Sit This One Out 2 (STOW 2) by MycroftJr, which lets you keep a large party around for dialogue, banter, and story without having everyone pile into combat.

I loved the idea, but I still had one problem, making companions invisible doesn’t necessarily remove their impact on normal exploration. They can still physically behave like followers, and with a big enough party you basically have an invisible small army squeezing through rooms, ladders, jumps, narrow spaces, and every other bit of traversal BG3 throws at you.

What I wanted was something closer to older party-based RPGs, where the wider cast is still travelling with you in the story, but only a smaller active group is physically present during normal gameplay.

So Me and My Pals sets out to simulate that approach-ish.

Noncombat Companions

You can mark a companion as Noncombat and they remain a real member of your party, but effectively disappear from normal exploration.

While Noncombat, companions are:

• []Hidden.[/]

  []Intangible and heavily protected.[/]

  []Removed from normal follower traversal.[/]

  []Kept near the active party rather than independently navigating the world.[/]

  []Completely excluded from combat.[/]

  []Automatically skipped during Turn-Based Mode.[/]

  []Still available for dialogue, cinematics, camp scenes, companion conversations, banter, and overworld remarks.[/]

Since hidden companions are kept fairly close to your active character, their ambient comments and banter also tend to remain easy to hear.

One of the biggest differences from STOW 2 is how hidden companions behave during exploration. STOW 2's invisible companions still behave more like ordinary followers, following you, climbing ladders, clogging stairs if you don't have a group climbing mod, while Me and My Pals deliberately removes them from most normal traversal and keeps them gathered around the active character instead.

Companion Controls

Show All - Temporarily reveal all Noncombat Companions for 20 seconds.

Show Talkers - Reveal Noncombat Companions who currently want to speak with you.

Hide All - Immediately return temporarily revealed companions to their hidden state.

Set Others Noncombat - Mark everyone except the currently controlled character as Noncombat.

Clear Noncombat - Remove Noncombat from everyone and regroup them with you.

Park Noncombat Companions - Temporarily remove Noncombat Companions from active travel.

Recall Parked Companions - Bring Parked companions back to your current location.

Exclude Noncombat From Dialogue - Prevent Noncombat Companions from being automatically selected for normal dialogue where possible.

Restore Dialogue Participation - Allow exc