One of the lesser, though still annoying, problems with having NPCs following you is the constant stop-and-start action required if you have a higher BMC than your followers - mutations, drugs, fitted sneakers and jeans can lead to some incredibly low BMC costs for yourself (one of my older dudes had a BMC of 57 IIRC) so needless to say this can get pretty problematic if you’ve really struck a home run in that department. So what about something that just temporarily sets your BMC to the BMC of your slowest follower, switched on and off like Safe Mode?
I imagine it’d work something like this:
Switch on Party Speed Mode
Check all NPCs in the area with the “Following” mode like you see in the Check NPC wish
Find the lowest BMC of all following NPCs and subtract the player BMC from the follower BMC
Apply the resulting value as a “Party Mode” speed penalty
I don’t know whether you mean that is what the player would do though, as it would probably just be easier for the computer to set the movement speed of the other party members to the slowest member without the manual settings, if that’s what you mean. I could also imagine a mode where you could manually change your speed using hotkeys , one setting your speed down by an increment of 1, another up if possible. This would also allow things like variable sight and sound levels correspondant to speed, letting the player sneak.
Mmm, manual speed control would be kind of a hassle to have to bother with, putting it up and down as need be, not to mention it’d kinda’ suck if you had to haul ass for any reason and you forgot to set your BMC all the way back up. That and you’d have to do fiddling to figure out just what your party speed is, and that can change depending on a host of things like how injured a party member is or what they’re carrying. A single toggle is probably better overall to use for simplicity and efficiency’s sake.
Would it be considered to broken to just up the NPC’s movement speed to that of the player? as that is pretty much a two line change.
Although I like the toggle option, it also gives ‘no please don’t leave me to die’ option where NPCs will hate you as you run off. Of course there isn’t really a downside to that hate as they will be shortly eaten by what your running from…