Would this be possible? I was playing last night and was surprised at how easy it was to just grab the great welkynd stone, hop down, run into a shadowy corner in sneak mode, and then snipe the lich king and two guardian zombies with arrows while they wandered around up top. Granted I am using "Attack and Hide" and it wouldn't be that easy without that mod, but I would like it to be more difficult even WITH that mod. I am interested in making obtaining the great welkynd stone much more exciting by turning the stone into a hot potato, so to speak. I want the lich king and the guardian zombies to have "great welkynd stone radar", so that they home in on it's location and try to kill anyone who has it (with it being impossible to hide from them), or grab it and add it to their own inventory if it's been dropped somewhere.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts on the matter!

Take a look at M'aiq the Liar's scriptwork.

He'll take calipers. Even if it means he needs to steal them. Won't be the whole of what you need, but you might be able to figure it out from there...

Easily done, give the lich king a "Find" package, with the condition that the player has activated the great welkynd stone. For further fun, you could disable the package and reenable the great welkynd stone on it's pedestal once the lich or zombies find the stone.

Awesome thanks for the suggestions guys... I so enjoy making the game more punishing.

Well, they're still not behaving as smart as I would like them to... Any ideas on how to make a creature have a "detect life" ability so to speak? So that even if a sneaky weasel has 100 chameleon they still can't sneak away from the lich? I noticed with highwaymen you can't sneak away from them, but I looked at their AI and tried the same type of ambush package with the lich king, but it doesn't seem to work... :T

Try giving them a little script to StartCombat with the player, like this:

Begin GameMode	If GetCurrentPackage == YourFindPlayerPackage && GetInSameCell Player == 1		StartCombat Player	EndIfEnd

This should override the fact that they haven't detected the player naturally.

The reason it doesn't work on your lich where it does work for the highwaymen is, I suspect, that the highwaymen force greet the player, and that interaction blows the player's cover. Creatures, however, cannot have dialog, so that's out the window unless you're using proper NPCs instead of creatures.

Anyway to do it without OBSE? I wish creatures could use detect life spells. Is there a setting/variable that dictates how capable a creature is of detecting a sneaking player?

Sure. Just check the quest stage or set up a quest script variable you can check against instead of the AI package itself.

Edit: There is the actor value Blindness, but it is set to 0 by default, leaving the only determining factors the player's skill, lighting, boots/shoes weight, etc... the stuff you already know.

Maybe it's not exactly what you thougt of, but the lich king already seems to have a behaviour like this. I remember when I was there for the first time and took the stone I ran away without killing him. Then some day I did the quest for Sanguin and got arrested in Leyawin and when I got out of jail the king was there with his zombies and beat up the guards. Apparently he had followed me all the time...

The fact that they'll follow you to the ends of the earth is considered a bug that was addressed in the unofficial patch I think... although I agree that it is kinda cool actually.