Hey,
Basically what I want to do is have a group of adventurers travel all around cyrodiil killing and looting in dungeons. What is the best way to go about achieving this?

Is this a party the player will be part of or you just want a party of NPCs looting the countryside?

Just NPCs looting the countryside. Maybe the player would see them at some point if luck has it.

Well, very little true randomness happens in Oblivion, it only appears random to players because they can't see the mechanics.

So, to start you would create your group of NPCs and make one guy the leader. Then give all the other guys http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Follow_Package AI packs to make them follow the leader wherever he goes, put them in the same custom faction to make them work together.

That's the easy part. Next you want to place xmarkers at specific points across cyrodiil and name them so you can call on them later. So say you put one at Pell's Gate, you might name it MyBanditPellsGateMark. And another at Cropsford you might name it MyBanditCropsfordMark

Then you will give your Leader guy one http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Travel_Package package per xmarker you placed. You could also use http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Find_Package packages in place of travel packs to make them find specific people to kill or specific treasure to loot.

In order for your badguys to kill NPCs or the player, you will need to make them evil and aggressive. This is done through setting their Faction as evil and their AI aggression level to something high like 80 or 100. :foodndrink:

That's just the basic idea, it will appear random to players since player's won't know the travel order or schedule you have created. You can make their behavior more complex depending on what kind of packages you give them. This is all a bit advanced if you have no experience with NPCs and AI. InsanitySorrow teaches a great http://www.invision.tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/forum/14-npcs-ai/ class at TES Alliance.

Hope some of that is helpful. :foodndrink:

Very helpful thanks. And yes i've created NPCs before and such, just haven't used too many AI packages. The thing is, if my NPC leader were to die, the other NPCs would stop travelling. And what package could i use to make them loot things?

If you use a Find package and give them a specific something to look for (target) in a specific location they should go there and root around that area for the item you set as the target. Since a lot of locations are short on loot you may need to add some loot in a respawning container they can loot again another time. If the target is a person and your bandits are evil they will find that person and attack.

As for your leader you could set him to Essential by default then give him a script that removes his essential status when the player attacks him. That way the player can fight and kill him but others can't. I'm not a script master but it might look something like:

scn aaMyBanditBossScriptshort doonceBegin OnHit Player     if doonce == 0          setessential MyBossID 0          set doonce to 1     endifEnd

Oh okay that makes sense. thanks a lot. cheers :foodndrink: