Here's a neat trick for RPGmaker2003 I invented (or, at least, I thought of it without seeing it anywhere else) while working on a Silimarillion RPG. You may have figured this out but, oh well, here it is. It's for easily implementing avoidable enemies, if that is what you wish. Just set aside ten or so switch slots, and name them monster1 through 10 (or whatever the maximum number of monsters you will have on a map is.) Then do the following. Set each monster to be an event, triggering either when the hero goes somewhere, have it chase the hero, whatever you want. When it touches, have it trigger to start the battle. Anyway, include after the battle code a code saying 'switch operation'. Then change 'monster1' to 'on'. All you need do then is add a second page to the monster event, make it only activate if the given switch is on, and make the sprite look like the monster dead. That way, you meet a monster on the screen, fight it, and see it dead (in mine, I had the screen littered with dead orcs and trolls.) Anyway, make sure to label the monster 'monster1'. Do the same with the rest of the monsters. Now, here's the kicker. On every exit from a map with monsters, do a mass switch operation: turn all from monster1 to 10 'off'. That way, all the creatures will be alive again when you return. And the best part? You can use the exact same ten switches for every single map, because they always default to 'off' (or 'monster alive') when you leave the last one. Thus, in ten switches you can do avoidable, but recurrent, battles for the whole game. Nifty, eh?
I can't think of any other trickes off-hand. Most of the things I thought of were specific to what I wanted to do (wrapped up bodies swinging from the ceiling in Shelob's lair, arrows flying overhead in a battle, that sort of thing.) I even made it so that the other players followed you, though that was really difficult, and didn't work that well. I'm sure there's a better way of implementing it, but I was just trying to be resourceful myself.
Here's a nice looking effect that I used once, though maybe I was just lucky with how it turned out. Not sure if you'd want to use it, but it makes for a seamless and dramatic effect. Have a paralax background, and a foreground that you can have someone standing on. The background would best be a sky or something. Anyway, leave at least a screen of room at the top for the background. Then make a second map identical with the top space, but a different foreground. What you can then do is have the 'camera' looking at something in the foreground on the first (I had someone looking out to sea), then pan up, change the screen transition to instant, no transition effects, and change the map to the second. There should be no visible change, as the paralax background is identical in both. Then just pan down, and continue with the other scene. You can thus juxtapose both scenes, one of those movie-like shots where it looks up at the moon, looks down again, and it's in a different place.
Oh, and good luck with double-techs. I'm actuallly curious how you're going about that. I never figured out how to achieve that sort of thing. Unless you're going into programming sort of thing. That I never touched. I only ever tried to be clever with the events and all.
