Question Mobs using skills

So I had this nifty idea that a mob could use skills, such as rescuing a pc in combat. I found a trigger in stock zone 46 as follows:

Looks simple enough, right? Except I can't get it to work. In fact, when I switch into the mob to see what it's doing (or not doing) it says: "You have no idea how to do that."

I can get mobs to use spells. What's the deal with using mobs to use skills? I feel like it's going to be super easy and I've just stubbornly gone down the wrong thinking path with all my tried and failed solution attempts. Anyone?

if (IS_NPC(ch) || !GET_SKILL(ch, SKILL_RESCUE)) {
send_to_char(ch, "You have no idea how to do that.\r\n");
return;
}


Because all skills has the IS_NPC check. They can't use skills.
If you remove it, Then you Will start getting alot of errors in log that mob uses bla bla something

Yeah, I came up with that around 2am this morning and just wanted to hit my head against the desk. LOL. Great minds think alike, JTP!

I think I'm going to experiment with making some copycat skills. I would love my players to be able to hire mercenaries to follow them around and do more than just assist. My vision is that the higher level mercs could rescue, pick locks, basically anything a player can do but for a price.

Well, there's a cheat-y way to do this which I've used in another mud base. If the guard is set to auto-assist when someone attacks the queen, do an if-check for fighting and do a find-mob to make sure the queen is still there. Then give the usual says or echos such as, "I'll protect you, my queen!" The guard jumps in front of the queen.

Then transfer the queen out to visit Puff for a couple of seconds and transfer her back in. If he's not already fighting then I guess you'd do a check to see who she's fighting and attack that person before transferring her out. I think that unfortunately the player may get a message that his target is not there but if the player looks, she'll already be back. Because the guard is involved in the fight there should be no break in the fight except possibly the one lost hit for the player. It's also possible that the guard will have switched tanks depending on how many people are fighting and how the game treats the situation.

This may actually work better than rescue if everyone fighting the queen switches to the guard while rescue (I think) only switches the tank for one player while everyone else keeps hitting the queen. However, I'm not sure how, or if, it would actually work.

That's an interesting work-around. I was thinking another direction - copying the rescue skill and naming it mob_rescue skill , without the NPC flag and only able to be practiced by anyone Imm-level. Kind of a skill that is not a skill, so to speak. Hmm.