A couple of questions about events...

I apologize profusely if any of these are covered in other threads, I searched extensively, but sometimes hitting on just the right combination of search values can be a daunting task in and of itself. 

I'm creating a special game for my nieces birthday.  Nothing extraordinary or special, a simple short story, with some battles, dialogs, and simple quests  in it.  It's a very linear game, with lots of dialouge and player/character interaction (more specifically, the character talks to the player a lot...)  And for these automated dialog startups(where the character initiates a conversation with the player)  I'm using an Autorun event (very top left hand square), and based on some switch values, and variable values, I can keep track of where I am in the story.  (Most of these conversations or mini cutscenes occur after transferring to a different map).

However, I re-use a lot of the maps I've created, and entering and leaving these maps seems to really tax this autorun event if there's too many conditionals or too many branches.  Plus some of the NPCs behave differently based on the point in the story, and their own event tabs seem to become over weildy and cumbersome.  The point of this little diatribe is that trying to debug all these conditions and branches isn't quite as easy as debugging the software I write at work (I'm a C# developer by trade...)

So what I've done is every time the chapter or act changes, and I have to re-visit a map, I copied the map, removed all the events from the new map, and then start adding them for the specific scene, chapter or act I'm curently engaged in.  Is this the wrong way to do this?  Does it add to my games overall complexity or just isn't very efficient?

Also, I've asked this in another thread as well, but might as well ask here too.  On the Event Editor screen, the Options on the bottom left hand side (Move Animation, Stop Animation, Direction Fix, Through, and Always on Top)... What are these specific options for?  What do they actually do?

I've done quite a bit with events already, and am actually considering a simple script, to give an NPC an array of possible dialog statements, and generate a random number, and using that number to determine what the NPC's response should be.  I know this isn't a scripting thread, but could anyone give me just a small example of such a script so I can use it as a template, then expand upon it myself?  That''s how I taught myself programming in general, learning by doing...

Wow.  That's a big text block.  But I read it.

There's really no "wrong" way to do anything in RMXP, and as long as it works for you, I'd keep copying and pasting maps.  The final file might be a bit large, but if the game is just for your niece, I don't think it matters to much.

Move animation sets it so that the character will go through the character sheet when it moves.
Stop animation cycles through the row of the current character sheet.
Direction fix prevents the character sheet from switching to a new row when moving.
Through makes it so the character is able to pass through the event.
Always on top makes it so the event is always on a layer above the hero, so he passes under it.

As for the bottom paragraph, I have no ability with scripting. However, you can do that with variables.
  Set variable to a random number between X and Y.
  Then, with conditional branches, do it so if variable is X, then this is said.  If variable is X + 1, this is said, X + 2, this else, so on and so forth through variable is y, this last thing is said.

Since I already have this discussion thread, and my new qustions are still pertinent, I'd like to ask a couple more event specific questions...

Do control switches ever reset themselves?  They're not supposed to be map specific right, but global to the entire game?  I ask because I had an instance where on an autorun event, with a conditional branch, it was always falling into a branch it shouldn't have, based on a control switch.  It was behaving as if somewhere along the line it was being turned off, even tho I wasn't resetting it myself...  Of course, this has been a while ago, and I may be completely mistaken, but the initial question stands, do control switches ever reset on their own?

And self switches, if I set a self switch, leave the map, and come back to it, does the self switch reset back to it's initial value?

Global Switches and Self Switches don't turn on or off without you telling them to.