Trying to make a little cutscene to no avail.

I'm making a little scene where my character walks into an arena and sits down in a chair and the camera pans out to the middle of the arena and 2 people are supposed to walk out and a fight was supposed to start.  (To be clear the charactar can walk freely anywhere he wants in the arena until he sits in the chair, which is when the event is supposed to take place)

I probably have this setup wrong, but the way I did it was

I set the event in the chair I want my character to sit in
i set the camera up to pan to the position I wanted it to
I put in a little message saying "Let the tournament begin"
The music then changes
Then I set a switch for a "0011 combatant1" to appear (out of view of the camera) to make it look like he walked into the arena.
I set the character appear event to "0011 combatant1"

Everything works fine until the switch.  The event commands in the character event, whether set on auto start or parallel process continually repeat the first event command.  The only way I'v been able to get the guy to move where I want him to was to set him "By its route" which of course still means I can't use any event commands without them looping over and over again.

Surely somebody has set something like this up before... There are plenty of Rpg2k games I'v played that have similar processes in them.

If anyone needs me to explain this better I'll give it a shot.

Cobalt, try setting this up as a common event, and set to parallel process and call on a switch. rm2k3 can be screwy with events for setups like this if you don't set some kind of movement setting to help the PP work, even that can be screwy.
Also, using the pan function can be a pain in the arse,

also, you can have so much fun with con branches, if switch "make this work"is on then do this(move event/hero) other wise (if not) do this.you should be able to set this to PP as an event and it may take some tweaking but you can probably get it to work.

so, if you try a common event to happen on a switch to call it to a pp, when he sits down in the chair have it set to that switch and have it on collison or touched by hero, below him. have the common event lock hero pos and then do your pan stuff, play your msg, then show your cut scene and when it's done un lock hero pos and  remember to have another switch to turn on to turn off the common event that was called(the cut scene stuff) to a blank common event.(that should end any looping )

sorry for the lengthy post. after rereading your post over and over, i think you can just solve your problem by having another switch turn on after everything is done to a blank common event. Or just turn the cut scene switch off at the end of the cut scene.

hope this helps, if not post a screen shot of what your talking about.

good luck