That sounds exactly like the approach I decided to take.  Basically, I ended up with two tile engines.  I have the original one with no real modifications that I use for gameplay and then a stripped down version of it that I use for cutscenes.  It's a little bit messy, but it sure beats starting from scratch.

Ok, here's one. I've been trying to work through a way to do things like panning a map without a character and initiating dialog for cutscenes.  I've been staring at this for a while trying to come up with a good way to implement such devices but I'm really having a coder's block.  Has anybody done something ...

I've been having a great time playing with the RPG starter kit.  I've done a lot of customizations for it, but so many times I've added some classes or changed existing ones just to realize that I could've accomplished the same thing by just changing the XML itself without adding anything to the project code at ...