THELASTDRACONIAN'S PROFILE

Okay, I've been having a LOT of problems programming (sorry for calling it scripting in the title) the game I want to make, so I decided to come here to ask for help. However, I'm only going to ask for a couple things at a time so that I don't create walls of text (at least, I hope I don't).

1: My game has lots and lots of characters, and I'm not trimming the list, nor am I killing anyone off. Instead, I plan on having a system for switching party members at will (at one fixed location, of course). Coding that seems really hard right now, though. Could someone help me to program that?

2: I'm trying to make a level-up item (like Pokemon's Rare Candy), but I can't seem to figure out how to make the game easily detect who's in the party and in what position. Is there some simple way to do this that I'm overlooking?