nope. afraid not. i would've thought there would be a way to export bones animation from max?

another funky idea is, if you know u are never going to have more than 8 of that one model existing (8 is just an example number) you could have 8 frames of idle pose. assign each character that uses that model a different number between 1-8 (in a skill or something) and use vec_for_mesh and vec_to_mesh with the various frames to edit that corresponding idle-frame number. if each one doesn't use a different idle frame, they would all affect each other.

that's just a basic idea, but it would be best to first find out if you can get bones out of max

julz