well i posted this question (before i saw like 20,000 other posts on the subject. i blame the search engine...) and sort of found a way to do it. the catch is the enemy will not be moving around chasing you and shooting and whatnot.
in my case, i was starting the level locked in a cell with a guard guarding me. the objective is to kill the guard to have him drop the key needed to open the door. since there is no 2nd "weapon" or a drop entity feature, this is the only way i have found...
go into your files folder and find your characters .fpe file. use fpimaker or notepad to open it, and look for a setting called isCharacter. change that value to 0(it will now behave as a standard entity). next change its destroy script to destroyandactivate.fpi. then, when editing your game, enter the name of your key in the ifUsed property. Finally, in the properties of your key change spawn at start to no.
again, unfortunately since you are removing the character behavior from the entity he will not shoot at you, but at least he drops a key
