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The problem: confusion is a super lame status effect. If you have !curing and can quaff !curing it just makes you waste a turn quaffing !curing, ie is a consumable tax, and !curing is so common that it's very hard to run out past the early game. If you don't have !curing or can't quaff it then you might get chain confused for a million billion turns; see every thread about mummies and tarantellas for why this sucks. The effect itself is pretty inelegant; it blocks some actions like spellcasting entirely but makes other ones like trying to melee a dude significantly worse instead, and then there's a couple things that don't get affected at all and there's not all that much rhyme or reason to it imo. It would be good for confusion to not be a status effect that 1) makes you unable to do a bunch of things, but a couple things just get made shittier because ??? and a few things are totally unaffected because ???, 2) is trivially curable with a common potion, and 3) can be repeatedly stacked on the player.

The goal: make confusion a good and cool status effect. The exact nature of what confusion should do is the main focus of this thread. I expect that any confusion rework will remove the "cures confusion" effect of !curing and the duration stacking thing but maybe someone will surprise me and come up with a great rework that maintains those features.

Cool idea number 1: confusion just gives you a X% chance, like 33% or 50% or whatever, for any action to be replaced with wait a turn, no other effects.
Pros: really simple, has impact.
Cons: it's just paralysis lite (or RNG slow if you prefer). Players will feel like they get RNG'd to death even if it's their fault, I guess this isn't too different from the current situation if you get chain confused though.

Cool idea number 2: confusion just prevents you from targeting anything (spell/wand/weapon/movement). The effect targets somewhere at random instead.
Pros: unique effect, somewhat similar to current confusion.
Cons: my experience w/ current confusion tells me that this would be really annoying.

Cool idea number 3: remove, replace all confusion effects with slow or with some other status
Pros: deletes a bunch of crawl code.
Cons: will have to listen to people complain about the removal for at least 1 release cycle.

Post yr own. Best most coolest radical idea* gets into hellcrawl.

that i can code

Cool idea number 4: confusion disables the use of diagonals.
Pros: easy to understand but can deeply impact play; affects all types of characters
Cons: May be difficult to communicate the diagonals being disabled.

Idea#5. Make Confuse "berserk-light". As long as you are confused you automatically repeat last action i.e. you essentially hit tab if your last action was melee attack, you shoot at closest target if your last action was shooting with a launcher or throwing, you cast the same spell again if your last action was spell cast. Movement does not count as last action, in this case you can choose what to do and start repeating it.
Pros.
1) Now you have control/fault in all your deaths to confusion.
2) Fun (summons are still subject to cap, casting Blink to avoid tarantella and still becoming confused, casting Static Discharge to kill yourself, quaffing agility again and again etc.). Orc Wizards become even more nasty.
3) Confusion-chain is fine.
Cons.
1) If you cannot repeat action (movement or out of MP/missiles, for example), you can do whatever you like and then you start repeating this new action instead. Spoilery a bit unless Confusion effect is described really well in monster description.

I would like player confusion to be (a) somewhat meaningful (b) not significantly different from monster confusion (c) roughly the same as it is now.

Therefore, my preferred solution would be:

Confusion can't be cured. If Slow or Paralysis can't, why should confusion be any different?
Confusion can't be chained: the player gets immunity from confusion for a while after being confused, kinda like Ensorcelled Hibernation on monsters.

As a small bonus, if monster confusion followed (b), one would automatically fix the interface issue of targeting an already confused monster with confuse.

I am not sure if I like any of the ideas better than the way confuse works right now.

As for cool idea #2 or #4, what about spells which have no direction, like fridge or summons?

My proposal from this thread and this thread:

You can attack normally, but there is a 50%* chance of attacking a square next to the target. You can read, but there is a 50%* chance of failure (or, reading takes more time). You can zap a wand, but there is a 50%* chance of misfiring. You can cast spells, but miscast chance is greatly increased. Etc. The idea is that you could try to do the stuff you normally do, but confusion would make it (more difficult / sometimes fail).

* or some other value

(And cancellation should definitely remove the status effect.)

remove the "cures confusion" effect of !curing and the duration stacking thing

Just try this without any other changes, perhaps.

chequers wrote:
remove the "cures confusion" effect of !curing and the duration stacking thing
Just try this without any other changes, perhaps.

In that case, please remove/change tarantellas. Spider would be become significantly more annoying otherwise.

Confusion now also has unintuitive messages if you cannot move.

I think that abilities and spells should just receive a huge success penalty and maybe lose a # of power, instead of being blocked out. Meleers already have better chances to survive thanks to AC, there's no reason to make spellcasters suffer even more by robbing them of movement, attack and defense options.

Confusion has been tamed, however. You can't even drown anymore. And it would be worth giving it a different name just because of how different it is from monster confusion: no drowning, no lava, no danger of hitting yourself with a giant club...

Halve STR/DEX/INT and each action takes 1.5x aut. Can't be cured, can't be extended, and if you've been confused, you are "clear-eyed" for 3d8 turns after confusion ends (temporary clarity).

I think game shouldn't warn the player that they are confused. Conf shouldn't be visible at all, or at least until character starts stumbling around. If Conf stays, it shouldn't go away immediately after confusion have expired naturally. Actions shouldn't be prevented, but either always fail or have a high chance of failure.
This will separate confusion from more obvious effects like slow and paralysis and make it more unpredictable and dangerous, especially in late game.

How about a Brogue-like hallucination debuff that disappears with experience earned? For those of you who haven't played Brogue, hallucination in that game makes monsters randomly appear as other monsters.

Pros: definitely unique, targets the player's information as opposed to turns, so isn't like anything else
Cons: could lead to unfair deaths or wasteful playstyle, as a hallucinating character might be forced to treat all monsters on D:4 as if they were ogres, for example

I'm sure this has been proposed actually. What are the reasons Crawl doesn't have something like this?

tankra wrote:How about a Brogue-like hallucination debuff that disappears with experience earned? For those of you who haven't played Brogue, hallucination in that game makes monsters randomly appear as other monsters.

Pros: definitely unique, targets the player's information as opposed to turns, so isn't like anything else
Cons: could lead to unfair deaths or wasteful playstyle, as a hallucinating character might be forced to treat all monsters on D:4 as if they were ogres, for example

I'm sure this has been proposed actually. What are the reasons Crawl doesn't have something like this?

"Targets the player's information" is considered a simple interface screw, which is actively terrible, if the result is "can be bypassed, by carefully tracking things outside of the game" then it should never happen in crawl intentionally. Anything that targets the player, rather than the character is a terrible idea.

How about an effect that randomly generates clouds, similar to qazlal, with a bias toward spaces that are farther from the caster than you? In corridors, this would often prevent retreat.

edit: Actually, it would be best if it only generated clouds in corridors, otherwise the clouds could be useful to the player.

While confused, every other action is a random movement (so player acts, monsters act, character stumbles around, monsters act, control returns to the player). If your movement would carry you into a monster you attack that monster instead. So slow+screwy positioning.

Siegurt wrote:
tankra wrote:How about a Brogue-like hallucination debuff that disappears with experience earned? For those of you who haven't played Brogue, hallucination in that game makes monsters randomly appear as other monsters.

Pros: definitely unique, targets the player's information as opposed to turns, so isn't like anything else
Cons: could lead to unfair deaths or wasteful playstyle, as a hallucinating character might be forced to treat all monsters on D:4 as if they were ogres, for example

I'm sure this has been proposed actually. What are the reasons Crawl doesn't have something like this?

"Targets the player's information" is considered a simple interface screw, which is actively terrible, if the result is "can be bypassed, by carefully tracking things outside of the game" then it should never happen in crawl intentionally. Anything that targets the player, rather than the character is a terrible idea.

Slash'em Extended has a panoply of interface screw traps and effects, and they are all somewhere between really annoying and absolutely miserable to play through.

+1 for removing diagonals.

Remove the ability to cure it, remove the stumbling, and suppress wand/evokable use.

PROS: It's more meaningful, but also no longer an automatic death sentence. Lets the player try to escape by running away, at least, if they can't just melee their way out of it. Also removes what I consider one of the most aggravating parts of the effect, since moving you randomly is either a) paralysis by another name or b) a god-awful interface screw, depending on how dangerous the monsters around you are.

CONS: It's really just a nastier single-target Silence, and therefore much worse for casters (melee dudes only lose the ability to escape). Personally I don't think that's terrible, but it does make it pretty similar to an already-existing effect. Perhaps they could be merged. Also, perhaps a complementary "you can no longer hit anything in melee but can still move around" effect could be introduced (limb-lock?).

EDIT:And "hell fucking no" to Brogue-style hallucination. That's right up there with acid mounds* for "worst-implemented legacy Rogue feature" in that game.

*Imagine old-style jellies. Now imagine that you could trivially but tediously kill old-style jellies with the brilliant strategy of "get naked and punch them to death." Oh and putting on/removing armor doesn't disable you for any period of time, it just takes a few turns to get to full AC. That's acid mounds.

I fail to see how removing diagonal use has any meaningful effect at all. If you encounter Sigmund on D:2 and he confuses you, you can likely escape by simply moving enough in the cardinal directions.

None of the choices seem at all better to me than the status quo effect (essentially: random move direction, not being able to cast). That was not an option in the OP, so I thought I would re-emphasize that I don't see anything wrong with the effect at all, and don't see why it should be changed. If there are different impacts on different types of characters, that's totally fine in a spell.

The problem with current confusion is that it is cured by a common potion. Make it curable by potion of heal wounds or mutation and it will not be trivial

VeryAngryFelid wrote:The problem with current confusion is that it is cured by a common potion. Make it curable by potion of heal wounds or mutation and it will not be trivial

Potion of cancellation imo. Which apparently already does it, so problem solved :)

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player confusion status rework brainstorming thread

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Re: player confusion status rework brainstorming thread

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