I feel like this thread's gotten hard to follow, so I'm going to attempt to summarize my understanding of the approaches to dealing with luring that having been proposed. If I'm right, this post will be a reference for people who have gotten kind of lost, and maybe help focus discussion. If I'm wrong, someone can correct me and then I can learn from it.
It seems to me solutions to deal with luring fall into a number of main categories:
- Make monsters do bad things while following you. Generally, this consists of either making monsters faster (or giving them a swiftness-type ability) so that they damage you while following you, or making them make lots of noise while following you.
- Explicitly punish luring through something other than monster traits/behavior, e.g. wake or spawn monsters when a monster is chasing the player.
- Increase reward for low turn count/punishment for high turncount in order to indirectly discourage luring.
- Change monsters AI to make luring impractical/impossible (e.g. limit how far monsters will follow you, possibly including monsters setting up ambushes). Giving all monsters a swiftness ability they use while chasing can also somewhat fall into this category, since it limits how far monsters will chase you too, although not through AI means.
Personally, I vastly, vastly prefer something from categories 1 or 4. Unless I'm misunderstanding category 2, it would be one of the most spoilery mechanics in all of Crawl. Category 3 has the potential to be spoilery as well, but more importantly, I like Crawl's current state where turncount is mostly a matter of score and rarely relevant to winning. I also think enforcing faster turncounts will cause some undesirable balance problems, and affect resting much more than it would affect luring.
I think option 4 could be very effective, but is difficult to do well. As others have pointed out, simple solutions (e.g. giving monsters a "leash" to limit how far they'll follow you) are often very abusable, and complex solutions are... well, complex.
So personally, I'm in favor of category 1.
My personal favorite solutions I've seen are either making monsters continue to shout occasionally while chasing the player, and/or giving all monsters a swiftness ability they use when chasing the player for long enough (for walking monsters, this could easily be flavored as sprinting, and I'm sure we could come up with a more generic flavor text representing a monster exerting itself for a burst of speed followed by slowness for other monsters). I don't know if these ideas will solve the problem (and they certainly do nothing to help stair dancing), but I think they'd help make luring feel a bit less safe. They also have two other very nice benefits, in my opinion. First, they don't punish small amounts of tactical repositioning at all, only longer chases. Second, I think both would be very intuitive and easy to convey to an unspoiled player through text, which I think is something extremely important that hasn't been discussed enough in this thread. It could also be possible to combine the two mechanics if both helped but neither one on its own punished luring enough.
I'd be very interested in an experimental branch with either or both of these mechanics to see how they affect things.