The Tavern

Currently if you summon something (with a rod of shadows for example) and your summon is then confused, it isn't immediately obvious unless you either notice the creatures drunken stagger or manually inspect it where it causally shows something like "(lightly wounded, confused, friendly, summoned)". Friendly summons should show a ? or ! when feared or confused (I don't remember if it shows petrify or other effects) especially considering a confused summon is almost as dangerous as a confused enemy.

Anecdotally, I did lose a promising character to getting mauled by my iron troll, summoned by rod of shadows and then confused by . . . Mennas or some jerk. It took two sequential turns of mauling to die, which makes it really galling -- it would have been easy to avoid if I had noticed what was happening, and not noticing was purely my own fault.

Of course, that was console.

Yeah; however, monster confusion is clearly indicated in console, too.

Actually, this is an issue in console too, unless you're referring to the monster list, because the background colour for friendlies overrides the one for confusion. Of course, fixing it in console would be harder since there's no equivalent of showing both icons. I guess we console players are more used to using `x` anyway so it's not as big a deal.

No, I meant enemy confusion is clearly indicated. Don't they flash the ? glyph over the monster glyph?

I'd have friendlies in an altered state of mind flash the confused color and glyph over the friendly color and glyph. Yeah, flashing things are annoying, but "my powerful buddy is not doing what I expect" is both uncommon and important.

Confused monsters don't flash a question mark in console and haven't ever done so in the years I've played crawl (at least not with the default settings)

I would consider this an accepable solution for console players for confused allies, since it is both uncommon and important, but only if you could turn it off.

Huh. Why is my brain telling me lies? Sigh, I should really go check before I post