Proposal: simplify needles

[Moanerette]

Unless I'm missing something, needles of paralysis and sleeping are functionally very similar, if not identical. This seems to me unnecessary duplication and inventory faff. With confusion, poison and curare I currently have five inventory slots occupied by needles.

The proposal is to rationalise needles into three types - poison, curare and needles of debilitation. The latter would fold confusion, paralysis and sleeping into one type of needle that, if it takes effect, would randomly apply one of these statuses. Alternatively, remove the last three and just leave poison and curare. Confusion and paralysis are available as both spells and wands, and I'm still uncertain as to how sleeping differs from paralysis (shorter duration?).

[le_nerd]

Paralysis is un-interruptible, much much much stronger than sleep.

And needles allow no-magic characters to stab. Even unique Pandemonium Lords. So its good to have them in. The game would benefit from just keeping one of the debilitating types, though. Why not just have paralysis? Would be a buff, but needle stabbing is already very strong and focused on worshipping two gods.

[tasonir]

I think limiting it to poison, curare, and paralysis would work. Balancing the supply of paralysis is tricky but that is a solvable problem - perhaps a bit more than currently but don't give it the weighting of the previous three types.

[watertreatmentRL]

Currently hellcrawl has a version of ranged reform that is quite good. In it, there are no blowguns (which is excellent) and three kinds of darts (which are thrown): Poison, curare, and frenzy.

The OP is correct to say that sleeping and paralysis are remarkably similar, but the OP overrates the difference between a confused monster and a paralyzed one, in my opinion. While the mechanics of needles and hexes are different -- one does a check based on throwing skill and monster HD, perhaps among other factors I don't know offhand, and the other checks MR -- the effects are often identical and that difference is fairly arcane. I don't think you can justify the existence of both wands and needles of paralysis and similarly with confusion, if I haven't missed any recent removals of those wands.

The hellcrawl approach, originally a contribution of a dcss dev in fact, goes even further than the OP in reducing inventory clutter and addressing the redundancy issue, while eliminating the weird situation where blowguns use throwing skill in spite of not being something you throw, the brand weapon thing, and other annoyances of blowguns. It would be well worthwhile to bring this reform into dcss.

[Airwolf]

Yeah, paralysis is crazy strong, and the ultimate PanHellLord strategy imy opinion. I'd suggest poison, curare, and confusion (although frenzy is very interesting) as a bit of a nerf, and sleeping is more specialized to stealthy characters.

I like the idea of removing blowguns.

[Quazifuji]

I imagine part of the confusion between paralysis and sleep comes from the fact that paralysis is, like sleep, represented by several Z's in tiles, despite being a very different effect. It would be nice to change that.

[Shard1697]

I still think that distraction+unaware/confusion should be shown by white/yellow ???'s, and sleep/paralysis should be shown by white/yellow zzz's, respectively

[Quazifuji]

I still think that distraction+unaware/confusion should be shown by white/yellow ???'s, and sleep/paralysis should be shown by white/yellow zzz's, respectively

That would be an improvement, but I think new symbols entirely would be better.