The Tavern

Have a strange idea on new monster spell, and one of the new effects caused by Chei/Pakellas punishment

Roguelikes is usually turn based. In anytime, you can safely go away from a keyboard. But not when you afflicted with that debuff. This debuff restricts your turns with a 2-second timer. If you won't do any action during these 2 seconds - your turn automatically will be skipped. So you would have to act really quickly, or you'll skip a lot of turns. Debuff duration would vary on the source. ~20-110 turns.

I don't think we'd want to go with an effect that inflicts extra punishment on (1) players with slow network connections and (2) the disabled.

I enjoy the fact that crawl allows me to play the game at my leisure. I thoroughly hope that no enforced time pressure of any kind is ever added to the game.

I do wonder about "simulating" the effects of such a spell in a turn-based way. I'm imagining an effect that causes your speed to randomly slow by large amounts for short periods of time - in effect, it would make all monsters move and act rather like sixfirhies. It would be a kinder, gentler version of paralysis, basically: you periodically don't get to act for a couple turns, but you don't have to deal with zero EV/stabbing damage. Obviously this would be a short-duration spell or wrath effect.

@ion_frigate: this is essentially the slow spell, although with a stronger than 50% effect. It certainly could be added, but if you're going to do that, I'd suggest to make it more distinct that you limit it to one turn. You get hit with "Mega Slow" and now your next turn will randomly take between 200% and 400% time.

We'd probably want to set a minimum to the next action's time, otherwise people would do the fastest action possible (removing your weapon without switching to another weapon is 3 auts) to avoid suffering the penalty. So if the action's time is less than 10 auts, use 10 auts anyways, and if it's over 10 auts, use the actual time. Call it "time stop" or something.