TheMeInTeam wrote:From a lore perspective, what "stasis" constitutes is not clearly defined. They have "strong ties to the Earth", and that's about all we get.
Lore has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. Trying to unpack Crawl design through assessing its lore will lead you down nonsensical paths -- most Crawl lore was written as afterthought flavour text.
Formicid was explicitly written as a challenge species. The species conduct was intended to block player access to movedelay-enhancing and repositioning effects.
The idea was to force interesting play by limiting players' ability to press 'undo' (with translocations, or by walking away) after making poor engagement decisions. Linking this to the preexisting stasis effect was a neat way to accomplish this, but pubby's idea of what effects should have been blocked for the species differed somewhat from the effects that were already blocked by stasis.
The weirdness WRT move effects and Fo mostly comes from DCSS devteam members doing things later, for their own reasons, that rubbed against the species design intent.
edit: Here's a link to the mantis ticket that resulted in swiftness being enabled on Fo:
https://crawl.develz.org/mantis/view.php?id=7786 , wherein pubby explicitly called enabling (old-)Swiftness on Fo 'bad design'. (For what it's worth, I strongly agree with pubby and dpeg's arguments there, and I think that the viewpoint put forth by evilmike rather missed the point of the species.)
Regarding duvessa's question about other movedelay effects on Fo:
In my opinion, chei/flash freeze/ponderous/shallow water are okay, under the interpretation that adding challenge to a challenge species is not a bad thing.
Form spells in current versions of DCSS should be fine, given that forms don't currently
decrease movedelay. Increasing movedelay is okay, as above.
Swiftness and running are various degrees of not-okay, under the interpretation that the species was intended to meaningfully limit player ability to disengage.
(Stairdancing is probably also not-okay! I think it's likely that if pubby had the practical choice to disable stairdancing at the time, they would have considered it; but blocking stairdancing would have been a can of worms that involved significant work beyond the scope of the species.)
All of this is, of course, irrelevant. The DCSS devs took the reins on Fo after it was pulled into trunk. Fo's current state reflects the whims of previously-active devs - moreso than original design intent, or balance considerations.