Monday, 7th February 2011, 21:04 by evilmike
I'm not a big fan of paralysis. The fact that it is often (way to suddenly) fatal is bad, but what I mainly dislike about it is that it's unfun and uninteresting tactically. What I'm about to write here isn't specifically a 0.8 issue but this is the best place to post it.
To show why paralysis is flawed, one only needs to look through crawl's various means of immobilizing you or restricting your movement:
Hold (from throwing nets): interesting effect in that you can struggle free, act in a limited way, etc.
Mesmerize: Again, you can act but movement is restricted, with the interesting addition that the effect is broken by killing the source.
Slow: A bad thing to have (though not as bad in 0.8), can get you killed but there are ways of dealing with it
Confuse: Most actions are blocked, but you can cure it with potions.
Sleep: You lose all control, but wake up easily. This gives you a chance to react and not be put to sleep again, and isn't a death sentence.
Petrify (not a monster spell, but could be interesting as one): Slows before paralyzing, gives damage resistance while paralyzed - less deadly than para but more importantly gives a reaction time before the bad part kicks in.
All of these are interesting effects because you can adapt to them. Of course, it is always better for you to not get hit in the first place, but the point is that if you do get hit, there is something you can do about it. This is one of the best features of crawl - outside of the very early game, there is usually some sort of tactical move you can do in a bad situation. Another important thing to note is that none of these effects remove control, except for sleep (in very short durations only) and confuse (on mummies and liches, which are special cases).
Paralysis on the other hand doesn't have nearly as much choice involved. You basically have two options: (a) load up on MR or put on stasis to avoid the effect entirely, or (b) get hit with it and hope you don't die. I think both of these are bad.
The problem with (a) is that it is that the player's goal is avoiding paralysis rather than coping with it or managing it. I can't think of any other effects in crawl that are like this - usually you'll want to avoid them, but there's always something you can do as a backup plan. (As a side note: this tactic of avoiding paralysis is actually pretty effective, - there are a few foils (zot traps, giant eyeballs, wasps if you don't have rpois) but in general you can avoid dying to paralysis if you prepare for it. In other words, I'm not arguing here that paralysis is too deadly, although it could very well be).
The problem with (b) is that all you can really do is hope. You completely lose control of your character and are subjected entirely to the whims of the rng. You can't even see what's going on, really. The issue here is part tactical, but it is also very much psychological. Players (including myself) do not like being taken out of the game like this. Even being able to just see yourself immobilized there while enemies move and attack you would be an improvement (right now you just get paralyzed and are hit with message spam). Once you get paralyzed, it's a crapshoot. Will it be a long duration or a short one? Will you survive? And so on.
Regarding this I can think of three improvements to paralysis: the first would be letting the player see what's happening. This wouldn't even begin to address the major issues with the effect, but it at least would remove part of the psychological "oops, you're dead now" sting that it has.
The second improvement would be a shorter duration that has very little (or even no) random variation. The reasoning here is that if you know paralysis always lasts for (say) three turns, you are able to adapt to the effect itself. You can put yourself in a position where you believe you can survive that duration, and will hopefully be able to manage it without having to load up on MR like people do now.
The third improvement would be to prevent chain paralysis entirely by giving the player immunity for one turn after coming out of it. This one is more trivial (gameplay-wise) than the other two suggestions I have, and probably less controversial, but it would make a big difference.
What I'm suggesting would make paralysis less deadly, but the point is just to make it interesting. Even with the suggestions I've made it's a flawed concept - the best would be to just replace all instances of it with more interesting status effects (the game already has a bunch of them, and there are plenty of ideas for more).
