Movement in Crawl is better conceived as a kind of guarded walking than outright sprinting. It takes the same speed whether you're exploring or escaping or sneaking. You can dodge and block attacks at the same time. It does not give you the Breath or Exh status.
I don't know how roadrunner-like movement can play out well in a non-racing videogame (because just look at Resident Evil) and I believe Crawl's mechanics are best geared for free movement and positioning.
This movement also nerfs charging (and buffs gnolls with polearms in corridors) and gives you occasional Cheisteps when autoexploring and tabbing, which is kind-of the opposite of kiting. In punishing most movement it rewards non-kiting ranged, so bows/etc remain powerful.
VeryAngryFelid wrote:When you try to retreat from adjacent monster, you are attacked immediately, after that you keep distance between you and monster.
I can't help but think that this is better implemented directly, if to eliminate timing attacks to kite slower monsters who have the same range as you. Here are some ideas in increasing order of complexity:
A. If you melee a monster within its melee range and move out of its melee range before the monster has a chance to do something, then the monster gets an opportunity to melee you as you're leaving, if that's what it would have chosen to do had you not moved away, and the delay of this attack is added to the monster's energy (if that's how monster turns work) so that a gap usually opens up when disengaging from Speed 10 monsters.
B. Same as above but extended to all instances of the player attempting to inflict damage or statuses to monsters, and extend from melee retribution to anything else the monster can do to directly inflict damage/statuses, so you can't even kite yaktaurs with Confuse while hasted (because if you fail to confuse a yaktaur, and move away, then it will shoot you before you can move).
C. All player movement is treated with the same mechanics as Blurry Vision. Doesn't really solve much; it is still possible to kite like this if you're fast enough e.g. hasted Spriggan.
All of these come with quirks and indeterminate cases that would have to be ironed out (what if the retribution tramples you, or blinks you, or blinks the monster to where you are or want to be?) and I don't even know if it would help much, so feel free to spin any of these off into another thread.
dynast wrote: while experienced players have to backtrack mentally the way they are going in case they need to retreat
that's not a big problem; the game could just show your footprints after manual moves, as after autoexplore.
whoa, that's a big post I just wrote!