Make paralysis heavy slow?

[wobbly]

The idea is to weaken paralysis so you can weaken FA (which is currently boring in my opinion). Slowing rather then paralysing would stop the chain paralysis effect as at speed 1 for instance a standard speed monster like a ghoul or illusionist can only ever get 10 moves against you.

More generally I'm interested in weakening status effects so they can be used more often. Why for instance is confusion a full spell lock out? With a high enough fail rate it would still be dangerous and restrict you to low level spells, for instance you could use confusion effects in the Morgoth fight to lock-down heal on a priest without locking out everything (confusion resist/save would have to be weakened too).

[Voovus]

Before this post goes totally off the radar (or ESP, if you prefer)...

I don't like any instadeath mechanics, and this includes (and is possibly topped by) the current paralysis effect. I think Blindness, Hallucination and Slowness work very well, Confusion less so as you're practically forced to cure it or teleport out, while "You don't have Free Action. You die." isn't fun.

Maybe paralysis should only make @ unable to move instead? So, thematically, only @'s legs get paralysed.

[Derakon]

I think there's room to add more status ailments that aren't "this has to be resisted or cured immediately"-levels of bad. An effect that prevents movement sounds like a good idea to me. I tried to think of one that would prevent attacking while also covering ranged/spell/device attacks but I guess that stunning has that pretty well-covered.

I'd have the movement-lock thing be separate from normal paralysis though. Paralysis IMO needs to be a really bad effect, to help sell the fact that the dungeon is a dangerous place where unprepared people will easily die. I agree that the current version is too deadly, though, if for no other reason than that it becomes one of those things where newbies die a few times before they figure out they need to have Free Action before fighting certain monsters.

I'd be down for a version that was "merely" -50 speed. I think that hits the sweet spot of "against shallow monsters you'll probably survive; against deep monsters you probably won't." And that feels like the appropriate level of lethality that we should be shooting for. IMO we don't want FA to be perceived as optional.

[Sky]

Or just make it so that you cannot be re-paralized while you are paralized.

[debo]

IMO we don't want FA to be perceived as optional.

I like how we don't want players to be able to act freely on whether they take free action.