ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Is there a reason why it's not allowed at present? It currently has two effects:

- makes leaving victorious encounters a nuisance because you have to wait several turns for any saturations to wear off
- makes escaping from difficult encounters much harder because the primary escape means involve triggering saturations (which are some abstract concept that otherwise have very little effect on the player)

If it's to stop the oddness of escaping whilst pinned or some other effects then let it be specific to those effects. A blanket ban on all trivial effects only serves to annoy in trivial circumstances, or prove lethal for the wrong reasons in difficult circumstances.

Another way to do it would be to not allow fleeing to the worldmap with any enemies in sight (or maybe nearby) at all. This would not address your first point at all. It would, however, make trivial detrimental effects not affect your escape to the worldmap nearly as often, as it would be blocked by mobs.

I rather like the "line of sight" limitation, as it would allow a charcter with LOS-obscuring talents to use them to escape, which is kind of cool. Fleeing an encounter shouldn't remove it from the worldmap though, but only keep it from moving for a turn. And if, on the worldmap, there are no walkable squares next to you that aren't also next to the enemy, the stairs should only appear once you've killed the first one ("breaking through their lines").

Example on not having stairs at first:
M=mountains
.=walkale
@=player
O=orc patrol

As has been said elsewhere, one should always have an escape route in roguelikes. If a new player goes straight into a high level dungeon and realises there are several level 30 monsters in view then he should have the option GTFO.

I was mostly thinking about encounters with that one. And only ones that are actively trying to kill you. The early ones in the west are harmless enough, and in dungeons this wouldn't apply, of course. Except for the ones where there is no escape already, one of which potentially gets you at level 1

I"d be all for this. One thing you'd need to figure out how to handle is what these negative effects do on the world map. I think the easiest and fairest way, if not a little strange, is to simply not have effects count down on the world map (this would probably also mean forbidding resting/health recovery). Otherwise, you might flee to the world map, and only then realize that the Insidious Poison effect is going to kill you before you can make it to another area and use a heal/wild infusion.

I certainly wouldn't like the "no fleeing to world map if in enemy LOS" option. I'm still just learning the game, and even with Adventure mode's extra lives, I'd be strongly discouraged from exploring any new zones. It would also make the weird pathing/LOS AI that much more exploitable (or rather, increase the need for the player to exploit it).

Could just remove all negative statuses on reaching the world map. The idea is that you escapd whatever conflict you were in and your character managed to find a way to restore themselves.

Only statuses that should stop travel to world map: Pin, Stun, Confuse, Daze, Freeze.

At the very least, could runic / infusion saturation not prevent you from escaping to the worldmap? It kind of shocked me the first time I saw it happen.