Fear
Version 0.33: This article is up to date for the latest stable release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
Fear is a status effect which causes monsters to uncontrollably flee, and players unable to get closer to the fear-inflicting monster.
Effect
On Players
Players affected by fear are unable to move towards the caster of fear. In addition, it causes melee attacks against the caster to have a 33% chance of failing ("flinching away in fear").
Players with clarity or that are berserk are immune to fear.
On Monsters
Fear makes monsters unwilling to attack, and causes them to run away. Monsters will still be able to use abilities tagged with the escape flag, such as Blink.
Monsters will lose the fear status under the following conditions:
- They are hit by an attack.
- They are unable to move away from you for more than 1 turn ("Cornered, <monster> turns to fight!").
- The duration runs out.
The following monsters are immune to fear:
- Undead, nonliving, and plant holiness monsters.
- Monsters that are berserk or under frenzy
Sources
- The Cause Fear spell.
- A scroll of fear casts Cause Fear at maximum power.
- Werewolf Form howling.
History
- Prior to 0.33, berserking players were not immune to fear.
- Prior to 0.30, fleeing monsters would not recklessly run into harmful clouds.
- Prior to 0.28, the spell couldn't affect demonic and holy monsters.
- Prior to 0.27, monsters could use a scroll of blinking or scroll of teleport while under fear. Also, fleeing monsters would use "emergency" flag spells rather than "escape" flag ones. This caused black bears and polar bears to be practically immune to fear; they would immediately berserk when inflicted with fear, which ended the fear.
- Prior to 0.13, Cause Fear on players only penalized moving toward the caster. Attacks against the caster were unaffected.
