Change how drowning attacks work, by making them pull you into a water square that is adjacent to both you and the attacker, and then sticking to you so you can’t move out of the water. This requires that the hero be allowed to survive (with a suffocation timer) underwater for several turns without magical breathing. If there are no mutually adjacent water squares, the attacker can’t use their drowning attack (it would either do nothing or you’d still be held but not get pulled anywhere). Unlike regular drowning, this wets your items each turn.

Attempts to analyze good instadeaths versus bad instadeaths (loosely defined as ones that are instant hard-to-avoid deaths that aren’t really similar to running out of HP):

• Poison, digestion, lava, death magic, and drawbridge instadeaths can easily be converted into HP damage of max(damage dice roll, substantial % of your max HP).
• Drowning and choking would be well-suited to a breath system, where it becomes a delayed instadeath. Especially so if you can stop the clock by putting on an amulet of magical breathing or praying.
• Intelligence drain and level drain generally can’t happen without the player being given ample time to escape, so they are fine.
• Starvation could be changed to HP loss, but you usually just die from side effects of fainting anyway.
• Instadeaths that almost always have to be intentionally caused by the player (self-genocide, divine wrath etc) are generally fine as-is.
• Instakilling artifacts are problematic, because there is currently no recourse except for the amulet of life saving.
• Eating or digesting the Riders should not instakill without warning, because it is now unexpectedly a bad idea to eat a reviving corpse, whereas it had been a good idea in the rest of the game.
• Good instadeaths generally use unusual resources to fix, or hit the player’s reserves in an unexpected way, and allow the player a chance to get out or stop it before dying.

Implement a strangulation or “can’t breathe” timer, which unifies strangulation, suffocation, food choking, rope golem choking, and drowning, and also provides a clean way for monsters to have a suffocation attack.

• This means that choking over food is no longer instantaneous. Each turn while choking over food, you have a 20% chance of vomiting and lose 1000 nutrition. At certain points while the strangulation timer is getting closer to 0, you take one point of Con damage.
• Drowning monsters now grab and pull you underwater in 1 turn, but you have until the timer runs out to kill the monster or escape in some other way. Lifesaving while drowning does not give you a free escape, but resets the drowning timer.
• Rope golems are now more dangerous, since they represent a delayed instadeath.