For several characters in a row now I’ve run into sleep spam - whether spamming in a room before combat, or fleeing after taking a few hits and spamming one room away. Sometimes sleep fails and I get a free pk, other times it lands and I die horribly. Is there a way to make this a less binary outcome (while saves have helped it remains binary)? Seems like fighting a necro or anti paladin intent on sleep spamming is like Russian roulette and not much fun.

Being an uncabal'd a-p player put me on the receiving end of sleep quite frequently too. Basically, assuming the victim is prepared (not with dam redux but with getaway items), sleep is almost useless 1v1 if you don't fight them in an area with a closable door.

If you think they're looking for you, right before you pop into any area that has a door (if it's a necro you mostly only need to worry about locked doors), scan into it first, and then instead of just going into it, do for example: "e;where;w" to be sure you're not about to be summoned.

As far as when you get slept, if you're not behind a closed door or Centurions, you should survive 9/10 times, if it's an A-P, and sleep ends, don't stand but rest;quaff teleportation. You have to be careful you're not stacking commands at the same instance you're being vaulted though or you'll get bashed down.

First move should be flee;quaff teleportation otherwise (and fleeing into a regular wall is why you die the 1/10 times)

It's a hassle but to survive after that point you need in your inventory and not in a container:

Potions:
cure blindness (I forget if oil of sight works well on hero blind, so carry a couple)
2 teleports (in case your first teleport is crap)

Pills:
Cure disease, cure poison, carry a few, especially if you're at hero

Money or barters, never hurts to be able to pay a healer if you can find one (if your memory is good you can usually tell where you are after teleing blind and just walk right up to one, and good luck curing level 51 diseases with ####ing berries). Vault and 2 rounds of melee with no weapons is also pretty painful, so the chances that you will need a healer to survive the bleed are decent. Carry some heal preps if you think you need it.

That should pretty much do it.

Also if they're a low int A-P, svs spell go a long long way. If they're a necro, forget about your svs.

Sleep is really rough. Even doing all I said successfully, you can't survive them all, but you can make it much riskier for the sleeper than for you, since they're usually somewhat squishy.

Bonus: you can try attacking things to wake you if you get slept, it usually takes a while to spell someone up, and there's also an item sold in a city that produces the same effect

edited out a mostly bad piece of advice

with "by design" answer.

There are so many counters to this though.

Excluding things like dash, you have preps that wake you, mobs that will track and wake you (I've seen this done by a character repeatedly), preps that will keep you alive after a teleport, preps to cure blind and then use other preps etc.

Plus if someone fails the sleep attempt you can often kill them.

If someone is spamming, and you think they are prepped, you can walk away and make them waste preps so they prep less in future.

Also, you know you get sleep resistance if they fail the first attempt? It's pretty effective.

Can't disagree with the sentiment but the only idea I can think of is to have the duration of sleep variable based on the save success. This would mean it lands more often (when it would have failed outright) but only last a tick or two vs mid success 4-5 ticks vs critical fail being 7-8 ticks.

And then since we love edges so much, introduce one for necros to sense how affective it afflicted a victim.