That sort of thing could probably be accomplished easier by prompt or combat settings that updated you on the status of party members in the room with you, I'd think. "Slowing down combat" or whatnot is great for reaction time, but apart from being pretty crappy in terms of fun (Great, now I have to wait for 5 seconds between swinging so I'll be here for 30 minutes) it's also not terrifically effective for keeping you up-to-date on your party's status.

Similiarly though, typing "party list" every round is useless. An updating status box though would be ideal if it could list a number of things going on at once in short hand. For instance,
  • Relative Health (same status indicators we currently use in party list),
  • Negative Status Effects (P for poison, B for Bleeding, KO for uncon, etc),
  • Relative Damage Being Sustained Per Round (colors on names would probably be fine here. White for no damage being sustained, bold cyan for little, cyan for some, green, magenta, blue, and red for massive damage per round),
  • Damage inflicting (Again colors might be useful here. The party should probably be graded amongst itself though, rather than the damage level being inflicted being shown)
among others I'm sure I haven't thought of.

I don't know how parties are concepted, but this group-combat option could be concepted as simple observable phenomena (Look, Drey's turning green. He must be poisoned.), calling out to one another (Luna yells, "It keeps retreating from my attacks, but is paying no attention to Sabu's!"), or magical means.
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