AntiGulp is the author of SpliceHack
Hitting a tree with sufficient cold damage makes it explode. The explosion type could be either physical, like a gas spore, or cold itself (which could possibly set off a chain reaction causing other trees to explode).
In variants with percentage intrinsics, intrinsics granted by one’s role need not be binary. For instance, monks tend to gain a lot of elemental resistances by leveling up, so rather than having those be all-or-nothing cutoffs at fixed levels, spread it out so that they gain a decent percentage of the resistance with each level near the original cutoff.
This would complicate the enlightenment display, since now it would have to disclose something like “You have 76% fire resistance: 45% from corpses and 31% from your priest levels”.
New monster “aballin”, from D&D. It is a mobile j-class monster that can appear as a pool of water when not actively moving, and can possibly appear as a water elemental when moving. They can eat organic items like gelatinous cubes, though perhaps not instantly like gelatinous cubes, instead dissolving them some time after engulfing them. They are incapable of climbing stairs, and typically sit dormant imitating a pool until a monster draws near, at which point they become active.
Pet dragons that eat mimic corpses should turn into large piles of gold, consistent with the stated reason that pets tend to mimic things they are thinking about.
In addition to making Gehennom much more open, make the monster generation rate much higher, so that players are encouraged to traverse them quickly and avoid being overwhelmed rather than spending lots of time searching every cranny and becoming bored.
A monster spell which does high area of effect damage, but clearly indicates what that area of effect will be a turn or two before it goes off, so the player can possibly get to safety.
A sentient and always-peaceful monster that you can recruit as a powerful steed, but you need to pay it a large amount of money to ride on it.
If adding a new centaur designed to be a significant threat increase over the existing ones, they should generate with good (if non-magical) armor and a good weapon, which is frequently a lance. If they have a lance, they will use it to joust you.
A system where your god grants you cool abilities, but only if you actively obey randomly generated edicts they put forth. Examples:
If your god orders you to do something that would make you suffer alignment, anger, murder, or Luck penalties, you are not punished for that.
Conceieved as a new race, or an extension of the angelic race, but could also apply to Priests or Infidels.
Make it possible to specify blood splatters in the SpliceHack level parser. Then add it to Orcish Town, the “massacre” and “temple of the gods” themed rooms, and the bottom floor of the Convict quest and possibly graveyards.
Some Medusa buffs:
Add 1-tile-wide corridors linking the rooms that contain the temples together in the Astral Plane, likely with secret doors so that monsters don’t start going through them. These give the player the ability to get around the Riders and go from the wrong temple to the correct one faster, but you run the risk of getting bogged down and surrounded if you use them.
It was pointed out that 1-tile-wide corridors may actually make things much easier on the player and would offer a much safer point to retreat to. Ideally they should be designed without long straight areas so the player can’t easily remove a bunch of monsters with a few well-placed teleportation zaps, but also be widened to avert the problem of being a refuge.
Take a page out of Brogue’s book for streamlining weapon identification: after a certain number of attacks, hits, or kills with a weapon, the weapon’s enchantment (but nothing else about it) becomes identified.
Possibly, it could take less time to identify a weapon the higher the absolute value of the enchantment. It should be pretty easy to tell that a weapon is really bad or good, compared to middling.
Behavior is undefined regarding stacking. E.g. if you drop 9 of your 10 daggers, use the other one a bunch, and come back to pick up the 9, should they still stack together? If not, it would make using stackable weapons very annoying. If you use the one dagger enough to identify it, should the others automatically become identified? Only if you try to stack them together? Not at all?
Weapons no longer stick to your hand when cursed, because that just makes the game less fun and strongly discourages experimenting with random weapons lying around (there are good weapons out there, but the risk of either ending up with a bad welded weapon, having to spend resources to get it unstuck, or spending identification resources on making sure it’s safe) means no one will give them a try. Instead, replace that behavior with a variety of other effects:
None of these are intended to be immediately obvious. While they are like object properties, they don’t necessarily have to be implemented like those: the curse behavior of a weapon could be deterministically computed from its object id hash.
When you approach Mephisto and he is still peaceful, he does not demand tribute to pass like normal. Instead, he offers to buy your soul in exchange for powerful assistance on your quest to get the Amulet. If you agree, you are given amazing combat advantages (huge intrinsic damage boost, huge intrinsic AC boost, etc).
One of two bad things can happen as a result:
Alternatively he might appear on Astral, but that could be hard to explain flavor-wise. Or just create some test for if the player is in a sufficiently dire condition, and when they are he claims the player’s soul.
If you already have the Amulet the first time you meet Mephisto, he may not offer a bargain at all.
Revamp Gehennom by making its main branch substantially shorter, a “hub” branch containing stairs or portals to a bunch of sub-branches containing demon lords’ lairs. Most of the lairs are optional, but at least some of them are required in order to enter the Sanctum. Each demon lord that you don’t kill, however, incurs a unique, harsh effect or debuff on you once you have the Amulet. Suggested ones include:
A tree hit by a fire ray or explosion should instantly incinerate, provided it’s not marked non-diggable (petrified). Likewise, a tree hit by a disintegration blast should disintegrate.
Add a new game mode in which everything goes wrong for everyone. Some examples: wands explode 50% of the time when used, all thrown/fired weapons can fly off randomly as if cursed, critical misses happen a lot, etc.
All monk techniques should have shorter timeouts, but if a technique is used in chained blitz, it has a one-off very long timeout.
New artifact, The Dwarf Bread, or possibly, The Battle Bread of B’hrian Bloodaxe. It is a cram ration, and if the object materials patch is present it is made of stone. It cannot be eaten; if you try you get a YAFM about how you really aren’t that hungry. Its main effect is that while carried with no other apparent food available, your nutrition will not decrease if it is at or below the threshold of going from Hungry to Weak.
You are considered to “have food available” if:
Possibly, it acts as a club when wielded, though being a cram ration it can’t be enchanted.
Kicking a dragon while you are riding it as a steed makes it use its breath weapon (if it is currently able to, with its cooldown over). This is still subject to possible tameness penalties and other side effects of kicking a steed. It’s not defined whether the player should control the direction it breathes in or whether it will select a target itself.
Teleport vortex, a monster which moves around the level sucking up items into its inventory; items in its inventory are periodically teleported randomly around the level. If it engulfs the hero, it will do the same.
Remove covetous warping entirely. However, a change like this would need to take into account that it makes the vast majority of boss fights a lot easier and more boring in that they would tend to consist just of the hero and boss standing next to each other hitting each other until the boss dies, so it would need to come with some improvements to boss fights, such as more interesting tactical AI where they will disengage momentarily and multiple forms (i.e. you “kill” it and then it becomes stronger before finally being defeated).
Crossbows deal more damage than bows, but the multishot bonus is lower because they are slower to reload.
Note a similar implementation in dNetHack, where crossbows always only shoot one bolt but the multishot amount multiplies the damage of that bolt.
If you escape the Black Market by branchporting, One-eyed Sam will pursue you on the ascension run.
Make magic cancellation not work with a fixed rate versus all types of attacks it works on throughout the entire game. Instead, scale a monster’s ability to penetrate your magic cancellation based on its level, base level, maximum HP, or hit dice.
Hit dice and base level are nice if it’s desirable for all monsters of the same species to have the same MC penetration, but hit dice and maximum HP are a little weird since they aren’t meant as offensive stats. Maximum HP and actual monster level are nice because they can be discovered with a stethoscope.
Giants can rip doors off their hinges, by picking them up, to use them as weapons. They do a lot of damage, and can only actually be wielded by giants. Possibly, kicking a door with excessive strength (and/or being a giant) not only breaks it off the hinges, but sends it flying to hit anything unlucky enough to be in its path.
There isn’t really an obvious object class for a ‘door’ object to be in, though WEAPON_CLASS is probably the most straightforward.
Possibly also allow this with sinks or trees. All of these heavy improvised weapons should probably use club skill.
If you walk over a banana while fumbling, you slip on it, making a lot of noise and destroying the banana. (This won’t happen if the banana is hidden under some other object on the square though).
Spring trap, like the reverse of a trapdoor: stepping on it bounces you up through the ceiling into a higher level, or alternatively just makes you crack your head on the ceiling.
Fog horn, a magical tool that when played surrounds the user with clouds and possibly fog clouds (the monster). It would be best if some type of non-poison-gas cloud were implemented first; it is probably a bad idea to actually change the terrain around the user into cloud.
Ballistae, a very large and heavy weapon that takes time to set up and prime, but can be used to launch javelins to deal a large amount of damage. Giants can wield them like crossbows. May appear as defenses in special levels like Fort Ludios and the Castle.
Incorporeal monsters like ghosts and shades are only hit with blessed objects, artifacts, magical attacks, etc 50% of the time they would have otherwise. The only items that are guaranteed to hit (assuming you make the to-hit roll) are those made of either silver or bone.
Crude (orcish) items should never generate with valuable metals (gold, silver, platinum, mithril) as their material.
You can play a Vow of Poverty Monk, from D&D. This gives you insanely good bonuses and intrinsics, but you are prevented from having any worldly possessions on your journey (which is pretty much all items).
Silver golem, which naturally causes silver damage to silver haters, and drops silver items on death. Should be pretty rare to avoid giving the player their pick of silver items.
Use a miniature cellular automaton to determine which spaces in a swamp room will become water, rather than using a fixed checkerboard. This may not work well for tiny rooms, so enforce a minimum size constraint on what can become a swamp room if necessary.
Enchanted boomerangs (or magic boomerangs, if implemented) can gather items from the floor and return them to you.
Premonition system: under various conditions (crystal balls, clairvoyance, dreaming while you sleep, the Oracle) you can receive a premonition of something that will appear later in your game (this could be almost anything: a monster, object, dungeon feature, special room, etc) which then has a very high chance of generating subsequently.
Boulders tear through spider webs (whether from a rolling boulder trap, thrown by a giant, or pushed by the hero). For extra realism, the web slows its momentum.
Amulet of reincarnation: when you die, it prevents your game from ending, but it permanently polymorphs you into a different form.
Spells can be “bound” together so that they can be cast simultaneously.
For most calculations that involve the depth of the Sanctum (score, level difficulty with the Amulet) use a constant 50 in place of the Sanctum depth.
Subspace branch, which has many entrances and exits to various parts of the dungeon for quick traversal. However, it’s populated with nasty monsters.
Shepherds’ crooks: a wooden multi-purpose weapon-tool.
