Artifact dart Safety Pin. It has no special benefits if used as a dart, but instead has a passive carry effect of protecting all your scrolls in open inventory from burning or wetting.

New spell “seek item”, mid to high level divination. When cast, you are prompted to name an object type (or use the wish prompt to allow more details to be specified - i.e. a +5 broadsword as opposed to any broadsword). Then the entire dungeon is searched for matching items and tells you where they are found, probably just telling you the level for objects not on the current level and showing you the locations of objects a la object detection if they are on the current level.

Wands of wishing always start at 0:1, but now uses the standard recharge and explosion odds of normal wands: it can be recharged multiple times with an increasing chance of exploding, rather than allowing only one recharge and always exploding on the second recharge. Recharging a wand of wishing only gives it 1 charge back, regardless of whether blessed or uncursed charging was used.

The practical effect is that it becomes an interesting choice for the player whether they should wrest the wand when it is x:0 (which gives 1 more wish guaranteed, but that’s it) or risk recharging the wand (with its standard increasing chance of exploding, so it could either give no more wishes at all or give 1 plus the same choice of whether to recharge again.)

Restructure Gehennom to be very short, containing the Valley, the three Wizard’s Tower floors, and a “nexus” floor at the bottom, containing the vibrating square and four magic portals, each leading to a randomly selected demon lair.

You can only enter each lair once: you must decide whether to attempt defeating the demon lord or not before leaving. The exit portal won’t work if invocation items are left behind. The demon lords are beefed up from vanilla, and are not bribeable since they’re not guarding access to the stairs to extort passage.

As incentive for defeating the demon lords, they apply debuffs on the ascension run, described in #3396.

Make the Plane of Fire more interesting by:

• Getting rid of the fire traps (which mostly serve to provide lots of message spam).
• Making the entire plane constantly deal damage if you aren’t extrinsically immune to fire, more if you lack both extrinsic and intrinsic resistance. Being close to or over lava hurts you even more, and can deal damage even if you are immune or “like fire”, possibly based on how many of the 9 squares immediately are you are lava.
• Lava can erupt randomly from lava, which does major damage for levitating over it.
• Ensure the portal cannot spawn right next to the arrival location.

Make untrapping containers an occupation: always takes 5 turns, you either find a trap or you don’t, and you can’t try again on that container. This avoids having to type out #untrap multiple times for no apparent results.

This could also extend to untrap attempts on doors.

When monsters levelport, they leave behind a magic portal which lasts one or a few turns, which you can use to follow them, to emulate how monsters can follow you when you levelport.

In order to penalize situations where the hero is partly or mostly surrounded without implemeting a complex flanking system: Every monster attack that incurs damage reduction due to subzero AC makes your effective AC worse by the amount of reduced damage for the duration of that turn. This means that a crowd of monsters hitting you all at once will whittle down your defense and do some damage rather than damage reduction being in full force for each individual attack.

Replace the current Basic-to-Expert skill system with a skill tree. Each role is given affinities for skills in this tree, which represent how easy it is to for them to enhance that skill. The baseline value for an affinity is 100. The lower an affinity number, the better it is for that role, because enhancing a skill costs (some base cost * affinity / 100) skill points. Skill points are awarded on each level up.

The end result is a system without arbitrary skill caps, where anyone can theoretically become expert in whatever they want, but if it’s something they’re unsuited for they’ll have rendered themselves unable to become skilled in much else.

A new take on a Bard role, generally themed around leading a party of other adventurers through the dungeon, with some other additional ideas:

• The bard and healer cannot both be focused around petmongering, so one of them would have to change. Most likely the healer, as the bard’s traditional abilities are only good on pets.
• Instead of the standard little dog or kitten, the bard starts with a “party” of 3-4 player monsters, who are randomly chosen from other roles.
  • This would make the primary strategy focused on having the party do the fighting for you, letting them level up, providing them with weapons and equipment, and not letting them die.
  • Healers and archeologists, and possibly tourists, don’t make very good additions to the party, and so should perhaps be ineligible.
  • Party roles could be randomly chosen from distinct sets of “strong melee fighter” (Bar or Cav or Kni or Val), “ranged combat” (Ran or Rog or Sam or possibly Tou), and “spellcaster/cleric” (possibly Hea or Mon or Pri or Wiz). These could also just be hardcoded.
  • The party will not start with the full starting inventory of their respective roles. They will generally have the same weapons and armor, but will probably not have any of the scrolls, rings, wands they normally start with, and starting spellbooks should be either eliminated or unrandomized. In other words, you shouldn’t be incentivized to slaughter your allies for their stuff.
• Healer strategy should shift away from petmongering - the easiest way to do this is change the protection formula in such a way that the protection racket doesn’t exist; so that the player isn’t incentivized to keep XL as low as possible until they can buy protection.
• Difficult for Healers to find a new niche. (Avoidance of combat is an option, but dtsund’s Class Overhaul Proposal calls for Archeologists to fill that niche). Perhaps something that focuses on pacifying monsters by healing them, but this has issues: you shouldn’t be able to ‘‘tame’’ by healing since that turns Healers back in the direction of acquiring lots of pets, and most monsters start at full HP and don’t need any healing.
• Bards (and probably all players) should be able to equip their pets by #looting them, or a similar mechanism. (This would also apply to mounts.) Intelligent monsters will prefer player-given items above all others and will never willingly replace them for other gear. Possibly make this behavior dependent on options, because some players may want their pets to be pragmatic in their gear choices.
• Player monster pets should perhaps not be able to detect curses.
• Songbooks, + class items which contain a song that the bard can learn.
  • Balancing the songbook generation rate against spellbooks might be tricky, because although bards can still cast spells and other roles can play songs, each is not very likely to have that much use for the other set of books. Hardcoding different probabilities based on whether the character is a bard or not doesn’t seem very clean.
  • Possibly the bard should be able to discover songs by trial and error, although simple brute forcing is definitely not the way to do it. Maybe all spellbooks start identified.
  • The bard could need to practice the song by using the songbook in order to restore “song memory”. Song memory does not work quite like spell memory, it works essentially like direct success rate. There might be some mandatory delay between practices, meaning you can’t take an unlearned song and practice it up to 100% immediately. Or there could be a possible failure of practice, maybe a dexterity penalty (“Dumb move! You strain your fingers.”) to serve to prevent practice-spam. Playing a song would serve to
  • Songbooks do not eventually go blank, and can be used for practice indefinitely.
  • Or to keep it realistic with learning actual songs, you need to have the songbook on hand early on when you want to play it, but as you play it more and gain practice, you can eventually play the song without it anymore.
• The bard should possibly be able to sing some of their songs without requiring an instrument.

See also: Bard implementations.

Allow wielding some types of traditional magical implements to reduce spell failure rates:

• Wielding a quarterstaff confers the same benefit as wearing a robe but does not stack with it.
• Wielding a wand of nothing confers the same benefit as wearing a robe but does not stack with it.
• Wielding an identified wand which matches a spell (wand of light -> spell of light, wand of death -> finger of death, etc) drastically reduces your failure rate when casting it. Perhaps casting the spell while wielding the matching unidentified wand should identify the wand.

Add a system for casting ritual spells: more powerful and more expensive spells which have some esoteric effects you can’t get otherwise. The main differences between ritual and normal spellcasting are that they consume valuable, hopefully non-renewable components, take a number of turns to cast instead of taking effect instantly, and may require you to be in or set up certain circumstances.

Various ritual spells that have been proposed:

• Ball spells which consume a gem as focus and create a ball of elemental power that hits surrounding squares but not you. (Long casting times would probably make rituals infeasible for combat though.)
• Temporarily increase your carry cap by a great amount. (Other new intrinsics as required.)
• Resurrect a corpse as a tame monster (necromancy).
• Grant temporary intrinsic life saving.
• Single controlled polymorph with a greatly increased duration.
• Summon a demon, demon lord, or demon prince. Requires 5 cursed candles and a marker (to draw the classic pentagram). If summoning a named demon lord, it’s either random or there’s some expensive way to control who shows up. The demon lord could be peaceful, but with current behavior this is useless. Possibly summoning them allows you to make a pact with them.
• Remove the graveyard status from a level (would need to be expensive, and perhaps involve the Book of the Dead, and multiple different headstones).
• Grow a tree. This consumes at least a piece of fruit. For anti-farming the tree should probably not produce fruit or bees when kicked.
• Create a portal between two levels of your choice (doesn’t work with the Amulet obviously, but otherwise works)
• Create an artifact (that is, you somehow imbue an item with properties it can’t normally get).
• Bless items. Consumes a blessed scroll of remove curse.
• Genocide a genocidable monster. Consumes a figurine of that monster plus other costly things.
• Reverse genocide a monster. The monster may or may not have to be normally reverse-genocidable. Consumes a figurine of that monster plus other moderately expensive things.
• Charge something. Requires a rare ingredient - perhaps a dilithium crystal.
• Summon tame elemental(s). Among other things, ingredients include: a potion of water, any beatitude (water); a rock (earth); lit candles, a lit oil lamp, or a lit potion of oil (fire); an amulet of magical breathing (air).
• Create a magic lamp. Needs an oil lamp (of course) and a figurine or mask of a djinni (or possibly a nearby live djinni).
• Make the current level non-teleport. Requires a scroll of teleportation and that the caster be standing on an anti-magic field at (?) either the start or the end of the ritual.
• Create a fountain. Requires a statue of a medium-sized or larger monster, which gets destroyed (by turning it into the centerpiece of the fountain). There may be potential for wishing abuse; perhaps the fountain should be flagged so that it can’t produce a wish-granting water demon.
• Turn a regular knife into an athame. Components include other bladed weapons with positive enchantments adding up to 20 or something; all of these charges will be drained to +0 in the creation of the athame. The resulting athame is +0, regardless of the charges on the component weapons or original knife.
• Create a tame golem or golems. Requires a large amount of total weight of objects made out of the golem’s material.
• Summon a coaligned angel or other minion of your deity as a pet.
• Create a tame wood nymph from a tree (only once per tree).

Ritual spells come in spellbooks like usual, but aren’t stored in your spell list. Instead, reading the spellbook prompts you if you want to begin its ritual and tells you the necessary ingredients and circumstances you need to satisfy as preconditions. If you meet all the conditions and answer yes, you initiate the ritual. (For simplicity, this should probably burn up / expend all the components instantly.) You cannot begin a ritual while in the process of casting another ritual; this should probably be implemented as a precondition.

Apart from the component cost, rituals act as a constant drain on your Pw until the ritual is complete. If something distracts you in the middle of the ritual, you can go take care of it and then resume the ritual as long as you have the Pw left to finish it. (You could also drink gain energy during the ritual.) The only way for a ritual to fail, possibly backfiring with bad effects, is for you to run out of Pw while it is incomplete.

In addition to its preconditions, each ritual also has some postconditions: common to all rituals is that you have been casting the ritual for at least some length of time, but there may be others, such as standing on the square where you began the ritual, or have another item, or kill a monster, or something. There may also be other conditions such as “moving off the space where the ritual started breaks and halts the ritual”.

Every time you stop casting a ritual (whether it succeeded or failed), it increments the spellbook’s spestudied field; the book will eventually disintegrate after casting it a certain number of times.

Charm monster is generally considered too powerful and too low-level, and should probably be nerfed. Ideas:

• It only works if you’re not wearing any armor. (This is apparently how D&D does it.) Alternatively, its chance of successfully charming is reduced the more armor you’re wearing.
• Make it more reliable than it is now, but it always fails if you have other pets. (You can then only have one pet at a time without using scrolls of taming.)
• It only tames one monster at a time. (Make it a directional beam with a maximum range of 1.)
• It only pacifies monsters, and can’t be used to tame an always-hostile monster.
• Make it do what the temporary pet code in the Bard patch does: the monster remains tame for a fairly short amount of time and then reverts to whatever it was originally.
• Split into three spells: pacify monster (peaceful for charisma*2 turns), charm monster (tame for Charisma*2 turns), and dominate monster (tame permanently or for a long time).
• It only works on monsters, and doesn’t work on intelligent beings.
• It can’t directly tame a hostile monster; it can only pacify it. Peaceful monsters can then be tamed by subsequent casts, but attempting to tame a peaceful intelligent monster may anger it instead. The pacification step is dependent only on monster MR, but the taming depends on the player’s level relative to the target. The scroll of taming should remain comparatively powerful.
• Scale with skill: unskilled attempts to pacify one adjacent monster, basic to pacify all adjacent, skilled to tame one adjacent, and expert to tame all adjacent. All of these are subject to normal monster MR checks.
• Whatever nerfs do get applied, they should ensure that the scroll of taming is more powerful and reliable than the spell.

Add a Druid role: intended to be a more balanced form of SLASH’EM’s doppelganger race, druids are highly attuned to nature and possess innate shapeshifting abilities.

• You begin the game with polymorph control and get polymorphitis at XL 5 or so.
• Possibly you start with a wand of polymorph, or potions of it.
• Inventory could be severely restricted, so you have to figure out how to do most things through polymorph.
• You have the power to change into a tree, which will make most monsters ignore you. While in tree form, you are immobile but regenerate HP and Pw faster. Orcs might attack you with axes, a la Tolkien.
• Without extrinsic polymorph control, your polymorph control limits you to changing into forms with the M1_ANIMAL flag.
• Possibly have limited access to #polyself outside of wizard mode, so they can change intentionally and not randomly. Would work best as an ability with a timeout, or cost Pw outside of wizard mode.
• Possibly, the monsters you can polymorph into must have a certain base level or difficulty that’s tied to your XL somehow (maybe XL/2). If their base level is too high, you can’t polymorph into them.
• Your controlled polymorphs always succeed - you will never accidentally fail and “feel like a new woman” with the 20% chance that all other roles have.
• You are seriously bad at combat in your regular form, having very little weapon skill (nothing can be advanced to Expert, possibly not even to Skilled), and physically weak in your normal form. Combat in a polyform should be incentivized enough so that it isn’t really worth it to wear any armor. Maybe you should get to-hit and damage bonuses while in a wild form?
• Diminishing returns on polymorph time limit that prevent you from reusing the same form(s) over and over and over again. (This may actually be applicable as a general YANI for polymorph control).
• The critical balance needed is to make polyselfing powerful and awesome to play with and use for typical combat, but simultaneously polyselfing needs enough restrictions that it doesn’t just turn into Master Mind Flayer: The Game.
  • One proposed restriction: you can only turn into monsters you have already encountered, or if that is too lax, into peaceful or tame monsters adjacent to you at the time. The druid should be able to pacify most animalistic monsters to take advantage of this (temporarily?)
• The starting pet is a woodchuck (or wolf). Pantheon is probably drawn from Celtic mythology, though hopefully not overlapping with Knights.
• Some heavy polymorph / monster / player as monster tweaking is probably required, in the sense that there should, ideally, be valid reasons to exist in any given polymorphable form.

A plan for magic traps to scale according to the depth they appear on. All these effects are still triggered just with the same magic trap - this isn’t adding new trap types.

Possibly remove polymorph traps as an independent trap type since it’s one of the options here.

Magic traps’ blinding and summoning monsters effects should be split up, since both at once tends to make them much more fatal, especially to early players. Alternatively, make the summoned monster selection with a lower-difficulty pool of monsters.

Statue traps generate monsters with a +5 difficulty modifier (though this might be too high). This is because a statue that surprisingly turns into a level-appropriate monster isn’t usually very threatening.

New role, the Artificer:

• Artificers can innately see charges on things and use wands at a higher skill level than everyone else.
• Starts with an inventory of consumables comparable to vanilla wizards’, a scroll of charging, offensive wands, a magic marker, and random tools.
• Starts with all armors (magic and nonmagic) identified and all tools identified.
• Restricted in nearly all weapon skills like a monk, or can only reach Basic in a few ones like knife.
• Quest involves lots of golems.
• Quest artifact grants double damage with tools and gives blessed charging when invoked.
• Gnome is a playable race.
• Has a special tool, an artificer’s knife, which they can use for ring crafting. This works by removing the gem from the ring and replacing it with another gem. Not specified how this works for non-gem rings or rings containing things like black onyx or pearl which aren’t obtainable gems; possibly these are just uncraftable. Crafting a ring like this may destroy it depending on the beatitude of the knife, 75%/90%/99% for B/U/C for non-Artificers, 20%/50%/80% for Artificers.

Also see dtsund’s proposed Tinker role.

Advanced spell forms are slightly problematic. Certain spells (fireball and cone of cold) which have advanced versions automatically kick in when the player is Skilled or above, and can’t be cast using the lesser form even if the player wants to.

• Some variants give you the choice of casting the basic or advanced form, but this suffers from an interface annoyance (an extra y/n prompt) and the fact that the advanced form counts as the same spell level so it is not actually any more difficult or expensive to cast.
• Advanced forms are castable even at Basic skill, but have a higher failure rate.
• The advanced form appears in the Z menu once you are Skilled.
• The advanced forms are implemented as higher-level never-generated spellbooks, e.g. “fire storm” and “frost storm”. Reading the basic spellbook automatically teaches you the advanced spell as well. This is dNetHack’s approach.
  • This allows you to balance them separately; in the case of fireball and cone of cold, the lesser spells could be dropped to level 3 or so and the advanced forms elevated to level 6.
• The advanced forms are broken out into completely separate spellbooks that must be discovered and learned separately.
  • This makes the balance of spellbooks a concern, since it would add more books of a certain school.
  • Both of the ideas that involve higher level spellbooks may create a problem with the Z menu only allowing 52 different spells if more advanced forms come along, not that that can’t be worked around.
• Skilled+ casting does nothing to the actual spell effects, but allows you to cast the spell mentally: you do not need to be able to speak or move to cast it.

It’s a problem that utility spells with a high failure rate, such as identify at 95% fail, is a mere inconvenience to players, since they can sit in a closet with a stack of food and wait for their Pw to recharge until they succeed. This is not really a problem with combat spells, since the penalty for failing to cast the spell correctly is a disadvantage in combat, where time and Pw matter. Some possible ways to address it:

• Large penalties for failing to cast a spell, like a 1% memory loss and 50 hunger.
• Failing to cast a spell locks it for a certain period of time. It would be hard to make this not turn into an even slower grind for utility spells, since the lockout period could just be waited out.
• Make spells never actually failable, but Pw cost is increased proportional to the failure rate, specifically: real Pw = base Pw / success rate. Under this formula, a 15 Pw spell at 95% fail becomes a 300 Pw spell at 0% fail. This means the Pw cost should be exposed in the spellcasting menu rather than failure rate, even though failure rate still needs to be calculated. Maybe use different colors in the spellcasting menu to denote spells you can cast now, spells you can cast by waiting to recover more Pw, spells you can’t cast even at your current maximum Pw, and forgotten spells.

Instead of books having spestudied charges which leads to a lot of issues with polypiling, you read them once and they disappear, but you get 3 times the spell memory. This is intended to remove tedious spellbook micromanagement.

• Spellbooks would need to be considerably more common than they are in vanilla. In FIQhack, where this was originally discussed (and later implemented), spellcasters generate with books, and the level of dropped spellbooks scales well as the game progresses since more dangerous monsters carry higher-level books.
• This addresses polypiling by allowing the player to polypile the book as much as they want, but they can only read it once. (Does not fix the problem of polypiling a book multiple times and identifying but not reading the results – perhaps an increased chance of going blank is in order.)
• Slightly makes things tougher for people who finish their games in under 60,000 turns, since they can’t use a spell for free confusion. Which may actually be a good thing.
• Also a problem for people who play very long games, because they will need to find or write replacement spellbooks; however, this was sort of already the case.
• May make polypiling unknown spellbooks too popular, since an unknown spellbook is likely not to be the one you want, or you have price-IDed it and know it’s something you will never use, and you can now poly without consequence. Perhaps address this by giving polymorphed spellbooks an elevated chance to become blank, and blank spellbooks do not poly into anything else.

The current resistance system is unsatisfying, because most resistances separate the effects of something into a binary outcome: worse effects with no resistance, totally ignorable effects with it. Most resistances also are get-once-and-be-protected-forever, which is uninteresting in the long term.

Proposed solutions to this generally assume that there will be some distinction between resistance and immunity, which offers better (or total) protection but is not normally obtainable as a permanent intrinsic effect. This also enables partial resistances (as found in SporkHack) to be used, though some ideas still treat them as binary - either you have it or you don’t.

• Extrinsic immunity isn’t as good as inherent immunity.
• Resistance halves HP damage and cuts attribute loss down to 1 point.
• Role benefits should probably only be resistance and not immunity.
• For partial resistance, damage is easy enough to do (express your resistance as a percentage and cut damage by that percentage), but many effects, particularly those protected by MR, are binary, and will be tricky to adapt.
• Resistances could start at 100% when you get them, but decrease by 1% every time it protects you from something.

Monsters that exist in groups are currently completely individualistic and try nothing more complex than charging towards the player and hitting in melee once they get there. This makes it easy for the player to cheese what would otherwise be tough battles, e.g. by standing in a doorway and killing them one by one, or by kiting them. There are some proposals for smarter AI:

• If a single monster in a group is next to the player, try to pull back until allies can get next to the player.
• Avoid doorways and narrow corridors; if you are in an open space, stay there unless you decide to move to another open space, and hang back from the doorway where the hero is, forcing them to enter the room in order to pass.
• Groups of intelligent monsters also try to stay out of the way of ranged fire if possible.
• If the current strategy is to defend a certain area, form ranks to block the player from reaching it.
• Pincer maneuvers; some monsters of a group will split up and try to get behind the hero or attack from another side. If the pincering group hasn’t gotten in position yet, the other group will fall back until they catch up.
• Wolf pack: the monster of the class with the highest level, or failing that the highest max HP, “leads” the pack, and all other members key in on this leader and follow it. This means if you get the leader to flee, the rest of the pack will flee as well.
• The Yendorian Army can form a phalanx, which is an ordered rectangle of soldiers. Will stick to wide open areas, try to stay out of the range of ranged attacks until they can swarm around you. Enemies forming a phalanx could receive to-hit and AC boosts.

Very intelligent monsters calculate whether it is more advantageous in terms of damaging the enemy versus taking damage themselves to pursue a target in melee, keep a safe distance and attack from range, or flee. Complex solutions would involve the monster storing lots of data about which attacks it has seen its opponents perform; however, this might get memory-intensive and expand save files quite a bit. A possible algorithm that relies only on game state and is based on FIQhack’s dragon AI algorithm is as follows:

   If able to attack at range (spit/breathe/shoot missiles/use items/etc):
     If the target is in range but not adjacent:
       Attack at range.
     Else if the target is adjacent, and is at least as fast as the monster:
       Attack in melee, or use ranged attacks point blank.
     Otherwise:
       Try to move somewhere aligned with the target, as far away as possible while still being in range.
   Else if the monster is unable to attack at range but will be able to soon (dragon):
     Stay out of line with the target.
   Otherwise:
      Close to melee range.

Make the identification game less regimented. Currently, a rational spoiled player (who will not take the risks associated with direct use-ID) is restricted to indirect use-ID (and monster use-ID) of most objects until such time as they can find a general, book, or scroll shop, at which point they can price-ID the scroll of identify and other items. Once identify is known (and could be blessed), the good items (as determined by price ID) can be fully identified. This is problematic because it’s not at all a gradual process, and it feels like it should be.

Some ideas have been floated to remove price ID outright (presumably, a shopkeeper would pay the same amount for each item of an object class as they currently do with amulets). This has some advantages; price ID is tedious, encourages stashing to some extent (because stashing near a shop where you can ID new things is good), and roguelike players who don’t primarily play NetHack tend to hate its price ID system. In this case, either the scroll of identify should start out identified for all characters, so that identification doesn’t take forever to get off the ground, or some other mechanic should be added so identify is easy to pick out for spoiled players (such as retaining price-ID for only that scroll).

A designer may not want to get rid of the price identification system entirely. But there are some options for amending it. Overall, it should become less regimented and predictable, and less necessary of a strategy. NetHack’s entire idea of price tiers doesn’t appear to be based on much of anything, and having items organized into tiers makes it easy to disregard entire sets of items once their base prices are known. Ideas include:

• Change price ID so that each item is assigned to a “band” of possible prices. There are four price bands, and each item class has its base price randomized based on its band. The price bands show up on unidentified items, e.g. “an expensive scroll labeled KIRJE”. Some items might fall into more than one price band.
• Implement price tiers (e.g. all scrolls cost either 100, 150, 200, or 300), and items are placed into 1-3 possible tiers at the start of the game.
• Fuzz the prices of items so that it’s not possible to definitively say what an item is, only that it’s cheap or expensive.
  • One way to do this is to scatter the base price of each previously tiered item each game on an interval so that it overlaps with the intervals from other previous tiers, perhaps a random number from 1/2 the original price to 2x the original price.
  • Or fuzzing is done on a per-shopkeeper basis. Each shopkeeper sees each type of object as having a different base cost, based on hashing their monster ID. Asidonhopo sells a scroll of fire with a base cost of 86; Enniscorthy sells it with a base cost of 103.
  • Or, do away with tiers entirely and simply scatter the base costs permanently. A ring of free action might be 240 or 260 base, because it’s on the higher end of usefulness in the former 200 tier. Some fuzzing would probably be needed here to keep things from being unambiguously identified.

In an effort to make use-testing spellbooks less of a terrible idea, all characters should get a warning when reading a spellbook that’s way out of their comfort zone and they have very little chance of successfully studying it.

Make scrolls and spellbooks in particular partially identifiable outside of a shop without having to formally identify them or guess based on frequency (which are currently the ‘‘only’’ ways to identify them outside of a shop). Ideas:

• Higher level spellbooks could be heavier. D&D does this. However, unless the game shows the weights of items to the player, it will be tedious for the player to figure out the exact weight of a book by picking up and dropping items of known weights.
• Make spellbook appearances more complex based on level. A simple color indicates a 1-2 level book, an unusual color or appearance indicates a 3-4 level book, a very odd or ridiculous appearance or material indicates a 5-6 level book, and a completely over-the-top appearance indicates a level 7+ book. (Example: “red”, “steel”, “bone”, “jewel-encrusted”). Shuffling of the random appearances would need to be changed so that the books retain an appearance in their original bracket.
• Make scroll label length (or, more complicated, its number of syllables) roughly correlate to its cost. The correlation could be fuzzed a bit, so MAPIRO MAHAMA DIROMAT is probably a 300 zorkmid scroll, but is certainly no less than 200, and NR 9 is probably something really cheap, but might be 100 zorkmid.
• When you read a spellbook, you are given a menu with three options:
  • Give the book a cursory glance-over. This can fail with low Int/XL but is fairly unlikely and has very minor failure effects. If successful, it identifies the spell level of the book. Takes 1/10 the usual spell study time.
  • Briefly study the book but don’t try to learn its spell. This can fail with mediocre Int/XL but will be reliable at high ones. Moderate failure effects. If successful, it identifies the spell contained in the book. Takes 1/3 the regular spell study time.
  • Study the book normally with normal failure effects and normal spell study time. Learns the spell if successful.

Address startscumming by introducing a point buy system for starting characters: unrandomizing starting stats and inventory and letting the user spend points on stats and equipment however they like. (Note: dtsund’s class overhaul proposal also addresses unrandomization of starting inventory by simply removing all the random chances to get items, but it doesn’t involve point buy.)

Starting stats

• Any point buy for stats is likely to involve a tedious interface. Developers could get around this by making it options-only, perhaps in a way that allows the user to say “buy to get my Strength up to 10, and my Int up to 9, and randomly pick the rest”, but specifying it per-role could get annoying.
• It’s important to allow people who want to start and splat games rapid-fire to do so, and it would be preferable if new players didn’t have to learn the complexities of a new interface.
• The rc file must allow the user to specify starting stats per-role in this case, or specify that they want random stats.
• “Dump stats” like Cha, and Int and Wis for non-spellcasters, allow people to buff their important stats at the expense of unimportant stats, which may indicate some underlying balance issues with these stats or that the stats can have too wide of a starting range.

Starting inventory

• Even in a non-point-buy system, for starting inventory in cases like for Monk and Wizard where the player gets a random spellbook with equal weight among the possible choices, the player should be able to select which.
• Any point buy system for inventory should probably be options-only, since designing an interface to do so would be complicated.
• Naturally, items like magic markers and rings of polymorph control cost lots of points, whereas things like apples and oil lamps cost only a few.
• Some items should probably have maximums.
• This would come at the expense of players who actually want different nonrandom starting inventories and don’t want to have to edit their rc file every time.
• If the player’s options leave some or all of the available points free, the game will randomly buy items until there are no points left.
• Unspent points should probably convert into a certain amount of gold.
• Possibly the default items are expressed as a list which consumes most or all of the points and is sorted from highest priority to lowest, and ones the user specifies get moved to the beginning of the list, which will push the low-priority items into the range of not being able to be purchased.
• Certain items, like the knight’s lance and probably most armor, should not be purchasable, and the character always gets them.
• FIQ proposed a system in which you can specify one item, and the game will try to reroll your starting inventory many times until it gets that item. Since this is effectively built-in tool-assisted startscumming, it gets tracked as a conduct. However, making it a conduct could be self-defeating in that people who don’t want the game to show they broke the conduct will not use this system and continue to startscum.

A radically different system from how alchemy currently works, known as “1 + 1 = 2”: no matter how many potions are in the stacks being dipped, only one from each stack is consumed, and two alchemized potions are always produced.

• Intended as a balance fix for the player’s current ability to make stacks and stacks of full healing, gain ability, or gain level potions, and promote use of found potions instead of diluting them.
• Significantly, potions of holy water mostly work like they do now - the holy water does not mix with anything and is consumed, while the dipped item becomes blessed - but you can only dip a singular item into the holy water, including other potions. This loss of the ability to mass-produce holy water creates a significant balance change.
  • Or it could sometimes make two holy waters, but be biased against it, and allow both waters to become uncursed in the process.
  • Still unbalanced, since holy water can otherwise be mass produced through water prayers and blessed confused remove curse.
• Undiluted potions can be duplicated by dipping them in normal water, e.g. one potion of gain level + one water = 2 diluted potions of gain level.
  • Diluted potions may need to have weaker effects to compensate for this, or undiluted potions stronger effects.
  • Or potions in general should become rarer, and possibly generate diluted.

Siren, a straightforward implementation of the ones in mythology. If you are within a certain range, you automatically move towards them at the end of your turn. You are protected if you are blind AND deaf AND not telepathic (telepathy overrides the protection of being blind and deaf, and in fact makes the pull even worse due to its heightened awareness).

Several elaborations on a system for more reliable (and less tedious) gifts from altars:

1. Your god will always give you a gift on the first sacrifice from a given coaligned altar (not if attempting to convert an altar). But after that, they will not give you any more gifts on that altar no matter how much you sacrifice. (Other sacrifice effects will still happen as if you failed the die roll for a gift.) This eliminates all the tedium associated with altar camping for gifts (though not all altar camping in general), but is a significant change since getting one corpse to an altar is much easier than getting multiple ones, and streamlining the game to this extent may be undesirable.
2. As above, but the gift will only be given for the first monster whose difficulty is above a certain threshold (possibly partially dependent on depth, and also with some random factor). Thus, if you sacrifice and get no artifact, you know you have to try a harder monster.
3. The total difficulty of monsters sacrificed is accumulated; the first sacrifice to put you over some threshold (say, 30 cumulative difficulty) is guaranteed to give you a gift. The totaling may or may not be per-altar.
4. Your god has a set list of rewards, each of which is tied to some monster difficulty level. Some of these rewards are artifact gifts; others may be things like luck. You only get a gift when you sacrifice a monster of the requisite difficulty, and thereafter monsters of equal or lesser difficulty to that are ignored by the god for reward purposes (they may still be used for mollifying and decreasing prayer timeout). If you make a sacrifice that earns you multiple rewards at once, you either get them all at once or you get the biggest reward and the smaller ones on subsequent sacrifices. This would enable game developers to fix a number of artifact gifts (say, 3), by encoding that many rewards for them. This system might have problems in games with no deep usable altars where it is harder to get randomly generated difficult monsters.
5. Variation of the above: at the beginning of the game, three random monster difficulties are chosen (with some limiting on ranges). Sacrificing a monster of a difficulty above any of these thresholds automatically gives you a sacrifice gift and removes the highest remaining threshold you met.

Scrolls of scare monster that have the “already picked up once” flag set are given some descriptor that can clue players into which of two stacks has been picked up or has not. However, this is only shown when scare monster is identified, so it can’t be used to trivially identify the scroll without letting one turn to dust.

A race which is very strong, with great abilities and intrinsics including drain resistance from XL1, but with the caveat that they instantly die of old age upon reaching XL30.

Intended for variants whose XP curve doesn’t make reaching experience level 30 through pure combat nearly impossible. Also, a safeguard might have to be put in place so that you cannot intentionally get smited by a god or gamble on polymorphing into your own race to lose levels intentionally.

A magic arrow spell, modeled off a similar spell in GnollHack. It is a level 1 spell that shoots a magic arrow at a single enemy for 1d6 damage and never misses. Possible variations include boosting the damage to 2d6 but allowing it to miss, or allowing it to be smite-targeted at any enemy in a radius with a direct unobstructed path.

A Minetown variant where Frontier Town is in the process of being invaded by orcs. Most denizens are still alive, but swarms of orcs are trying to destroy the town, and if you are an orc the leader will try to press you into service to join them in trashing it. If you decide to join them, all the normal Minetown inhabitants become hostile to you but murder penalties are removed.

Djinn role: the primary gimmick of it is that you are able to access three wishes, through #invoke or some other mechanism, one each at experience levels 10, 20, and 30. You are not able to get wishes from any other source; the wish fails (perhaps a friendly djinni from a lamp will make some comment about how you don’t need more wishes or they can’t grant wishes to fellow djinni).

Because Vorpal Blade delivering random, unpredictable instadeath is not fun to be on the receiving end of, replace it (or just replace its instadeath effect) with a “chaos blade” that has a bunch of random unpredictable effects, including some that may backfire on the user.

Such a new artifact would almost certainly be chaotic rather than neutral.

Foocubi can switch gender either at will or after seducing someone.

Archons’ light radius should be a passive aura area-of-effect attack that causes strong light effects: potentially blinding normal monsters, hurting gremlins and undead, petrifying trolls, and so on.

A new type of trap called a “conduct trap” that spawns in Gehennom. Triggering one causes Moloch to enforce one of the in-game conducts on you for the rest of the game, or until you next break it, even if you have previously broken it. Breaking it after this happens makes Moloch mete out some sort of harsh punishment.

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:

• The mysterious force, as it exists in vanilla.
• When you try to ascend the stairs, they vanish and several illusory copies of stairs appear across the level, along with one real one which you have to find.
• Walls extrude from existing walls around the hero in random directions, never entirely closing off, via a cellular automaton that looks for walls with a 3x2 area of walkable spaces in front of them, with the space directly in front a regular floor space - the effect of this given enough iterations turns the terrain around you into a maze.
• Generic damage over time, not severe but enough to provide a headwind. Or partial or total disabling of natural regeneration.
• Asmodeus: Some damaging cold effect that happens periodically, or your cold resistance is nullified and replaced with a vulnerability to cold effects.
• Baalzebub: Something to do with insects, either periodic summon insects from nowhere or stronger/more frequent insects
• Juiblex: You may randomly become ill, or have your regeneration dampened or something
• Geryon: Hordes of buffed q generate and rampage periodically.

Make the sparkle animation not necessarily synchronous with its related messages. Instead, when the core game engine calls the sparkle function, it informs the windowport that it should display a sparkle, and then proceeds as normal. The windowport may decide to play them immediately (as is currently enforced) or it may decide to defer playing any sparkles until just before the next time the player is prompted for input.

The primary use case for this is with multi-line windowports such as the curses interface, in which one might be on the Plane of Fire and get several messages like “foo stepped on a fire trap but is unharmed”, each with its own sparkle. Under the current system, the game must wait until each sparkle is finished before printing the next message. This implementation would allow the game to print all the messages at once, and then display all the sparkles one by one, or even simultaneously if it wants to.

Rather than placing random amounts of gold on each tile in a special room that generates gold on each tile (zoo, leprechaun hall, and any other that might get added), bias it so that there is more gold in the corners and along the walls, on the basis that things tend to accumulate in the corners of rooms. Should work on irregularly shaped rooms as well as rectangular ones.

One possible algorithm is that corners get 3 “helpings” of gold placed on them, walls 2, and every other space 1.

Another take is to instead put more gold into the center of the room and less further out, possibly guaranteeing some dragons on top of the biggest piles.

Allow lua files to specify a trap as “mapped”/”known”/”seen”/”premapped”/”visible”; when the trap is generated it will set its tseen value so that the player instantly sees it from a distance, like how most holes work.

Don’t allow any single source of HP loss to kill you if you had full HP before the loss, unless your maximum HP is less than 10. (It would presumably leave you at 1 HP).

Chatting to intelligent monsters gives you the opportunity to mock them, which will anger them without incurring an alignment penalty.

Add a flag for monsters indicating “has seen/encountered the player yet”, which is set to true when first coming in line of sight of the player or being next to them. This is used to possibly change their initial peaceful/hostile state when they see you; for instance, if you’re an orc polymorphed into an elf, any orcs that generated peaceful will turn hostile when they sight you for the first time, and vice versa for elves that generated hostile.

Add multiple sub-branches of Gehennom, each containing a single demon lord’s lair. Killing them is optional, but each one that remains unkilled provides passive effects to thwart the player within Gehennom, especially on the ascension run. The mysterious force could be one such effect. The idea is that it’s not feasible to skip them all in a normal game because the combined effects are too difficult to overcome, but not necessary to kill them all either. You are able to choose which effects you want to put up with.

Helms of opposite alignment don’t instantly change your alignment. They still autocurse, but they instead constantly drain your alignment record, until it hits some negative value (-1? -100?) which triggers your alignment to change. When this happens, your alignment record is reset to 0, and no longer drains as long as your alignment remains something other than your original one.

If you remove the helm, it works similarly, rather than immediately restoring your initial alignment: with no helm of opposite alignment on and with a non-starting alignment, your alignment record constantly drains. When it hits that same negative threshold, your alignment changes back to its starting value and alignment record is reset to 0.

Raise the instakill ratio of Vorpal Blade and the Tsurugi of Muramasa, but only make it work if the target has under 50% of its hit points. Thus, the player can’t be instakilled by it if they stay above that HP threshold.

Make fire giants (possibly only in the Valkyrie quest, possibly others) spellcasters who can only cast a fireball spell. Or, to avoid a flavor issue with giants being not very smart to be good at spells, flavor it as something other than a spell (it could also be implemented as a new attack type).

Grant an experience level or two for completing Sokoban without penalties (or with an acceptably small number of penalties). Also maybe a permanent +1 luck that never decays, like with a full moon. Possibly remove the rings and wands or the prize to compensate, since they make the branch effectively non-optional and it should be optional.

Remove the air currents in Sokoban that prevent you from floating or flying over the pit and hole traps. Instead, apply the normal luck penalty. Though it’s been pointed out that this would allow a player to bypass the entire branch and then negate the whole luck penalty if they can find or create a coaligned unicorn and throw a few gems at it.

When a foocubus is affected by conflict, it will not attempt to seduce the player, instead just hitting them in melee normally. (The balance ramification of this is that conflict is now able to prevent all seduction.)

Scroll of recall: a scroll that works like a magic whistle but with more varied effects.

• Uncursed: works identically to a magic whistle, summoning pets on the level to your side.
• Blessed: summons pets from anywhere in the dungeon to your side.
• Cursed: summons hostiles to your side (unclear if this is from anywhere in the dungeon or just the current level).
• Confused: summons objects to your side.

Converting an altar is made easier to do in terms of RNG (either increasing the odds or making the conversion guaranteed after some number of sacrifices), but in compensation for that, all attempted sacrifices cause the altar’s god to get angry at you and smite you, with the penalty dependent on your XL or level difficulty. They can do things like curse your items, give you negative protection, send minions to defend the altar, and blast you with lightning and disintegration if at a high enough level.

Lizards and cockatrices/chickatrices should grudge each other.

Unicorn horns become less effective the more you consort with foocubi, as you are becoming less pure.

Being choked and unable to breathe should confer all the benefits of being unbreathing, including being (partially) immune from the effects of poison gas.

Make it so that dying in a polyform carries a severe, possibly permanent penalty, such as losing some Constitution, maximum HP, or forcing you to a low percentage of current HP regardless of what you had when you first polymorphed.

Since lycanthropy is an “abnormal” polymorph, dying while in your wereform kills you completely. (This closes off the silliness of turning into your wereform and throwing your weapon at yourself until you die and turn back to normal).

Possibly, weak lycanthropes such as wererats and werejackals should be removed so that getting infected by one isn’t essentially a death sentence.

Make lycanthropy less random in when it triggers, allowing the player to know clearly when an episode is approaching, but make the effects when transformed more dangerous to the player. While transformed, the player is overtaken and controlled by an animalistic AI, giving no control to the player until they untransform.

Outside the Plane of Air (where there is no gravity), stepping onto air terrain automatically makes you fall to your death unless you are levitating or flying. (Or possibly you merely fall to a lower level, taking a fair amount of damage, or you have so far to fall that it takes a couple turns to hit the bottom, in which you have a couple turns to take some action to save yourself, by levitating or flying or whatever). However, you are prompted to confirm stepping out into the open air if it isn’t safe to do so.

Items dropped into open air either end up randomly placed on a lower level if there’s a sensible lower level to place them on, or vanish forever (though in that case an exception needs to be made for the unique items).

If falling into air is an instadeath, life saving acts the same as if you die in lava; it puts you on a safe location (“You find yourself back on solid land again”).

Air can use the W_NONDIGGABLE flag, or possibly one of the other struct rm flag bits, to represent a wind barrier, which the level designer can use to make a region of air impassible. Attempting to move onto such a space produces a message like “A strong gust blows you back!” and makes you lose the turn.

One of the greatest problems with air terrain is what ASCII character to display it as; existing implementations use just regular space (which is what it displays as on the Plane of Air), but this is easily mistaken for stone, which can lead to players unexpectedly falling to their death if there is no safeguard against wandering off a cliff, and would present a problem if there were ever a air/stone boundary, which would be invisible. Other suggestions include: space, but highlighted with the terminal’s black color ( ), black pound sign (#), black tilde (~), black right brace (}), or even just gray counterparts of these. All of these have various downsides; for instance, it must be expected that they will render as dark blue for some players who have use_darkgray turned off.

Merge magic cancellation and monster magic resistance into a single stat “magical protection” which determines how easy it is for the magical portion of attacks to reach you and deal effects. All races have a low innate MP, but armor can raise it higher. Most monsters’ innate MP resembles their current monster magic resistance.

Fuzz the base prices of objects at the start of every game, between 75% and 125% of the item’s defined base price.

Monks can gain intrinsic immunity to just about everything by leveling up, but most of these are nullified if the monk is wearing body armor.

“Piercing” object property, eligible on ammunition, which makes them not stop flying or break when they hit a monster, continuing on to possibly hit more monsters behind it.

Invoking the Longbow of Diana gives a temporary buff of “piercing”, in which all your projectiles (not only those fired from the bow) pierce through monsters and continue flying.

A “blank ring”, which has no powers. A gemstone can be inserted into it, which will turn it into that type of gemstone ring, whatever it happens to be. Possibly can be obtained by canceling other rings.

Arrows fired from The Longbow of Diana will never break and will automatically return to you. It also counts as your racial bow regardless of your race.

Markers no longer have charges; instead they drain Intelligence points.

Covetous warpers can only warp to the location of the item they covet. This means that if you are carrying it, they can warp to you all they want, but they can’t warp back and forth to the stairs.

You can enter into a pact with a single non-unique demon of your choice over the course of a game. This gives you significant benefits (varying and according to the type of demon) but also major disadvantages for the rest of the game. One major disadvantage for all demons is that it becomes much harder to be in good standing with your god.

Other examples of advantage/disadvantage pairings:

• A +8 damage bonus in exchange for being unable to become fast or very fast
• Being able to cast any non-healing spell in the game in exchange for no natural heath regeneration
• Maxing out an attribute in exchange for permanent reductions in your other attributes

Archeologists can ascertain a rough estimate of an item’s sale value without a shop handy, due to their profession.

Make it impossible to portal-dance in Fort Ludios and beat it easily by putting a second exit portal in the fort and some sort of one-way gate in the starting room which has no other exits and the original exit portal.

Aggravate monster, as well as possibly wielding Stormbringer, disables Elbereth’s protection.

Fruits can be applied to create potions of fruit juice.

Add spheres that give buff effects and deal no damage to whatever they explode at. They target tame monsters if tame, and hostile monsters if hostile. There is a spell that summons them.

If monsters with area-of-effect passive attacks are implemented, these monsters should perhaps be eyes instead of spheres, and have the buff effect as their passive, and no explosion attack.

Cursed scrolls of wishing give the usual cursed wish effect - the item comes out cursed regardless of beatitude, wishing for positives gives you negatives, etc.

Sunsword does extra damage to vampires and trolls, on top of its normal bonuses versus undead.

Whenever a lich is created, a special phylactery amulet is created somewhere on the level. When the lich is killed, the phylactery begins a timer to resurrect into the lich again. The player can somehow destroy it to finish the lich off once and for all.

Weapon differentiation - possibly a replacement of the old D&D “damage vs. small / damage vs. large” system currently in use. Weapons would do the same damage regardless of what size the target is, but might get a damage bonus or penalty based on if the target is vulnerable or resistant to piercing, slashing, or whacking/blunt weapons. Being resistant to this weapon type means that the damage is halved; being vulnerable to it means that the damage is multiplied by 1.5. Some obvious examples:

• Most undead are resistant to piercing damage. Skeletons are additionally vulnerable to blunt damage.
• Thick-hided animals are resistant to slashing damage.
• “Blunt is best against hard things, slashing is best against soft things, piercing is best against fleshy things”

A bunch of scattered ideas for handling candles, given that the hero almost always wants to have only one lit at a time:

• Track all candles separately unless they have the exact same number of turns remaining.
• Merge all candles automatically, but still keep track of each one’s lifetime. (This would enable lighting multiple candles and then having one of the stack burn out.) When you light part but not all of a stack, the game internally picks the shortest candles.
• When candles merge, their lifetimes are averaged together.
• You can’t light more than one candle at once at all. (Not a great idea since it would destroy the mechanic of lighting a large amount of candles for more light).
• When candles merge, the candle with the shortest life automatically sacrifices as much of its lifetime as needed to “top up” the rest of the stack. That is, if the lifetime is 400, a candle with 50 turns remaining will merge with a candle with 375 turns remaining, making a stack of 2 candles with 25 turns remaining; when those 25 turns are up, it becomes a stack of 1 candle with 400 turns remaining.

An early-game body armor piece that increases Pw regeneration.

Electric spider that, when it stands on a web, can electrify that web and all contiguous ones, dealing shock damage to anything in it.

Add nets, on the basis that NetHack needs to have nets in it. You can throw them in pools to fish with, and throw them at small monsters to trap them in place. There could also be a trap that catches you in a net. You can also mess up throwing them and tangle yourself instead. Possibly, nets would be their own skill too.

For simplicity of implementation, they should create a temporary web on the player’s space (with a flag set so that it uses “net” in its messages instead of “web” and is probably harder/impossible to tear through at high Strength). Either nets would generate in stacks of 11-20 and get destroyed when the monster escaped the net, or they would drop themselves (most of the time) when the monster escaped the net and destroyed the trap. Either way, they should be fairly light.

If you’re polyselfed to a lithivore, worthless glass tastes terrible but valuable gems taste delicious. Each gray stone gives a different YAFM: “Yabba-dabba delicious” for flint, “That was a heavy meal” for loadstone, “The stone’s texture is delightful/distasteful” for touchstone, ??? for luckstone.

Scroll which makes an evil clone of a target monster which will attempt to kill it.

A way to allow the player out of locked shops they teleport into. Possibly chatting to the shopkeeper, or trying and failing to open the locked door from inside the shop.

One or two Orcish Town exits are blocked by boulders instead of iron bars. This allows the player to get inside when they’re ready without requiring digging or acid, but won’t allow the orcs to escape.

Add some incentive for orc characters to prefer orcish shields over elven ones.

Wood golems drop small shields in addition to their quarterstaffs.

Sinks’ glyphs should be changed to a white {.

Conflict negates Elbereth protections.

Peaceful priests and angels of your own god on Astral help you out by attacking hostiles. Possibly only if your alignment is good.

You should be prompted to confirm before attacking a monster while standing on Elbereth.

The player’s own ghosts generate peaceful (possibly only in bones files).

Vapors from the potion of polymorph should cause a brief or minor polymorph. Possibly the “you feel like a new foo” effect.

Remove the spellbook of haste self so that casters don’t have a large advantage in speed over non-casters.

The scroll of create monster now summons only 1 monster (occasionally 2 or 3). The beatitude determines whether they will turn out allied with the reader (blessed), created normally with the usual probabilities of being peaceful (uncursed), or whether they will be hostile to the reader or omnicidal (cursed).

Polymorph, teleport and levelport traps should disappear once used by any monster (including the player). Or else they have a low-ish chance of disappearing per each use.

Monster hallucination, if implemented as a status, should be rather stronger than confusion: when confused, monsters can still see what the other monsters around them are, but when hallucinating they ought to see the same random monsters as the player does, and lash out at any of them.

Float stone, a gray stone which has negative weight. Non-stacking, and rare. If you get enough float stones to more than cancel out your own weight and the weight of any possessions you’re carrying, you levitate. Possibly doesn’t work when put into containers, or at least doesn’t get multiplied by the effect of a cursed bag of holding. May gain positive weight when cursed, or greater negative weight when blessed (or vice versa).

Helms of opposite alignment use a hash function for determining what alignment they’ll set a neutral to, instead of just using object ID mod 2.

Blind or eyeless monsters aren’t affected by invisibility or displacement.

Fix race base monster weights: human weights should be dropped from 1450 to 1000, elves should be dropped to 500, dwarves should weigh a bit more than elves, orcs should be between dwarves and humans, gnomes should be lightest.

Various ideas to prevent powerful bones generated on a level’s upstairs from instakilling a player:

• Don’t generate bones if the player died on the upstairs.
• Going downstairs doesn’t use a turn, but going up does.
• When saving the bones, set all monsters’ movement points to 0.
• If the player died on the upstairs, swap the upstairs and downstairs locations.
• A way to “peek” up or down the stairs without going there.

You can convince peaceful intelligent monsters to join your cause (taming them) by chatting with them. The outcome depends on several factors: your respective alignments (lawfuls have a very hard time recruiting chaotic monsters), respective levels, respective races, your Charisma (which should be a large factor), and possibly others. Failing might turn the monster hostile, or do nothing. You only get one attempt per monster; if they don’t want to join you, trying again will never work. More complex behavior could possibly be implemented with the monster demanding something from you or making you do something before they will follow you. E.g. “I’ll only join you for 100 zorkmids,” or “Bring me the helms of three goblins to prove your worth!”

Internally, this would probably work by having a new flag “recruitable” on a monster, which is only set to true when a monster generates as peaceful (and is not set at all for certain monster types like shopkeepers and priests). Chatting first checks this flag: a taming attempt is only made if it is true, and it is set to false regardless of the taming outcome. Some peaceful monsters of a recruitable species could also generate with the recruitable flag as false.

To avoid this conflicting with existing #chat, there are a few options:

• Recruitment attempts only happen when you use the m movement prefix before chatting. This has the disadvantage of not being very discoverable.
• Chatting to recruitable monsters could bring up a menu of possible things to discuss with them, one of which is recruiting and another of which is regular chatting. This has the advantage of being extended to other possible interactions in the future.
• After the regular chat interaction occurs, you are asked if you would like to try recruiting them. There could be an option that disables this prompt.

The maximum difficulty a monster can be generated at is independent of player experience level. Only the level difficulty (and perhaps other player-independent stats such as branch) matter. The details of how the curve of monster difficulty compared to level difficulty should look are up to debate; NetHack4’s is a piecewise function that climbs slowly until level 10 and thereafter is (level difficulty - 5).

As a more minor version of this, only enforce this rule during level creation, and respect experience level for monsters generated after creation.

Clubs may stun monsters that they hit. Perhaps the chance increases with skill, such as 0% unskilled, 10% basic, 20% skilled, 40% expert.

If you don’t have a default window port set in your config file or the sysconf, you get to choose which to use on startup.

All H can step out of a pit in 1 turn.

Swap the spell levels of sleep and cause fear: sleep is now level 3, cause fear level 1 (to maintain there being a level 1 enchantment spell).

Chatting to trolls while hallucinating makes them appear to say internet-troll phrases: “Problem?” “U mad bro?” “Trololol!”

Wizard-harassment summon nasties should produce a “Monsters appear from nowhere!” message, and this message should force a –More–.

Reduce the impact of a single master mind flayer attack, so that they don’t just spawn out of nowhere (e.g. via harassment) and one- or two-hit kill a character with low Intelligence.

The Orb of Detection can detect the presence (but not location) of artifacts on the level. Possibly this is an Archeologist-only power.

When the player is afraid of a monster, to-hit is reduced and they may not be able to attack that specific monster at all.

Elves can engrave Elbereth and use it on the player, scaring them.

The confused scroll of identify, if non-cursed, identifies a random unknown object class and adds it to your discoveries list, even if you’ve never seen any of that object.

You can make deals with demon lords (or maybe just one demon lord) for special abilities, but this has major drawbacks.

Dogs will eat candy bars off the floor, but will then get sick or nauseous from eating it.

Engraving should be an occupation rather than weirdly leaving the player paralyzed but still writing until it’s finished. If it is an occupation, the usual interruptions will make the player stop engraving.

Ring of carrying: new chargeable ring that multiplies the weight of the player’s inventory by (1 - (0.05 * enchantment)) when worn. Stacks with a second ring. Initial charge and beatitude is set the same as any other charged ring.

If you consort with a foocubus while Lawful, “You feel unclean.”

Instead of a mslow flag in the monst struct, use a signed char called “speedbon” which represents the amount of speed offset that the monster should have from its normal speed. This allows for more nuanced speed mechanics, like zapping a wand of speed monster or slow monster multiple times and having the effects stack.

Tile that indicates, somehow, that it is suspicious-looking - it might conceal a secret door or something else discoverable, or it might be nothing, but it’s a clearer hint to the player than usual. This would work well in a tiles windowport, but it’s not clear how it could be done in ASCII.

Proposed nerfs for ring and wand destruction due to electric damage (some of them extensible to scrolls, spellbooks and potions for fire and cold damage):

• Rings never explode, as they are rarer and a more crucial part of a player’s gear. Only wands explode.
• Wands and rings made of metal never explode.
• The amount of wands and rings that can be destroyed by a single shock attack has a fixed cap. (Currently it has no cap and everything can be destroyed if you’re unlucky.)
• Extrinsic shock resistance (and only extrinsic) protects against these effects completely.
• Wands and rings hit by electricity act similarly to being charged, though they don’t actually get charged. Wands have their recharge counter incremented then roll for explosion. Chargeable rings roll for explosion at their current enchantment (meaning +0 rings will be safe). Not specified what should happen to unchargeable rings; perhaps they should just behave like +2 rings or something.
• The maximum number of items that will be destroyed is the amount of damage divided by 10, so an attack dealing less than 10 damage will never destroy anything, and e.g. a 6d6 damage attack from a wand will destroy at most 3 things. Combined with a possible hard cap of 5 or so items per damage.

Scale monsters’ hit dice bonuses based on their size. In order to reduce the high amount of variance monster HP currently has, monster HP is now computed by this formula: (HD)d4 + HD\*2\*(size), where size is 0 for MZ_TINY, 1 for MZ_SMALL, and so on.

Thrones have an affiliation with a monster. Only the affiliated monster can sit on it and use it. It starts out as the king monster generated on the throne. If the monster dies, its killer becomes the new affiliated monster. This would need some flavor for why the king doesn’t just sit on it and use it until it vanishes; there are a few possible ways to handle that. One is that though the throne effects are good, the king is flavored as not wanting to lose the throne. Another is that throne rooms will start empty except for the king and maybe a couple guards, and the king does in fact use the throne’s powers against you (without risk of it vanishing since he is the original owner, or something).

Remove the scroll of genocide, or else institute some awful (divine?) punishment for genociding monsters, because it is a heinous act. (This would help with symmetry for monsters using genocide.)

Diluting full healing potions turns them into undiluted extra healing; diluting extra healing turns them into undiluted healing. Though this may create weirdness where, for instance, a milky potion gets diluted and turns into a brilliant blue potion, and then gets diluted again and turns into a golden potion.

Make more potions effective for throwing at monsters, first by making the vapor effects hit more than just whoever they were thrown at (i.e. splash effects), and then by making more potions have a vapor effect that affects monsters.

In order to make extrinsic regeneration scale better, it acts as a multiplier to your natural regeneration rate. x2 is an option but may be too high; x1.5 might work better.

Another idea is to make it so that regeneration gets better the closer you are to dying of HP loss, formally: if current HP = X * maxHP, regeneration will heal you at a rate of (2 - x) times its normal rate.

Change Vorpal Blade to do very high damage (on the order of x3 or x4) when it critical hits, instead of decapitation, in order to remove YAAD potential in monster hands. The new critical hit message is “Your Vorpal Blade goes snicker-snack!” (Some other message might be needed to replace the existing message when you are neutral crowned but already holding Vorpal Blade).

When you attempt to interact with (or possibly explicitly search) a door or container, you get “There [are no traps / is a trap] on this [door / container].” which guarantees that there is not or is a trap, rather than an ambiguous “You find no traps”.

Monsters in groups should always spawn with the same affiliation (peaceful/hostile).

Modify Sokoban maps so that a monster can never get stuck in an awkward place except by the player doing something foolish. Possibly make the corridors leading to the goal double-sized or have alcoves off to one side where a monster can move.

Saltwater or murky water, intended as a nerf for “just dilute most potions”:

• Potions of saltwater behave exactly like potions of water, except that they cannot be used to bless or curse things. Holy (and unholy) water must be pure.
• All in-game sources of water except for magic fountains (possibly regular fountains as well, but they might be too plentiful) are saltwater. Diluting potions in them will yield only potions of saltwater.
• Can also get pure water if a unicorn horn dip would already result in water.
• Not specified what cancelling potions should do. Possibly most potions just cancel to saltwater, juice or sickness. It’s weird because flavor-wise it shouldn’t produce anything but pure water, but it obviously won’t fix the current problem if you merely have to cancel potions instead of diluting them.
• If called murky water instead of saltwater, the “murky” randomized potion appearance should change.

Alternatively, don’t actually make saltwater a separate potion; just use saltwater as a flavor reason for why the player can’t intentionally dilute potions to water. (Can use a separate flavor argument, that potions are generally corked while not used, to explain away the lack of dilution for water damage.) Also, make most potions cancel into non-water base potions (such as confusion and hallucination to booze), with the notable exception of polymorph. It’s also harder or impossible to get water from random alchemy or polymorph.

A third option is naming blessing-capable potions “purified water” and leaving the mundane potion of water as it is. Things such as unicorn horns can neutralize toxins but can’t actually remove them, so the resulting water isn’t purified.

Strictly separate the AD_SITM and AD_SEDU stealing attacks (hostile theft vs. charming to hand over an item), and remove the is_animal checks from the stealing code.

Cave-like or cavernous levels, like the Mines and the Caveman home level, spawn bats fairly often.

Merge dart and arrow traps into “missile” traps, that fire a random sort of missile. Also, make such traps store their ammo in the trap to be fired one by one or released when untrapped, not to be created one by one when triggering, as described in #768.

Restructure Gehennom as follows: the main trunk consists of the Valley, then 5-7 filler cavern/lava levels interspersed with two bribable demon lairs, then the Vibrating Square level (also cavern/lava), then the Sanctum. The Vibrating Square level contains six revealed portals, one of which leads to the Wizard’s Tower, one of which leads to Vlad’s Tower, and the others all lead to demon lairs in which you can’t leave the level until the demon is defeated.

Greased gloves grant extrinsic slippery fingers.

The Oracle centaur statues may contain sizeable piles of ranged ammunition, particularly arrows and crossbow bolts.

Make monster sleep work more like player sleep, where being attacked / taking damage is quite likely to end the sleep. Then sleep is not basically a duplicate of paralysis.

Set the minimum dungeon level for polymorph traps to a deeper level, to perhaps 12 or 15. Polymorph traps now polymorph you in spite of magic resistance, but you can acquire some property (not as strong as polymorph control) that makes it much more likely or guaranteed that you will polymorph into a form that will preserve your armor and your hands.

Add hallucination effects to (many, perhaps all) scrolls:

• Scroll of punishment: changes your Luck based on scroll beatitude

Change the confused effects of the scroll of punishment: blessed mollifies your god if angry, uncursed increases anger by 1, cursed increases anger by 1 and your god smites you.

Remove the scroll of stinking cloud in favor of a potion that when shattered releases a stinking cloud. Drinking this makes you vomit or become ill.

Add an option to re-enable displaying statues as `, rather than their monster symbol.

If you attempt to put on a helm of opposite alignment in the Astral Plane, your god is angered and disintegrates it off your head before your alignment changes.

Add pegasi, lawful u-class monsters that fly, have a slightly higher base level than a warhorse, and speed around 25. Might be tameable with vegetables, or only blessed vegetables, or one certain veggy food, though.

In variants with reviving undead, you can apply a weapon downwards at a dead zombie’s corpse to destroy it so that it can’t revive. This may take several turns.

When a monster decides whether you are peaceful and makes race or alignment checks to do so, they do it based on polyform, current alignment, and when they first spot you as opposed to when they are first created. If the player polymorphs into an orc and some other orcs are hanging out in an unexplored room across the level, they should be peaceful to the character as long as the character is polymorphed into an orc (but will turn hostile when she changes back).

Make death magic resistable by an amulet or ring. Possible names and corresponding exact effects vary:

• “life protection” (bad name, life saving is very similar)
• “unliving” (makes you not count as living and life saving won’t work)
• “undeath” (actively makes you count as undead, you are vulnerable to turn undead effects and lawful gods may be annoyed at you)
• “versus death magic”

Gods may grant a saddle as a sacrifice gift and unrestrict riding skill.

Role-specific artifacts given to you only when you are crowned.

You can walk diagonally into or out of an open door if there is also another open door adjacent to both your starting and ending location.

Make magic cancellation visible in the status bar.

Luck ideas:

• Luckstones don’t remove luck timeout, they merely extend it.
• Luck is much less controllable, impossible to get any clues about except through enlightenment, and various random events (like what?) can give or remove luck. A skilled player would know how to bias the odds towards luck-increasing events. Controllable sources of gaining luck like sacrifice and throwing gems at unicorns are removed. It no longer times out.
• The luck timeout rate is less predictable, and a luckstone will help but it might still time out quickly if the RNG hates you.
• The base number that luck times out to is equal to the total number of luckstones in your inventory (so carrying 2 noncursed luckstones means luck times out to +2). Luckstones’ weight is increased.
• Remove luckstones in favor of an amulet of luck. Luck timeout can no longer be slotless.
• Luck times out at a rate of 1 point per (600*(number of luckitems + 1)) turns.
• Do away with luck timeout entirely in order to make it impossible to micromanage luck. Luck is now conferred entirely by luckitems. The problem with this approach is that NetHack has about two ways to gain timing-out luck and many, many ways to lose it.
• Luck can be gained by enchanting luckstones.
• Different types of luckitems which stack with other luckitems but not with each other, like a four-leaf clover you can get from leprechauns.

New unaligned artifact dagger Almagest: uses the powers of scrolls to augment itself, and bears a scroll label signifying which scroll ability it is imbued with. Opinions vary on whether this label should be randomly generated by the dagger (and the player may choose to read it, upon which it gives the uncursed scroll effect and disappears for 1000 turns, eventually returning with another label) or whether the label should be deliberately imbued by the player by rubbing it on a scroll. It gains +d4 to damage and +d4 to hit when it has an inscription.

There are additional special effects if the player has formally IDed the scroll whose label is on the dagger:

• Identify: 25% chance of probing
• Light: +d6 to undead, light source
• Enchant weapon: +d4 damage
• Enchant armor: gives 3 points of AC when wielded
• Remove curse: Protects fully from all curses when wielded
• Confuse monster: 25% chance of confusing
• Destroy armor: Ignores enemy armor when calculating to-hit
• Fire: +d8 fire damage
• Food detection: Enemies are much more likely to leave corpses
• Gold detection: Enemies may drop small amounts of gold when killed
• Magic mapping: 5% chance of activating clairvoyance on hit
• Scare monster: 15% chance of scaring on hit
• Teleportation: 10% chance of randomly teleporting on hit
• Amnesia: Extra mindflayer tentacle attack, no effect when read
• Create monster: 5% chance for create familiar effect on hit
• Earth: 5% chance of creating boulder over enemy
• Taming: 5% chance of charm monster effect on hit
• Charging: Does 2x Pw damage and adds it to your own, 5% chance of cancellation
• Genocide: Instakills as Tsurugi, +1 damage
• Stinking cloud: Permanently poisoned
• Punishment: Weighs 100, deals +d12 damage. Autocurses and triples alignment losses.

Levels between Medusa and the Castle generate with roving contingents of the Yendorian Army, and have large open areas if they are maze levels.

Touchstones no longer count as magical items. (Real-life touchstones aren’t.)

Fixed crysknives never revert.

Priests can sacrifice corpses anywhere, with no need for an altar, except in Gehennom. (This should be strictly worse than altar sacrifice - maybe it only reduces prayer timeout, by less than it would normally, and can’t result in gifts.)

The Oracle now prompts the user to ask a question. Her oracularities now have associated keywords (a many-to-many relationship); if you use keywords, she will select an oracularity matching as many of them as possible. If she doesn’t know what you’re asking about, she gives you a random oracle (with a slightly different message to rationalize why she’s going off topic). This could even be leveraged to ask about information that’s normally hidden from the player; for example, asking about the Sokoban reward or the location of branch stairs.

Strength should not give a to-hit bonus; the encumbrance system is already there to address that.

An addendum to ideas where the player starts the game with some random object types identified, without actually starting with such objects. Use a different ID state for these types, so the player will recognize them when they come across those items, but they can’t startscum for “good” discoveries by checking the discoveries list at the start of the game.

New type of book “encyclopedia”:

• Appears as a “hardback book” when unidentified, base price 300.
• Nonmagical and always polypiles into a blank spellbook.
• When read, it adds the appearance of some unknown magical items (1d4 if blessed, 1d3 if uncursed, 1 if cursed, plus 1 if you are an Archeologist) to your discovery list.
• It doesn’t disappear when read, but will set a flag that prevents its effects from happening again. This flag will be cleared when creating a bones file.
• Archeologists start with a special blessed encyclopedia (using a different flag), which is their research (the starting one comes pre-read and isn’t useful to this character). Reading an unread archeologist encyclopedia gives the message “These seem to be an archeologist’s notes. You pore over them intently.”, and type-IDs two unknown scrolls, rings, amulets, and wands, and puts two blessed scrolls of magic mapping into your inventory.
• The Archeologist home level contains another encyclopedia.
• There has to be an incentive for archeologists carrying around their encyclopedia so it doesn’t just get discarded as dead weight. A flavorful way to do this would be to award them extra experience points (say, double or triple) when they learn new object types while carrying an encyclopedia.

Change trap symbols and colors to be more unique: holes should go on their own glyph, level teleporters should be colored bright magenta, trap doors should be colored green.

In the last level of the Dungeons of Doom (normally the Castle), the powers of your god and Moloch are approximately equal, and prayer may or may not work here. (The Valley is strictly Moloch’s territory.)

New object property, burden. Makes the item heavier than it is normally. Objects with this property generate cursed 90% of the time.

Reduce the level of the spell of create familiar to 2, and give it a dedicated list of summonable monsters based on skill level: Unskilled creates only kittens and little dogs, Basic will pick a random non-fully-grown dog, cat or horse, Skilled will not create kittens, ponies, or little dogs but otherwise will choose any d, u, B, or f that isn’t a unicorn. Expert will choose from the Skilled list, plus any q or w. If not doing that, as a more minor change, don’t create any monster that is always hostile.

If you get another role’s quest artifact through bones or wishing, player monsters of that role will gradually start to be spawned of increasing difficulty who pursue and hunt you down because you are now their quest nemesis.

Giant characters or characters polymorphed into a giant should have a boosted carrying capacity.

The spellbook of cure blindness can be read while blind.

A blessed scroll of teleportation will allow you to follow monsters that recently teleported away, whether that is a levelport or a normal horizontal teleport.

Cursed potions of gain ability give you an ability point in something by taking it away from one of the other scores.

Reduce the base price of the scroll of blank paper to something low and unique. It should probably cost less than the scroll of identify, but not be incredibly cheap.

Covetous warping only works on teleportable levels. It should also count as a regular teleport and cost Pw for the warping monster.

Rather than giving Monks a flat -20 to-hit for armor, base it on the armor delay - the factor that determines how many turns armor takes to take off or put on.

If an undead monster tries to put on an amulet of life saving, it will be either undead turned or destroyed, or brought back to life.

Monsters should not be able to unlock, open, and move into the space of a door all in one turn, or move and eat in one turn.

The scroll of create monster, when blessed, says “This is a scroll of create monster.” and allows you to choose between 0 and 8 monsters to create.

Make Elbereth work the same as it did in 3.4.3 for animals or mindless creatures, but intelligent foes won’t be scared by it, they merely won’t attack in melee.

Skills should be trained even when damage output is 1 (but cutoffs would probably need an increase). Skill level cutoffs should probably be rebalanced anyway; for example, it should take longer to train long swords than it does for broadswords, and this could add an extra dimension to weapon choice.

Wearing gloves prevents you from making touch attacks. Affects monsters too, so monsters that have touch attacks will avoid wearing gloves.

Replace the Sokoban rewards with something that is still nice but not AS nice.

• Random fire or frost horn
• Unicorn horn
• Highly charged horn of plenty (but no food generates in the normal levels)
• Zoo is now a throne room, so there is now a throne there

Replace the passtune boon with something more useful, since it is only marginally useful to spoiled players. Then, let the Oracle provide the passtune as either a major consultation or as a service. The Oracle can also be used to tell you which prize is at the end of Sokoban.

Killer bees should hurt even more than they do currently, and their sting should poison 100% of the time, but they instantly die when they sting.

The Master Assassin has an instakill attack (though not unpreventable; the player should be able to prepare and protect themselves some way).

The ring of slow digestion has no ring hunger, but instead prolongs hungering by a factor of 20 (presumably by making hunger naturally decrease only on multiples of 20 turns). Wearing 2 of them prolongs it by a factor of 400.

Jousting should be affected by riding skill, not just lance skill.

Samurai have an ability (maybe a special ability) to displace hostiles.

Knights pass over monsters in their way when doing a knight’s-move jump.

Female oviparous monsters sometimes drop eggs of their species when killed. The chance is reduced if the monster was dead and revived.

Alignment record changes: chaotics get -1 penalties over time for failing to do any chaotic behavior, neutrals get +1 alignment bonuses more slowly over time by not doing anything, and lawfuls get neither of these and need to get their bonuses on their own. Alternatively, lawfuls accumulate bonuses by doing nothing (not breaking the law).

If Orcish Town is generated, guarantee a “peaceful” Mines’ End where all the inhabitants, surviving shopkeepers, watchmen and the priest have fled. Chatting to the priest will make him ask you to clear the orcs out of Orcish Town, upon which chatting to him again will make him grant you a protection boon and give you a luckstone.

• Internally, this can be done by setting a global flag if and only if Orcish Town generates, and only load the peaceful Mines’ End if that flag has been set. If you manage to get to the bottom of the Mines without yet generating Minetown, you are guaranteed not to generate the peaceful Mines’ End, and Orcish Town will not generate either.

War hammers are a two-handed weapon, with much higher damage than they currently have. Slashing and (maybe) piercing weapons no longer get a Str bonus to damage, only bludgeoning ones do. Probably need to rebalance weapon damage types and attribute bonuses completely.

Add herblore (possibly as a non-combat skill). This allows you to brew various potions using herbs and potions of water. Healers are quite good at it, and their quest contains many herbs. Requires actually implementing herbs, which cannot be planted or grown like in ADOM.

Attempting to move healers out of the petmastering role: they now have skilled medical knowledge that enables them to hit monsters in melee with a scalpel or knife to inflict a “bleeding” status effect which will cause the monster to lose HP continuously. Any role is able to do this with a scalpel, but the effect is much more limited than it is for Healers. This means that for a Healer, combat now consists of hitting a monster to make it bleed, then disengaging and keeping away from it in the hope that it dies on its own. The Staff of Aesculapius no longer drains, instead it heals the damage it would have dealt (unless the Cyclops has it, in which case it drains life like normal.)

Additionally, the Staff of Aesculapius no longer has level-draining powers. Instead it has a drain HP attack that heals the wielder.

Add more non-magical ways to get pets that are better than what your starting pets can level into. Such as pet stores with figurines, or being able to tame watchmen by paying them money, or by healing a monster at low HP.

Polymorph traps do not instantaneously polymorph you; instead they start a short timer during which the player has time to either stop the polymorph from occurring (through healing potions, or prayer, or some other decently common consumable) or put on a ring of polymorph control or amulet of unchanging. However, magic resistance no longer protects against this effect.

The game should ask to confirm when you try to throw something that is not intended to be thrown (for example, if you unwielded your bow and are now trying to throw arrows).

The Master of Thieves has a stealing attack that allows him to choose intelligently what to steal.

Cut all map sizes in special level files down to at most 20 lines tall, so that there is extra space for messages and status line in an 80x24 terminal. Few levels currently use all 21 lines.

Add a scroll of air (as well as the scroll of flood, which is renamed to the scroll of water) so that there is one scroll for each element. When read normally, it could give a message “You feel a fresh breeze” and either reset your strangulation counter or give you temporary breathlessness. (Breathlessness seems like a potion effect more than a scroll effect, but then again, during those times when you need emergency breathlessness, you’re probably not capable of quaffing a potion.) If you read any of the water, earth, fire, and air scrolls while confused, it summons elementals, whose tame/peaceful/hostile state depends on the beatitude of the scroll. If you read it while on the Plane of Water, it either creates a new air bubble if you’re not in one, or expands your bubble permanently if you are in one. If cursed and in a bubble, the bubble shrinks to one space.

SpliceHack has since implemented the scroll of air as an burst of wind that shoves adjacent monsters away in all directions.

If the Wizard of Yendor’s monster ID is a multiple of 1000, he should be named the “Warden of Yendor”.

Your god respects any conducts you currently have when giving you stuff. If illiterate, will not give you a spellbook. If weaponless, will not give you artifact weapons (maybe could give a +1 intrinsic damage bonus instead). If pacifist, may send tame minions. However, this is only if your deity is lawful or neutral - chaotic gods will ignore these rules and give you whatever.

Player monsters, crossaligned priests, and hostile angels on the Astral Plane are able to steal the Amulet from you. Should they get it, they will try to make a beeline to their high altar to sacrifice it. The player is also able to steal the Amulet back, though; and wearing the Amulet acts as one turn of protection against it being stolen; an attempt to steal it will just remove it from your neck. If something else ascends, your game ends in an escape. However, all these monsters are hostile towards the Amulet-bearer, not you; so if it gets stolen from you, the pressure will let up a bit.

Knights start mounted, or else are trained enough to mount their horse from turn 1.

If you ascend with your alignment mismatching your align0 (meaning you changed alignment at some point), your game-end reason is recorded as “ascended in dishonor”.

Mind flayers cannot tentacle you if they are cancelled.

Allow taming of player monsters in bones with one prerequisite: you must tame its ghost, draw the ghost over the corpse, and then revive the corpse. To facilitate this, killing a player monster should always generate a ghost over the corpse, possibly with a gravestone and 80% of inventory being cursed.

There should be one major monster of each alignment that is ungenocideable: Archon for lawful, deep ettin for neutral, arch-lich for chaotic.

Candle additions:

• Wielding a candle gives it a light radius of 3 (at the obvious expense of not having a weapon).
• Hitting enemies with a lit candle (thrown or melee) has an 80% chance of extinguishing the flame and a 20% chance of lighting them on fire, doing 2d3 fire damage.
• A lit candle can be applied to an adjacent burnable object (door, tree, wood golem, paper golem) to light it on fire.

Mummy traps, a new trap type that generates with a very desirable item: highly enchanted gear, magic markers, items with object properties, etc. However, when you pick it up or interact with it in any way like teleporting it or having a pet collect it, a bunch of mummies appear around you (they would obviously need to be more threatening than they are right now). Also can have a “mummy room”, a special room that contains one mummy trap and nothing else.

Land mines should blast the player away in a random direction, not make them not move and fall into a pit.

Elaborations on the Fort Ludios minesweeper proposal by ais523:

• Should spaces with 0 neighboring mines get 0 gold? Good because it makes the game possibly more instantly recognizable as minesweeper, bad because it makes the overall amount of gold less predictable
• Need to guarantee somehow that the person stepping into the room doesn’t trigger a mine instantly, and set up the level accordingly.
  • The column nearest the entry door could be clear of mines and gold.
  • The whole border could be clear of mines. However, this means that the total amount of gold must end up being an even number - not ideal.
• What happens if a monster steps on a mine?
• Possibly this needs an Oracle consultation to explain it to unspoiled players. Or make an engraving when you enter - possibly “xyzzy” as a reference to the cheat code in Windows Minesweeper. Or start off with one mine uncovered and identified on sight.
• The number of adjacent mines could be expressed in the ones digit of the gold amount. Possibly with a large round number added, so every space is 3001 or 2002, which hopefully clues the player into the fact that it’s a significant number. But this might be too restrictive.
• How to reach the magic number 69105, and do so in a way that guarantees it can be generated? May need to bias the level generator so that this must happen.

If you eat the corpse of something and a monster of that same class sees you eating it, it becomes angry. (This is from ADOM).

You take fire damage from standing next to lava, levitating or flying over it, or walking on it. Damage from standing next to it is (number of adjacent tiles)d8, whereas being over or on lava has rather higher damage. Fire resistance does not prevent this damage completely.

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.

Finger of death is renamed to touch of death, and works equivalently to the monster spell (melee range only, and it may fail). Because of this, its level should be reduced, which for some people means that there should be a replacement level 7 attack spell (ball/ring spells might work here).

You can invoke the Amulet of Yendor exactly once for a wish, with some unspecified major drawbacks.

Change the message for gaining intrinsic shock resistance to be “Your current health feels amplified!”

Invisibility works completely when the invisible monster and the detecting monster are far away. When within 5 (or 4?) squares of each other, its location is known to within 1 space (fuzzing the real location by 1 space in all directions). When the invisible monster takes a direct offensive action, or with some probability when it is adjacent, its position becomes known. It still appears as I, but the I will move wherever the monster goes until it becomes 5 or more spaces away, at which point invisibility once again works fully. This could work differently if the invisible monster is stealthy.

Lycanthropy fixes:

• It triggers much more rarely, every couple thousand turns, but while you are in your beast form you lose all control.
• Or it triggers much more predictably, with messages making it clear that a change is coming, and the duration of the change is both more limited and more predictable.
• Or it triggers on a certain damage threshold or after taking a particularly strong hit, determined by your level, HP max, and phase of the moon.

Implement “spoiler novels”, cheap books like 3.6 novels that contain spoilers. (Not described in what form the spoilers would be. Several true rumors?)

Ideas around a system in which you can cook corpses:

• The general idea is to unbreak the hunger system by making regular corpses unsafe to eat, so the shortage in resources isn’t in food itself but is in safe methods of cooking it.
• Cooking sets a corpse’s rot timer to 0, lets them go longer without spoiling, or unspoils them.
• May also remove poison from some kinds of poisonous corpses.
• Cooked corpses are unsuitable for sacrifice and less likely to give intrinsics, or don’t at all (because the vitamins are destroyed).
• Can apply wands of fire to cook corpses.
• Or maybe eating raw non-vegetarian corpses is just plain dangerous, causing vomiting or sickness or other bad effects.
• Corpses can be cooked by killing monsters with fire or hitting monsters with fire attacks while they are carrying corpses.
• The problem is that nobody has yet proposed a mechanism for cooking corpses that would work well. Having firewood or some similar thing would massively affect the early game between characters that can and cannot manage to find it, and roles that start with or without it. Wands of fire have been proposed as a resource but those are valuable. Introducing a new item like firewood means that a whole lot of mechanics have to be reviewed for whether they should interact with or create that item.

Race and polyform should not be distinct; they should be merged into a single permonst or corpsenm-like variable. Role is independent of race, and perhaps every monster should be described with a monster/role pair, with the role being null for most monsters (i.e. gnomish wizards are just gnomes that are also wizards). This might eliminate the entire concept of player race, internally, but transferring some of the racial effects on players (e.g. elves’ sleep resistance at XL 4) might be tricky.

Nonwishable unique items or artifacts that would be “nice finds” in the dungeon.

All characters should start with a minimum of 11 HP, so they don’t get one-shot by a falling rock trap on turn 1.

The ring of protection from shape changers should apply to the wearer as well as other monsters; if the wearer has lycanthropy, they will not transform; if the wearer is a different shapechanger like a vampire, they cannot transform.

King monsters should spawn with an entourage of monsters; e.g. a gnome king should create several other gnomes around him upon generation, with preference given to gnome lords and possibly gnomish wizards. If monster pets are implemented, they should behave as the king’s pets, and the king may generate with a magic whistle.

A Word of Recall spell, which after a sizeable delay (3d5 or 5d6 turns) levelports you to one of several possible locations: Minetown, dungeon level 1, the Oracle, the Castle, the Quest. You will not travel anywhere you have not already visited. Does not work if you have the Amulet.

Fire and cold should both work as a cone, and should spread out over distance and possibly hit multiple targets, but with damage decreasing over distance.

Rays should reflect erratically or not at all from non-wall rock terrain, Walls are smooth, but rock is rough.

The list of monsters that ignore Elbereth should be increased, but the list of monsters that ignore scare monster should remain the same or decrease (3.6.0 Quest nemeses excepted). Perhaps scare monster should be renamed to “scare creature”, as it scares humans and elves, which are not really monsters.

Disintegration blasts don’t reflect from a wall; they dig it out instead. If the wall is undiggable, the ray merely stops - it never reflects.

The Watch should turn hostile when you apply a cursed tin whistle within earshot of them (because it produces a shrill whistling sound).

Bards as a monster, who spawn in a group of same-race monsters with a (sometimes but not usually) magical instrument, and they keep their distance and play songs to buff their allies.

Getting lifesaved has permanent detrimental effects. Perhaps it reduces the stat maximum for an attribute as well as the attribute’s current value, like Wis or Con (Con is preferred, because it hits both carrying capacity and regeneration), and if the attribute it would reduce is 3 or below, life saving does not work at all. It could also possibly drain 1d3+1 levels.

Sphere conjurer: a monster who creates hostile spheres.

Player monsters should always resist conflict.

Tourists should be able to swim. Alternatively, tourists should specifically NOT be able to swim, but other roles might.

Change the impossible() message (in NetHack 3.x and variants) so that it doesn’t imply the user should quit the program (thus destroying their save file).

NetHack4 impossible() should not imply that the save file is corrupted, and the distinction between impossible() and panic() should be less blurry.

Add a silvery potion, either as a random appearance or a dedicated potion like dNetHack’s potion of silver starlight, which will silver ammunition dipped into it, perhaps temporarily. It might also silver other weapons (spears, daggers) or other items. Random appearances have the possible problems of the potion potentially having a defined dip effect already (polymorph, for example), and it potentially not appearing in the game if there are extra random appearances. Dipping fragile silver items, like silver arrows, into a potion of acid could create a silvery potion.

Stealing from shops via your pet doesn’t directly anger the shopkeeper, but the shopkeeper is aware of it and raises their prices to compensate and eventually won’t let you reenter the shop. Alternatively, the shopkeeper simply will block the entrance as long as ‘‘any’’ monster in the shop is carrying unpaid items, but this could be circumvented with a magic whistle.

Some version of key breaking, perhaps when trying to use a cursed key. However, this should not go the SLASH’EM route of allowing any unlocking device to break, since that just makes the player carry around extra keys. Skeleton keys should be made of bone and can break. Perhaps add a new key that is not breakable but is rarer than skeleton keys (stealing some of skeleton keys’ probability).

Lock picks and credit cards should possibly be able to break too.

Move enchant armor/weapon scrolls to the 200-zorkmid tier.

Add shallow water to the Gnomish Mines (not GruntHack’s deep water).

Armor should make use of its corpsenm (monster index) for efficiency and to do interesting things that are not currently done. For example, this would allow dragon scales and scale mail to be merged into two items that use the various dragon monster indexes to figure out its special effects, and it would allow for fireproof low boots created from polypiling a crocodile corpse to be flavored differently. In variants where applying dragon properties to other pieces of armor is being considered or planned, this would provide an easy way to do so.

Also see dtsund’s dragon scale mail proposal.

Greed as an object property for containers: the container will refuse to open 80% of the time, costing a turn. Either any gold put into the container vanishes permanently or gold weighs nothing when in the container.

Split up the effects of magic resistance, as it is too extensive. It protects against magical force, death magic, teleportation, polymorph, etc.

• Death resistance conferred by a helm, an amulet, maaaaaybe as an intrinsic gained through crowning

Roles which are good with melee weapons (Bar, Val, Kni?, Cav?) should be able to see the enchantment of their weapon after using it for a while, or perhaps right when wielding it. Alternatively, seeing the enchantment of a weapon should be based on skill: basic will reveal enchantment on 1% of hits, skilled on 10%, expert as soon as you wield the weapon.

Limit the amount of tamed monsters you can have at once.

While wielding a polearm and attempting to move in a direction where there is a monster 2 spaces away (and no monster 1 space away), attack with the polearm instead of moving. Also attempt an attack for monsters 2 spaces away diagonally if polearms are Expert. To hit a monster a knight’s move away, it still has to be applied. If preceded by the m key prefix, move into the space normally and don’t try to attack.

Give monsters their own XP counters, because the system of “all kills by a monster count as equal experience” is weird.

Any gaze attack which is prevented by blindness (one which is visual in nature) is prevented by hallucination, or at least the effects are reduced or mitigated. Possibly archons’ blinding gaze should be exempted from this, with the hallucinatory message being “The power of the Aurora overwhelms you!”

More acid resistance sources in FIQHack, to balance yellow dragons’ exploding acid breath. Possibly a ring or amulet of acid resistance.

Leprechauns steal anything made of gold, in addition to plain gold pieces. (In vanilla, the only gold item is the gold ring, but variants have other gold items.)

Merge the P and b monster classes, on the grounds that puddings and blobs are both classes of amorphous monsters that are sparsely populated. (Some attempts have been made to also merge the j monster class in.)