An Alchemist role, revolving around potions and alchemy, and likely requiring overhauls of several systems.

• The main form of combat is to create phials of potion (where 1 potion splits into many phials), which can be tossed at enemies to cause potion effects on them. The main potions used are things like acid, paralysis, (lit) oil, and confusion.
  • Phials come in all the same types as normal potions but have somewhat weaker effects.
  • You can dip a stack of empty phials into a potion to fill them with that potion (up to some maximum).
  • Thrown phials have the same exact splash damage effect on things as throwing the potion would produce, but drinking it is a small enough dose to only cause the splash damage effects to the drinker. Requires some balance so that splash damage is useful against monsters but not useful for the player to drink for beneficial phials.
  • Phials can be dipped into potions, but nothing can be dipped into phials.
• The quest artifact is the Philosopher’s Stone.
  • The quest leader is Nicolas Flamel and the nemesis is an Avatar of Death (like Death, but weaker).
  • Fun possibilities for transmuting materials here if the object materials patch is in effect.
  • Its base item type could be a ruby (but perhaps not because dnethack makes the Heart of Ahriman a ruby) or a garnet, based on its color in Harry Potter, or an opal.
• Can also create alchemic gizmos: smoke bombs from potions of blindness, firebombs from potions of oil, all lighter and more numerous and useful than the base potions.
• Start with all potions identified.
• Could start with an alchemy kit, which is a rare tool find for other roles. NeroOneTrueKing proposed a set of mechanics for an alchemy kit:
  • Has 3 compartments. The first accepts only potions/phials of polymorph (or perhaps it just has charges and you can recharge it by using potions of polymorph).
  • The other compartments must each only contain items of the same material.
  • A success chance is displayed based on the amount of polymorph potion available, the weight ratio of the two compartments, and the materials themselves (metal can transform into metal relatively easily).
  • A successful use swaps all of the materials of the two compartments.
• Needs mechanics such that in an Alchemist’s hands, no potion is useless.

The invoke effect of the Philosopher’s Stone is heavily debated.

• It creates potions of the Elixir of Life. This potion cures disease and restores lost attributes, but most importantly it grants temporary intrinsic lifesaving. If you die with intrinsic lifesaving, you lose the remaining time for the intrinsic.
• Creating potions is way too powerful since the player will be able to bank them, so nerf this: perhaps you can only get Elixir of Life by dipping the Stone into a potion of full healing, or something. Or Elixir goes bad after a while and reverts to water, making it usable for before a fight but not for stashing.
• The Elixir should not be more powerful than a potion of full healing, or the invoke effect of the Staff of Aesculapius - healers should be the best at actual healing. Probably, getting lifesaved from intrinsic lifesaving will only restore enough HP to stay alive a little longer.
• The Elixir gives a large temporary boost to HP regeneration.
• No Elixir of Life; it instead turns potions of sickness into (extra? full?) healing.
• The Stone can turn metal objects into gold or can turn rocks into gold pieces when rubbed on them.
• When dipped into gain level or gain energy, transforms the potion into polymorph.

A really great Alchemist implementation would probably involve a full alchemy overhaul which adds herbs and fungi, harvesting ingredients from corpses, cooking, and interesting ways to combine everything. The challenge with making this is how to make it useful for other roles and not just the alchemist, and at the same time not overcomplicating the game with the new additions.

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.

Gnome punting: all kicks delivered to gnomes send them flying a few squares. (This also applies if a monster kicks the hero and the hero is a gnome.)

Various ideas to give the bonus from certain sources of speed only as a bonus to movement, not to getting more turns to attack, use items, etc.

• First, to classify: most agree that speed boots, intrinsic speed, and steed speed should be sources that only give extra movement opportunities, while polyform speed should give extra full turns. Less agreement on magical sources of very fast speed (the potion and haste self), but general opinion seems to be that these should also not be limited to movement.
• Add a second pool of movement points that coexists with regular movement points, but can be used ONLY for moving. Speed boots and its fellow sources add to this pool, and any unused points in it are discarded at the end of the player’s turn. When you make a movement, points are deducted from this pool before being deducted from the “core” pool. Note that this approach can cause core points to accumulate to the point where the player can eventually get multiple non-movement actions on their turn.
• Reduce the movement point cost if you are taking a movement action and have sources of movement-only speed. (This might interact oddly if general-purpose sources of speed continue to add movement points as usual.)

For variants with wand skill, higher wand skill improves the outcomes from snapping a wand. Ideas include increasing the effective number of remaining charges, increasing the explosion radius, and decreasing the damage the player takes.

The Master Key of Thievery can be wielded and makes 3-4 stealing attempts per hit. Alternatively, it can be wielded in the offhand while twoweaponing and make 1-2 stealing attempts per hit.

Itlachiayaque can be read to get a clairvoyance mapping, with the message “You see nearby terrain reflected in the depths of the shield.” This should possibly be limited so that it can’t be done infinitely; perhaps it only works when the invoke timeout is zero and increases the invoke timeout by some small amount when read.

The Staff of Aesculapius doubles healing from all sources while wielded.

Multi-skill gifted weapons should unrestrict all of their skills.

Get rid of the enchant armor and enchant weapon scrolls. Artifacts have fixed enchantment values. Higher-enchanted gear spawns as depth increases.

A Gehennom Gnome Fortress, like a demon lair except with gnomes. The gnomes are physically weak but have strong crossbow attacks (and clockwork minions).

Dart and arrow traps are much more likely to generate if the trap is next to a wall. Alternatively, when generating a dart or arrow trap, look for a wall tile in line within 3 squares that contains the launching mechanism; if no such tile exists, the trap cannot generate. The player must then untrap the wall square, or dig it out, to remove the trap.

Eating brains while polyselfed into a mind flayer recovers magic power instead of nutrition.

Expert-cast levitation, or a blessed potion of levitation, grants flight instead of levitation.

Change the sickness instadeath to a HP-based form of damage, since it is very obscure about how long you have left to live and can be drastically reduced.

• Instead of a death timer, apply a penalty to HP regeneration rate, with this penalty being variable and slowly decreasing as you recover from the sickness. This is nice because it allows for monsters to have a sickness attack in the early game.
• This penalty can be large enough to make your regeneration rate negative.
• Getting hit by a sickness attack while already Ill not only increases the severity/duration of your illness, it deals some extra damage proportional to the severity of the sickness.
• Severe enough sickness only partially times out - you will need to take some actual self-healing action like quaffing healing potions, praying, casting cure sickness, applying a unicorn horn, etc. to be completely cured.
• Unicorn horns no longer cure the entire illness all at once - they will only reduce the severity (which might cure the illness all at once if it’s mild).
• Being sick for a long time may cause vomiting, Con loss, Str loss, and occasionally hallucinations.
• Sickness will eventually go away on its own if it’s not bad. Maybe look to FIQHack zombification disease for specific mechanics for how this could work.

Gods’ “Prove thyself worthy or perish” message is flavored as “Prove thyself worthy, because I can do no more for you”. On the Planes, the gods’ balance of power prevents your deity from granting you any extra help (apart from sending angels when you arrive in Astral). If this were not the case, one would expect to be able to breeze through the Planes, with your god smiting down any enemy that might threaten you getting them their Amulet. Prayer will not work, though it will still break atheist conduct.

Carried loadstones prevent knockback, including Newton’s Third Law effects. Possibly it prevents levitation entirely.

Wind dragons, a cyan D whose breath is a wind beam: it doesn’t damage you, but blows you backward, and can’t be reflected. Their scales grant flight, which now confers resistance against knockback and Newton’s Third Law.

A number of ways for weapon enchantment to be learned without formal identification.

• Rubbing it on a blessed touchstone
• Making a number of successful hits with it
• SLASH’EM’s weapon practice technique
• Making a number of attempted hits with it (they don’t have to hit)

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.)

Engraving with Fire Brand creates a burnt engraving as a wand of fire does (but still degrades the sharpness of the blade).

Monks, or anyone skilled in martial arts, can kick weapons out of an enemy’s hand.