If you chat to a straw golem, it will say a random strawman argument, e.g. “If the priests give two bits to every beggar, nobody will want to work anymore.” or “The straw golem completely misrepresents your argument.”

Enhance Minetown with a bunch of new NPC denizens:

• Dwarven trainer: found in a largish room.
  • Chatting to him makes him ask if you want to train, for a fee. If you say yes and pay it, he shouts “Defend yourself!” and begins to fight with you. This lasts until you chat with him again. While you are in this training fight, neither of you deal damage to the other one, though you can still deal damage normally to other things.
  • If you don’t want to train, he offers to teach you how to disarm for a large sum of money. Disarming is a technique you can use with the #disarm command after you have learned it from him. Possibly, it unlocks a “disarming” skill that you can’t get elsewhere. When you use the disarm command, you are prompted for a direction to pick an adjacent monster. The monster must be wielding a weapon, and you must have some minimum amount of skill in your weapon (which can be martial arts). The chance of success is 20% base, +1% per point of Luck (or -1% per negative Luck), +5% for every skill level above Unskilled you are in either your weapon skill, or the disarm skill, +2% per level you have over the monster, and -2% per level the monster has over you.
• Elven enchantress: Mutually exclusive with the trainer. Chatting with her prompts you for an item to enchant.
  • Items that are not naturally enchantable with enchant scrolls get refused.
  • Artifacts or items at their maximum enchantment get refused; she gives a line about how it is already surrounded by powerful magic and she dares not attempt it.
  • If the item is damaged, it gets repaired, for a modest amount of money per level of damage.
  • If the item is undamaged but not blessed, it gets blessed, charging a slightly higher amount of money.
  • If the item is blessed and undamaged, its enchantment is increased by 1, charging a larger amount of money that scales in direct proportion to the preexisting enchantment on that item.
  • She possibly fooproofs the item if it’s at maximum enchantment.
• Dwarven innkeeper: also found in a large room.
  • Chatting to him has him offer you an ale, for either 5 zorkmids or the appropriate buy cost of a potion of booze, and accepting produces the effects of an uncursed potion of booze, as well as identifying the potion of booze. 50% of the time, he also gives you a random rumor as if from an uncursed fortune cookie. (Criticism of this is that on-demand confusion makes several early-game challenges involving confused effects of scrolls trivial.)
  • He will also offer you a room to stay the night if the Watch is not angry at you, for either $50 or the cost of a potion of full healing. Accepting fully heals you (or produces the effects of an uncursed potion of full healing, without identifying the potion since one wasn’t involved). Not specified how it should deal with the time you are sleeping, whether that means literally putting you to sleep or something else.
• Old gladiator: found 1/3 of the time, possibly in the inn; chatting to him produces some old battle stories and a request for an ale (same price as if you were buying it yourself). The first time you buy him an ale, he will teach you a random weapon skill. Subsequent times he only thanks you drunkenly for the drink.
• Aged traveler: found 1/3 of the time, possibly in the inn, mutually exclusive with the gladiator; chatting to him has him offer to tell you the depth of the Oracle level for 50 zorkmids, or offer to “teach you some things he’s learned in his travels” for 1000 zorkmids, which acts like a blessed potion of gain level, but is not available after you get it once. Alternatively, he could teach you several random item identities.
• Dirty drunk: found 1/3 of the time, possibly in the inn, mutually exclusive with the gladiator and traveler.
• Bar brawler: found in the inn, interacting with him in any way will make him angry and start a fight. You’re allowed to fight but not kill him (which would anger the Watch), and you can pacify him by putting him to sleep, paying him off, beating him close enough to death to make him give up, or whatever. If the fight breaks out in the inn you owe the innkeeper money for broken furniture.
• Criminal or mugger: chatting to them makes them aware of you and they will try to steal from you later.
• Merchant: Wanders around Minetown, slightly weaker than a shopkeeper. Will sell you food rations at the standard price. Criticism of this is that an unlimited source of food rations is unbalancing and makes a delicatessen obsolete. To add balance, he might have a limited quantity of them to sell, but then he is still kind of pointless.
• Beggar: Has one randomly generated item, which he will sell at either its standard price or a discount. Most of the time this won’t be useful, but occasionally it could be something good.
• Bureaucrat: sits alone in a small room. Chatting with him makes him sneer at you, “I’m busy”. However, if the Watch is angry, he will offer to take a large amount of gold from you to pacify them.

A secondary proposal is to make some of the denizens who teach you things actually useless a random amount of the time. For instance, the gladiator is a liar who’s good at spinning stories and not much else, or the aged traveler is a charlatan who gives misinformation, abusing Wisdom or sapping your experience points.

Cursed wind instruments (bugle, whistle, most horns) stick to your face when used, preventing you from using #chat or making other forms of conversation (to shopkeepers, demon lords, priests, etc, though most of these are ambiguous on whether the hero needs to speak) and possibly also preventing eating.

Alternatively, using the cursed wind instrument could simply produce “You hurt your vocal cords!” and make you mute for some length of time.

Chatting to a pet that is carrying an item picked up off the floor will command them to drop the item. The odds of them obeying depend on their tameness and apport.

Chatting with peacefuls with high Charisma can get them to tell you about what they’re carrying. The stated goal of this is so that the player can learn whether it’d be worth murdering them for their gear.

If you chat to a peaceful spellcaster creature who is carrying a spellbook while carrying or wielding a spellbook yourself, it may offer to trade.

This might be of limited utility since only aligned priests in vanilla normally carry spellbooks, or it might be well suited to a variant like FIQHack where spellcasters usually have a book or two.

If you are a werecreature in your were form, you can chat to monsters of the same form to tame them.

You can chat to the Minetown Watch to pacify them if they’re angry, but it requires high Charisma and Luck to pull off (and is never guaranteed). There probably also needs to be some limiting factor so that you can’t retry this.

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

You can tell shapechanger pets to change shape (but not what to turn into) via chatting to them.

Wandering peddler, an always-peaceful, randomly-generated monster that aimlessly wanders the dungeon. (Possibly, these could be implemented as shopkeepers that are detached from any shop, but that may be too complicated.) Chatting to them causes them to try to sell you items from their inventory, which they generate with several of. The items are mostly those eligible to generate in a general store, but with certain weight and possibly cost caps. Killing them either doesn’t drop their items, or it does but carries the normal drawbacks of murder and having to overcome a shopkeeper-quality monster.

In order to prevent farming items off them through create monster, these might have a low extinction cap of 20 or so.

A “druid staff” artifact, which can be invoked to create a patch of grass similar in size to a stinking cloud, radius 4-5. Enemies within the grass radius become rooted to the ground, making them unable to move (but still able to fight, shoot, etc) for some time. While wielding it, you can chat with trees, which causes them to give you some food, mana, or rarely a pet (possibly an ent).

After the lamassu created from Sharur is killed, it reverts back into the artifact mace Sharur rather than just dying and never being usable again. You can also #chat to it to make it revert without dying.

In variants where you can kill the quest leader to gain access to the quest: implement alternative dialogue for the quest guardians after you kill the leader.

A much more fleshed out interaction system for sapient monsters. It is initiated by chatting, which opens up a menu offering four key verbs: Ask, Tell, Show, and Give.

Ask is used to gain information from a monster; this could be a whole bunch of things, from rumors to identification to information about the dungeon. Each type of monster you can ask things of has a limited knowledge base, and this knowledge base may contain some inaccurate information. Especially interesting is the possibility that you can ask someone for identification, and they tell you what they think it is - which could be right or wrong, but a good clue either way. You can also ask someone to join you, and pay them some gold to tame them for a certain amount of time.

Tell is currently a less developed part of this idea; the only thing suggested so far is that you can tell a creature about traps you’ve discovered, which will make those traps known to the creature. You can also use “tell calm” on your pets to make them refrain from attacking peacefuls.

Show lets you select any item from your inventory to show to the monster. This can be used for intimidation (e.g. showing a stack of iron skull caps to a goblin).

Give lets you give items to a monster, which in some cases, depending on the AI, lets you test the effects of items.

Note that a potential pitfall of such a system is that if it’s complex enough to do interesting things with, it is probably going to be hard to use without spoilers. And if it’s uncomplex enough, it runs the risk of most possible responses being “I don’t know/care about that”, which also makes it hard to use without spoilers. A middle ground between these is likely to require an enormous amount of work.

Taciturn conduct, which requires that you not use your voice at all. This mostly means that you can’t #chat with things; there probably aren’t currently enough things in the game which require or incentivize speech to make such a conduct meaningful. To that end, a useful #chat system that lets you do many things with many types of monsters (e.g. the one described in #2576) would be useful.

Certain messages like “You scream in agony as your body begins to warp” would need to be changed to special YAFMs if you have taciturn conduct intact.

Watchmen that you chat to on the Tourist quest give special dialogue themed to the Ankh-Morpork City Watch.

Chatting to the ghost of a dead player may tame it. At least one of your role, race, name, or alignment must match the ghost’s, with an increased chance the more factors match. If the attempt to tame fails, it may become peaceful or remain hostile. In either case, subsequent chatting attempts won’t work.

A mechanism for checking the health of your steed that isn’t as specialized as a stethoscope. Possibly chatting downward at it gives you a clue.

Chatting to monsters gives different various effects depending on your current form and the other monster. For instance, chatting to an orc as an elf or vice versa will make them hostile.

When hallucinating, you hear monsters that can speak say funny things. Possibly only when chatted to; they say “O great wise [bogusmon], how may I help us defend us all against wicked adventurers who quest for the sacred Amulet?”

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.

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

The ability to chat with intelligent pets and give them basic strategy directives, such as what type of attack they should be favoring, or whether they should stop attacking and stay by your side. Opinions vary as to whether this should be limited to intelligent pets or not.