If you are in a form that has a headbutt attack and are wearing a helmet, the helmet’s enchantment should be added to your to-hit and damage calculations.
New role based on a “loup du noir” archetype, possibly called the Lycanthrope - you start with a pelt, a new sort of cloak-slot armor that polymorphs you into a specific type of monster when you wear it. You also are inflicted with some sort of delayed lycanthropy - you won’t randomly polymorph into a monster like with standard lycanthropy, but after not using a pelt for a while, you do start feeling the urge to put one on, and if you still refuse, you are eventually compelled to put one on. (It isn’t specified what happens if you get rid of your pelt(s) by the time you would be compelled to wear one; possibly you just die from insanity, or else the addiction is implemented in some other way like continuous worsening HP damage.)
The form you get from wearing a pelt has some boosted stats from the base form - in particular, your carrying capacity and damage would be better than the stat blocks for the monsters suggest.
You could start with either a “default” pelt which is not very good, but can be turned into an ideal one later, or start with a specific animal’s pelt, which you can control with the pettype option. This role never starts with a pet.
Pelts might also work as a standalone concept or one that works with a druid, ranger, or caveman role:
You can use a wielded saber to parry attacks from other monsters made with bladed weapons. There are a few proposals for how this would work:
Insects on Baalzebub’s level have double speed and deal double damage. Baalzebub can cast summon insects (or otherwise has that as a special ability that isn’t actually spellcasting).
Artifact suit of armor (type is unspecified, perhaps a ring mail or chain mail) that is unaligned and operates like magic armor in the Legend of Zelda. When worn, it drains your gold at a constant rate, and when you take damage, you lose a somewhat randomized amount of gold, in exchange for partially or completely negating the damage (perhaps the easiest way to do this is via half physical damage, since it doesn’t make much sense for armor to protect against e.g. poison damage from drinking a potion of sickness). Gold is consumed at some rate higher than 1 per turn, and it is lost for damage at some rate higher than 1 per hit point.
If you have no gold while wearing it, you become either very slow or very encumbered, and it ceases to reduce or negate damage.
Croesus may occasionally generate wearing this armor, along with some gold to supply it. Otherwise it generates like any unaligned artifact.
Knights who have never consorted with a foocubus have a permanent +1 intrinsic increase damage bonus, which they lose when they do consort with one, with the goal of it being something that is not a huge difference to lose, but does add up over the long run, and which will not stop pacifist knights from using foocubi to achieve the Quest level. This is based on Lancelot and Galahad in Arthurian legend.
Two new objects, spiked gauntlets and spiked boots. Both are nonmagical and made of iron. Spiked gauntlets give a large damage bonus to unarmed combat and also give more AC than standard gloves. Spiked boots give a large damage bonus to kick attacks, and allow you to walk on ice without slipping, the same as snow boots do.
Fire Brand gives you extreme vulnerability to cold damage, making you take quadruple damage from it. If you have cold resistance, this only reduces it to triple damage.
Frost Brand works the same way with fire and fire resistance.
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.
Xorns hit by the stone to flesh spell are briefly paralyzed, and while paralyzed, either take increased/double damage or are treated as if they have a worse AC.
Every ogre that gets killed by Ogresmasher gives it a “charge”, which is separate from enchantment. Charges can either grant it damage bonuses, or there is something you can do by applying Ogresmasher to expend charges for a unique effect.
If a dwarf sees you eating a dwarf corpse, he grows enraged and gains to-hit and damage bonuses. This may also extend to other races seeing you eat their fellow kin, though orcs might just laugh instead.
Ammo shot from launchers (but not thrown ones) should receive a damage bonus based either on Dexterity or on the launcher’s enchantment to compensate for the Strength-based damage bonus for thrown missiles or melee weapons.
Pits get deeper the further down in the dungeon you are, which makes them deal more damage, might cause wounded legs with a chance that increases with depth, and take longer to escape from (or are so deep you can’t climb out at all). In Gehennom, they might deal extra damage on account of being designed and put there by demons. The extra depth could be conveyed to the player by “You fall into a [very] deep pit!”
In a lot of folklore, iron wards away elves. This could be implemented in the game in several ways:
Gold is a metal associated with the sun, so weapons made of it should deal extra damage against undead. Additionally, blunt gold weapons get a d2 damage bonus versus everything due to being heavier.
Having a copper weapon wielded while suffering shock damage has a lightning rod effect: it causes you to take extra damage, but completely protects all your rings and wands from being destroyed.
Fire damage is amplified for any creature who has greased fingers or equipment.
The wand of magic missile should scale somehow, but explicitly not with wand skill, which may not even exist in a given implementation. Instead, its baseline damage remains 2d6, but your magical stats such as maximum Pw or skill in attack spells can increase its damage output.
If you fall downstairs while fumbling, you may land on a monster that was already occupying the upstairs of the level below, damaging them proportional to the weight of your armor and possibly reducing the damage you took from falling down the stairs.
When polymorphed into a monster that has hooves, your kicks deal some extra damage, whether via the kick action or via the polyform’s kick attacks.
Invoking the Tsurugi of Muramasa causes a fear effect similar to reading scare monsters and gives a temporary effect equivalent to increase damage (possibly only on hits made with the Tsurugi, possibly with any weapon).
It was also pointed out that triggering a temporary effect by invoking could get tedious. Another suggestion was to give it some sort of passive fear-causing effect when wielded (in addition to the one-time scare when invoking it).
Carrying a loadstone makes all stone-type missiles (slung ammo, etc) deal double damage - increasing the payload of stones. Also, when blessed or uncursed, it doesn’t weigh as much as cursed.
Samurai who twoweapon a katana and wakizashi should get some small bonus to damage or alignment record or similar. Though since they start the game able to do this, it would have to be a small bonus.
Intelligent artifact weapons reduce their damage (perhaps nullifying any bonus damage given by the artifact, or dealing half damage) if you are crossaligned, have negative alignment record, or your god is angry at you.
Angels (or other “blessed” monsters) that make bodily contact with undead monsters deal d4 bonus damage to them, just the same as if a blessed weapon hit them.
Cavemen wielding clubs get damage bonuses that increase with their skill in club, to make up for clubs’ awful damage.
Damage from kicking a monster is increased if your boots are metal.
New artifact The Spear of Mars, an unaligned spear that can be invoked to “charge” it, dealing massive damage (on the order of +100ish) on its next hit, but only works if you’re male. Will only be gifted to a male character.
(Intended as a counterpart to the Mirror of Venus, #2125).
If you are eating someone’s brains when polymorphed into a mind flayer, and you are very satiated to the point where you aren’t getting the full amount of nutrition from it, you do less damage with the attack because you aren’t eating as much of their brain.
Implement a player fear system that unlike many other proposals, does not take away agency from the player by paralyzing them or forcing them to flee using a predefined algorithm. Instead, it incentivizes the player to flee by making continued combat unattractive.
Create a new intrinsic called “Panic”/”Panicking”. Sources of fear (including existing sources of paralysis-fear, e.g. ghosts) give you temporary amounts of this intrinsic. While you are panicking:
When you’re brought below 20 HP and also below 10% of your HP, with no status ailments, a special adrenaline buff automatically kicks in that grants to-hit and damage bonuses for a short time, but causes exhaustion debuffs after it times out.
Barbarians who roll a 1 on their damage die get the die rerolled and the second result used.
Wielding a one-handed weapon with nothing in the offhand will double the damage bonus from Strength (but not weapon damage or other bonuses).
Add the turn a pet was created into the edog struct, so the game can measure how long and loyal of a relationship you have with it. Pets that stay tame for a long time get some combat buffs such as a damage boost or more hit points. They are also more likely to come back tame if killed and resurrected.
Note that if a pet is momentarily untamed and then retamed, it resets the “turn it became a pet” counter.
Rolling boulder trap hit chance and damage is based on dexterity and not AC, for how much you can jump out of the way. Only high dexterity will allow you to dodge the boulder entirely.
New artifact Mirror Brand. It is an artifact short sword that grants reflection when wielded and when it hits an opponent, takes the higher of its own base damage roll and the other weapon’s (then adds its own enchantment to the result).
It is based on dNetHack, though it’s more akin to a generic mirror blades than the actual Mirror Brand artifact in dNetHack.
New artifact Sinsword, a chaotic two-handed sword. If your alignment is positive, it behaves just like a regular two-handed sword. If negative, it gains a bonus to to-hit and damage (capped at 6) based on how negative your alignment is. Deals double damage to angelic beings.
Non-weapon artifact which, when carried, adds bonus fire damage to all of your physical attacks, regardless of what you’re using to make the attack.
Spells that give temporary to-hit or damage buffs. Must be carefully balanced; this is intended for fighter roles more than wizards. It also shouldn’t last long enough or be cheap enough to be perpetually castable.
You don’t take damage when tossing lightweight, non-hard, non-weapon objects upward. “Light” is defined by some weight threshold. (It’s very weird that you can take damage by tossing, for instance, a eucalyptus leaf in the air.)
Bodkin arrows that have heavyshot (from DynaHack): instead of multishooting, they deal double or triple damage depending on how many you would have multishot otherwise.
If a monster has horns, AT_BUTT attacks deal extra damage.
Intrinsic cold resistance only halves damage from Asmodeus’ cold attack. Only extrinsic cold resistance protects against it fully (or cuts it to 1/4?).
Cursed weapons deal bonus damage to all angelic beings, like blessed weapons do to undead and demons.
Remove the special damage bonus skill tables for bare-handed and martial arts combat. In place of them, scale up the die size based on skill: bare hands damage is a d2 at unskilled, a d3 at basic, etc. and martial arts doubles this die size, for a d4 at unskilled, a d6 at basic, and so on up to a d14 at grand master. Note that this still gives pretty poor damage output. Possibly it should be 2 dice being rolled (with the die size changing as described here).
Sunsword does extra damage to vampires and trolls, on top of its normal bonuses versus undead.
Chargeable ring that reduces incoming damage (perhaps by half, not triggering if half physical or half spell damage applies from some other source) but may lose a charge every time you take damage.
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:
New artifact: The Trident of Poseidon. Chaotic (only because Poseidon is in-game). While carried, grants magical breathing, swimming, and protects items from water damage. When wielded, confers water walking. Double damage versus aquatic monsters, and gets a damage bonus versus all that scales with the amount of water squares adjacent to you. Invoke to get an UnNetHack-style flood.
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.
Rebalance multishot damage so that multishooting +7 projectiles doesn’t give a massive damage bonus over a single +7 melee weapon. Possibly only apply the damage bonus to the first projectile.
Brass knuckles, an item that increases damage done with bare hands and martial arts if you are unarmed. There are multiple takes on it:
Cavemen get a large damage/to-hit bonus when throwing spears at large mammals, or an alignment bonus for killing large mammals with spears.
The description for the katana says it can be used as a two-handed sword. Maybe twoweaponing could be adapted for this, i.e. use both hands on the weapon for an extra damage bonus based on strength, at the expense of being able to use a shield.
Attacking with a crossaligned artifact weapon halves all damage you deal.
Additional temporary effects accompany drinking a potion of booze. The effects wear off when the confusion does (so if you extend it by, say, drinking a potion of confusion, the effects are prolonged). There is consensus that there should be both positive and negative effects; all of the following have been proposed:
Gold objects deal extra blessed damage and extra cursed damage (i.e. extra damage from wielding a blessed weapon versus undead will be enhanced if the weapon is gold).
Ring of fast living: gives an experience multiplier and increases hunger rate drastically, multiplies your damage but also multiplies damage you take.
Long worms should be much faster than they currently are, and they get a damage bonus for each tail segment that is lined up behind their head.
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).
Artifact bullwhip that grants extra damage against tigers and other animals, and grants better passive pet-control effects.
Elementals fire back weapons you throw at them with additional force (dealing additional damage to you): water elementals in a geyser, fire elementals burning with primal flame, air elementals in a gust, earth elementals in a shower of rocks (or they just incorporate the weapon into themself and become stronger, dropping it on death).
Yendorian Army units surrounded by fellow army units have higher AC, to-hit, and damage.
Increase the damage of slung touchstones. Thrown luckstones retain their lowish damage but have a chance of getting “lucky” hits that do much more damage or instakill monsters.
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.
A Barbarian rage mechanic (possibly an effect on Cleaver replacing its current damage bonus) where a damage bonus is assessed based on how long ago you last killed a monster. Originally a buff to Vorpal Blade where it beheads anything it hits if the last behead was N turns ago, but this is unbalanced.
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.
