When you pass out after drinking booze and “awake with a headache”, you lose 1 HP. If this kills you, your death is “killed by a hangover”.

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:

• You have a large to-hit penalty, possibly making it so that you can only land a hit when rolling a natural 20. (Directly subtracting a large number from to-hit could still be overcome by wearing rings of increase accuracy and would be hard to balance the exact number.)
• You deal half damage for any attack you can make land.
• Ranged attacks have a high chance of misfiring in the wrong direction.
• Spells not in the escape school or designated as emergency spells (or healing spells, for variants that remove emergency spells) have a higher failure rate or are uncastable.
• Your skills may be treated as if they are the levels you started the game with.
• Your speed is slightly boosted (if possible, only your movement speed, not your general attack/item use speed).
• If you die, your death reason will have a “while panicking” appended to it.

“while already on Charon’s boat” is appended to the death message whenever the game ends with the player’s own role genocided, not just when they quit. Possibly it’s left off if the player ascends.

If you are killed by a tame monster, the death message reflects that. Perhaps as simple as putting the word “tame” before the monster.

If you ascend while polymorphed and your role is genocided, your god gives you some YAFM.

Alternatively (or additionally), the game is recorded as “ascended while on Charon’s boat”.

If you used to have the Amulet but now don’t for some reason, your death message gets “(without the Amulet)” appended to it.

If you drown while playing as a Pirate, the death message is changed to “went to Davy Jones’ locker”.

Death descriptions distinguish between “killed by a falling boulder”, “killed by a hurled boulder”, and “killed by a rolling boulder.”

Change the “killed by the wrath of [god]” death to “annihilated”.

Make death messages more diverse and flavorful. Base it on the attack type of the monster and possibly the weapon used, so that “killed by a jackal” becomes “clawed/mauled/shredded by a jackal”, “killed by a gnome” becomes “bludgeoned to death by a gnome” if it was wielding an aklys, “stabbed to death by a gnome” if it was wielding a dagger, etc.

Note that this creates a headache for tournaments that track unique deaths.

Ranged attacks can be directed at the . space. If this ends up killing you, the death reason is “shot [him/her]self in the foot”.