In variants that have vulnerability to elements, especially as a temporary debuff that the player can be inflicted with, you should be able to remove the debuff by doing something that would give you intrinsic resistance to that element (such as eating a corpse or tin).

Another possibility, not mutually exclusive, is that you should be able to stack multiple sources of the resistance to negate or reduce the severity of the vulnerability - i.e. two extrinsic sources of the resistance, or intrinsic resistance paired with an extrinsic.

You should be able to wield amulets to get the same extrinsic as you would get wearing them. Not specified if they should weld to your hand when cursed, as this would otherwise let you identify them easily. It’s also not clear how an amulet of strangulation would strangle you while you wield it.

Restructure elemental resistances so it’s no longer possible to have a full 100% resistance to any element.

Instead of having gradual percentage-based resistances that you can build up over time, classify resistances into 4 discrete steps:

1. No resistance.
2. Resistance from eating things. Reduces 50% of damage from that element, and your items are still subject to being destroyed if it’s fire, cold, or shock.
3. Resistance from role or race. Reduces 75% of damage from that element, and your items are still subject to destruction.
4. Resistance from an extrinsic source like a ring or dragon armor. Reduces 90% of damage from that element, and your items are shielded from destruction.

A possible fifth step is immunity to the element, at which 100% of damage is negated and your items are shielded. This should either not exist at all, or if it is, it should only come from very rare sources, like a few artifacts.

In variants that allow dragon-scaled body armor: Cavemen should have the ability to add dragon scales to other pieces of armor, so they can get a lot of powerful extrinsics. However, few slots besides body armor itself should provide any secondary extrinsics when dragon-scaled.

If you have a resistance extrinsically, taking (and negating) damage from that elemental source gives you a small 1 or 2 point recovery of your magic energy, in order to give some benefit to having extrinsic resistances you will almost certainly have intrinsically for most of the time it matters.

Make it impossible to have fire and cold resistance intrinsically at the same time. If you eat a corpse that gains you one, you lose the other. Things like crowning that give you both now do not give either (unless perhaps you have neither, in which case you get a random one).

Extrinsic fire and cold resistance are not affected. This makes it valuable to have those extrinsics from a ring, underused colors of dragon armor, or an artifact.

All polymorphable monsters that currently resist both fire and cold must have one of those resistances taken away; otherwise you could have both at once by polymorphing into them.

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.

Extrinsic properties are stored as an int rather than a bitfield, so that the game can count how many sources of an extrinsic you have at once, allowing interesting things such as letting regeneration items stack with each other.

Randomize the set of “critical” extrinsics and the base items that provide them in each game. I.e. instead of every game having a cloak of magic resistance, ring of free action, and amulet of reflection, the game could have a ring of reflection, a cloak of free action and an amulet of magic resistance.

An artifact cloak (the base type is unspecified, likely a normal nonmagic cloak) that you can apply towards an adjacent monster. If that monster has less HP than your current experience level, it dies and is consumed by the cloak, which can grant the cloak extrinsics it confers to the wearer. Every additional extrinsic added may remove out one or more existing extrinsics on the cloak.

Not specified whether you need to take the cloak off to apply it at things.

Assuming dtsund’s dragon scale mail proposal has been implemented: Confer extra dragon scale extrinsics (similar to those found in FIQHack: speed for blue scales, free action for orange scales, etc) if and only if the player is wearing dragon-scaled armor and a matching set of scales in their cloak slot.