Monks should receive a benefit for fasting. This could be in the form of giving them a point of alignment record every so often when they are Hungry or worse, and/or slowing down their hunger rate when they are Hungry.
Wearing cursed rings causes you to hunger slightly faster than if they weren’t cursed.
Gnomes, being much smaller than other races, hunger significantly less quickly.
Real-life creatures tend to eat an amount of food proportional to their weight, so the hunger rate in NetHack should depend on your race’s (or your polyform’s) base weight. This mainly helps gnomes by cutting their nutrition rate significantly.
Merge the rings of slow digestion and regeneration. Keep the name “regeneration”; make it chargeable. A positive rate boots your regeneration and your hunger rate, up until they are doubled at +10; a negative rate decreases both until they are halved at -10, with the intermediate values scaling as appropriate.
Possibly, since the extremes of &177;10 are hard to attain, make the doubling/halving threshold at &177;7 instead.
Ring hunger is increased for rings that have high amounts of charges. For each ring you are wearing that is +4 or above, you lose two points of nutrition for it when its ring hunger is deducted, rather than one point.
Make the ring of slow digestion’s effects totally opposite those of the ring of hunger: rather than cancelling your normal digestion entirely, it only stops you hungering on every other turn, effectively increasing the hunger rate while you wear the ring from 1/20 to 1/2.
Hungerful regeneration from the ring only costs excess nutrition if your HP is actually below full. Possibly, to compensate for not having to micromanage your ring finger, accelerate the hunger rate while regenerating HP: instead of double, perhaps triple or quadruple its usual rate.
Regenerating HP naturally doubles your hunger rate while you are regenerating.
Your base hunger rate is adjusted slightly up or down based on the amount of weight you’re carrying.
Use timing-out intrinsics (beneficial ones gained from corpses) to invert the hunger clock: use the limit on how fast you can hunger as a restriction on how many intrinsics you are maintaining.
Ring of fast living: gives an experience multiplier and increases hunger rate drastically, multiplies your damage but also multiplies damage you take.
The hunger property, instead of doubling hunger rate, halves any nutrition you get from any source, making it marginally more useful for eating large corpses. (This should probably only be granted by the actual hunger intrinsic, i.e. the ring of hunger, as opposed to other intrinsics like conflict and regeneration that burn through nutrition fast but aren’t explicitly about being hungry.)
Merge the rings of sustain ability and slow digestion into a “ring of stasis”. Double-edged effects: slows down digestion like normal, but also slows down healing, energy regeneration, timer effects like confusion and sickness, any timing-out intrinsics, prevents exercise from happening, blocks or reduces to 1 effects that directly change attributes.
Energy regeneration should cause you to hunger faster.
The ring of slow digestion has no ring hunger, but instead prolongs hungering by a factor of 20 (presumably by making hunger naturally decrease only on multiples of 20 turns). Wearing 2 of them prolongs it by a factor of 400.
Ring and amulet hunger should be counted all on turns that are a multiple of 20, to close the two-slow-digestion-rings loophole.
