For Infidels, sacrifices of baby monsters (those with a “baby” in their name) are treated as though the monster had a higher difficulty than it actually does, as a reward for sacrificing babies.

Add a Druid role: intended to be a more balanced form of SLASH’EM’s doppelganger race, druids are highly attuned to nature and possess innate shapeshifting abilities.

• You begin the game with polymorph control and get polymorphitis at XL 5 or so.
• Possibly you start with a wand of polymorph, or potions of it.
• Inventory could be severely restricted, so you have to figure out how to do most things through polymorph.
• You have the power to change into a tree, which will make most monsters ignore you. While in tree form, you are immobile but regenerate HP and Pw faster. Orcs might attack you with axes, a la Tolkien.
• Without extrinsic polymorph control, your polymorph control limits you to changing into forms with the M1_ANIMAL flag.
• Possibly have limited access to #polyself outside of wizard mode, so they can change intentionally and not randomly. Would work best as an ability with a timeout, or cost Pw outside of wizard mode.
• Possibly, the monsters you can polymorph into must have a certain base level or difficulty that’s tied to your XL somehow (maybe XL/2). If their base level is too high, you can’t polymorph into them.
• Your controlled polymorphs always succeed - you will never accidentally fail and “feel like a new woman” with the 20% chance that all other roles have.
• You are seriously bad at combat in your regular form, having very little weapon skill (nothing can be advanced to Expert, possibly not even to Skilled), and physically weak in your normal form. Combat in a polyform should be incentivized enough so that it isn’t really worth it to wear any armor. Maybe you should get to-hit and damage bonuses while in a wild form?
• Diminishing returns on polymorph time limit that prevent you from reusing the same form(s) over and over and over again. (This may actually be applicable as a general YANI for polymorph control).
• The critical balance needed is to make polyselfing powerful and awesome to play with and use for typical combat, but simultaneously polyselfing needs enough restrictions that it doesn’t just turn into Master Mind Flayer: The Game.
  • One proposed restriction: you can only turn into monsters you have already encountered, or if that is too lax, into peaceful or tame monsters adjacent to you at the time. The druid should be able to pacify most animalistic monsters to take advantage of this (temporarily?)
• The starting pet is a woodchuck (or wolf). Pantheon is probably drawn from Celtic mythology, though hopefully not overlapping with Knights.
• Some heavy polymorph / monster / player as monster tweaking is probably required, in the sense that there should, ideally, be valid reasons to exist in any given polymorphable form.

Magic traps’ blinding and summoning monsters effects should be split up, since both at once tends to make them much more fatal, especially to early players. Alternatively, make the summoned monster selection with a lower-difficulty pool of monsters.

Statue traps generate monsters with a +5 difficulty modifier (though this might be too high). This is because a statue that surprisingly turns into a level-appropriate monster isn’t usually very threatening.

Randomly generated statues and figurines (and masks in variants that have them) should use a higher effective difficulty when choosing the associated monster species, because using low-level monsters is boring and typically useless to the hero.

This should probably also apply to statue traps, since they are not very threatening at the moment.

Generate a single out-of-difficulty monster on every level, as an experiment to see how the game balance changes (not necessarily as a permanent feature). Or instead of picking something out of difficulty, generate a monster with the maximum permissible difficulty.

Several elaborations on a system for more reliable (and less tedious) gifts from altars:

1. Your god will always give you a gift on the first sacrifice from a given coaligned altar (not if attempting to convert an altar). But after that, they will not give you any more gifts on that altar no matter how much you sacrifice. (Other sacrifice effects will still happen as if you failed the die roll for a gift.) This eliminates all the tedium associated with altar camping for gifts (though not all altar camping in general), but is a significant change since getting one corpse to an altar is much easier than getting multiple ones, and streamlining the game to this extent may be undesirable.
2. As above, but the gift will only be given for the first monster whose difficulty is above a certain threshold (possibly partially dependent on depth, and also with some random factor). Thus, if you sacrifice and get no artifact, you know you have to try a harder monster.
3. The total difficulty of monsters sacrificed is accumulated; the first sacrifice to put you over some threshold (say, 30 cumulative difficulty) is guaranteed to give you a gift. The totaling may or may not be per-altar.
4. Your god has a set list of rewards, each of which is tied to some monster difficulty level. Some of these rewards are artifact gifts; others may be things like luck. You only get a gift when you sacrifice a monster of the requisite difficulty, and thereafter monsters of equal or lesser difficulty to that are ignored by the god for reward purposes (they may still be used for mollifying and decreasing prayer timeout). If you make a sacrifice that earns you multiple rewards at once, you either get them all at once or you get the biggest reward and the smaller ones on subsequent sacrifices. This would enable game developers to fix a number of artifact gifts (say, 3), by encoding that many rewards for them. This system might have problems in games with no deep usable altars where it is harder to get randomly generated difficult monsters.
5. Variation of the above: at the beginning of the game, three random monster difficulties are chosen (with some limiting on ranges). Sacrificing a monster of a difficulty above any of these thresholds automatically gives you a sacrifice gift and removes the highest remaining threshold you met.

Track the amount of time the player has spent on a given dungeon level. As it increases, random monster spawns gradually get less frequent (unless you have the demigod flag set, which overrules this) and more difficult, starting at one or two thousand turns spent on the level.

A polymorphed monster will turn into a monster of similar difficulty to its current form, rather than a monster of difficulty appropriate to the current dungeon level.

Player monsters do not generate with dragon scale mail until well after the difficulty where adult dragons spawn.

A new branch with infinite levels, whose level difficulty continues steadily increasing the deeper you go. Monsters killed do not drop anything, except that there is a very small chance, increasing with greater difficulty, of dropping a single wand of wishing. Unlike the rest of the dungeon, monster generation cares only about the level difficulty, ignoring the player’s experience level.

Levels in this branch are non-persistent. To prevent destroying any unique items, you either can’t bring them into the branch at all, or you are prevented from leaving a level in any way while they are on the level somewhere other than your person. Not determined what drinking a cursed potion of gain level would do.

One way to increase the challenge and prevent the hero from resting on the downstairs every level and starting each new level fresh is to suppress or remove natural HP regeneration in this branch.

Using an upstairs will take you back to the branch entrance, which may then close off forever. Possibly, 9/10 of upstairs will just crumble to nothing upon arrival in the level (whether this 9/10 is random or happens regularly every 10 levels isn’t determined). This makes it less easy to decide to bail out, though levelport or branchport would probably still work as escape items.

Not determined is to what degree the branch should enforce the player to spend time on each level. The three proposed options are:

1. No enforcement. The player can go as deep as they want by digging a hole right away with the increased risk it entails.
2. Enforced finding the downstairs. The floor is nondiggable, so the player has to at least reach the downstairs in order to travel further.
3. Enforced battling a certain amount (or all) of the monsters. The downstairs will not let you travel down them unless you have killed a certain amount of monsters on the level.

Sharply cut the frequency of lizards spawning (possibly even lower than 1/7), and possibly remove the special case that makes them always leave a corpse. This is because a player will usually accumulate enough of their corpses to be easily safe from any delayed stoning effect for the whole game. This won’t much affect reverse genociding them, if the player really wants a lizard corpse.

Also, possibly elevate their monster difficulty to something higher than 6; not because they are that difficult, but to make them appear only later on in the dungeon.

Alternatively, simply make lizard corpses rot, so that a player who wants to carry around a stoning defense must use other items, such as tins of lizard or acidic monsters, or potions of acid.

Revamp the scroll of scare monster: rather than being good indefinitely as long as it’s not picked up, it will increment an internal counter whenever it scares a monster, by an amount equal to that monster’s HD or difficulty. The scroll disintegrates on the floor after this “total difficulty of monsters scared” counter exceeds some value.

Fuzz the effective difficulty of monsters sacrificed, so that you can’t trivially count up and calculate how much more you need to sacrifice.

One possible “trouble” if you are praying is having more than a certain total level/total difficulty of hostile monsters around you relative to your own level. If your god decides you are in trouble from this and decides to fix the trouble, they will teleport you horizontally somewhere else on the level far from any monsters. If the level is non-teleport, they will instead lift you up one level like a potion of gain level would. If that cannot be done, they will not attempt to fix it.

Walled-off sections of graveyards with locked doors named “crypts” can generate. Inside crypts are very strong out-of-difficulty mummies. Note that this would require that very strong mummies exist in the game in the first place.

Monsters that spawn in groups are regarded by the monster-generation function as having a higher difficulty than they actually do.

Dragons’ alignments are adjusted so that the values actually matter (at the least, yellow should be very lawful, gray should be pure neutral, and black should be very chaotic), and are not specified as M2_HOSTILE anymore so that they can rarely be generated peaceful. Perhaps more interestingly, their difficulties should be varied.

Increase the difficulty of werecreatures, to compensate both for their lycanthropy and that they are capable of summoning many monsters of equivalent difficulty.

If a shrieker summons a purple worm with its shriek, check for difficulty first. If purple worms would be out of difficulty, generate a baby purple worm instead.

Chameleons randomly select a monster of up to (level difficulty + N) when shapechanging, not any monster ever.

Restrict bones files from being loaded (possibly just discarding the bones file) if they contain monsters that are far out of difficulty for the player encountering them.

When choosing the monster type for a mask, use a higher difficulty threshold than it would take to generate monsters; otherwise masks only generate with level-appropriate monsters which the player probably doesn’t want to turn into.

Special candle found generated in Gehennom. While one is lit on a level, it suppresses spawn rates and makes the difficulty about what it is now (without the candle lit monsters will generate at a much higher difficulty). They should be fairly nonrenewable, perhaps wishable but not polymorphable. This limits your duration of time in “easy Gehennom” before it gets harder. The candles work the same outside Gehennom, but are less useful (maybe they specifically suppress demon spawns).

Burnt offerings: via some mechanism, you get the corpse smoldering on the altar. When sacrificed, it is treated as higher difficulty.

The maximum difficulty a monster can be generated at is independent of player experience level. Only the level difficulty (and perhaps other player-independent stats such as branch) matter. The details of how the curve of monster difficulty compared to level difficulty should look are up to debate; NetHack4’s is a piecewise function that climbs slowly until level 10 and thereafter is (level difficulty - 5).

As a more minor version of this, only enforce this rule during level creation, and respect experience level for monsters generated after creation.

Figurine monsters generate with an inflated monster generation difficulty (because a figurine of most at-difficulty monsters is likely to be underwhelming as a potential pet).

You have access to the full total allotment of skill points from the beginning of the game (effectively making it so that gaining more levels isn’t required to unlock skill slots). To compensate, you can only train skills by fighting at-difficulty monsters or higher, so you can’t train everything by farming weak monsters.

Ammunition that is +X will break if and only if it scores a hit on a monster above a certain difficulty. The formula suggested was that it can only break when 5X+3 < difficulty, but this is just a wild guess at the numbers and isn’t balanced.

q class monsters should have their difficulty rebalanced to at least roughly reflect their damage output; mumakil are the strongest q of all and have one of the lowest difficulties.

Gods are more likely to give gifts for higher-difficulty sacrifices.