Rather than bugles being tuneless, they should be able to play sequences of notes containing only C, E, and G.

Solve the problem of pets wasting their hard-trained apport by picking up and dropping objects randomly all over the dungeon, by triggering them only to use it when the hero plays any instrument (or maybe any non-magical instrument). Bonus points if the player can train the pet by playing an arbitrary sequence of notes (chosen by the player) on tonal instruments.

Various effects for armor pieces based on their randomized description:

• Buckled boots and old gloves: cost (and sell for) twice as much in a shop.
• Hiking boots: prompt before walking into known pits or holes.
• Mud boots: autocurse when worn.
• Padded gloves and visored helmet: +1 to AC.
• Tattered cape: -1 to Charisma.
• Ornamental cope: +1 to Charisma.
• Opera cloak: some sort of bonus when using musical instruments.
• Plumed helmet: +1 to Charisma, -1 to Dexterity (or have these adjustments multiplied by its enchantment).

Cursed tonal instruments are incapable of playing notes, and instead just make noise.

A new take on a Bard role, generally themed around leading a party of other adventurers through the dungeon, with some other additional ideas:

• The bard and healer cannot both be focused around petmongering, so one of them would have to change. Most likely the healer, as the bard’s traditional abilities are only good on pets.
• Instead of the standard little dog or kitten, the bard starts with a “party” of 3-4 player monsters, who are randomly chosen from other roles.
  • This would make the primary strategy focused on having the party do the fighting for you, letting them level up, providing them with weapons and equipment, and not letting them die.
  • Healers and archeologists, and possibly tourists, don’t make very good additions to the party, and so should perhaps be ineligible.
  • Party roles could be randomly chosen from distinct sets of “strong melee fighter” (Bar or Cav or Kni or Val), “ranged combat” (Ran or Rog or Sam or possibly Tou), and “spellcaster/cleric” (possibly Hea or Mon or Pri or Wiz). These could also just be hardcoded.
  • The party will not start with the full starting inventory of their respective roles. They will generally have the same weapons and armor, but will probably not have any of the scrolls, rings, wands they normally start with, and starting spellbooks should be either eliminated or unrandomized. In other words, you shouldn’t be incentivized to slaughter your allies for their stuff.
• Healer strategy should shift away from petmongering - the easiest way to do this is change the protection formula in such a way that the protection racket doesn’t exist; so that the player isn’t incentivized to keep XL as low as possible until they can buy protection.
• Difficult for Healers to find a new niche. (Avoidance of combat is an option, but dtsund’s Class Overhaul Proposal calls for Archeologists to fill that niche). Perhaps something that focuses on pacifying monsters by healing them, but this has issues: you shouldn’t be able to ‘‘tame’’ by healing since that turns Healers back in the direction of acquiring lots of pets, and most monsters start at full HP and don’t need any healing.
• Bards (and probably all players) should be able to equip their pets by #looting them, or a similar mechanism. (This would also apply to mounts.) Intelligent monsters will prefer player-given items above all others and will never willingly replace them for other gear. Possibly make this behavior dependent on options, because some players may want their pets to be pragmatic in their gear choices.
• Player monster pets should perhaps not be able to detect curses.
• Songbooks, + class items which contain a song that the bard can learn.
  • Balancing the songbook generation rate against spellbooks might be tricky, because although bards can still cast spells and other roles can play songs, each is not very likely to have that much use for the other set of books. Hardcoding different probabilities based on whether the character is a bard or not doesn’t seem very clean.
  • Possibly the bard should be able to discover songs by trial and error, although simple brute forcing is definitely not the way to do it. Maybe all spellbooks start identified.
  • The bard could need to practice the song by using the songbook in order to restore “song memory”. Song memory does not work quite like spell memory, it works essentially like direct success rate. There might be some mandatory delay between practices, meaning you can’t take an unlearned song and practice it up to 100% immediately. Or there could be a possible failure of practice, maybe a dexterity penalty (“Dumb move! You strain your fingers.”) to serve to prevent practice-spam. Playing a song would serve to
  • Songbooks do not eventually go blank, and can be used for practice indefinitely.
  • Or to keep it realistic with learning actual songs, you need to have the songbook on hand early on when you want to play it, but as you play it more and gain practice, you can eventually play the song without it anymore.
• The bard should possibly be able to sing some of their songs without requiring an instrument.

See also: Bard implementations.

Cursed wind instruments (bugle, whistle, most horns) stick to your face when used, preventing you from using #chat or making other forms of conversation (to shopkeepers, demon lords, priests, etc, though most of these are ambiguous on whether the hero needs to speak) and possibly also preventing eating.

Alternatively, using the cursed wind instrument could simply produce “You hurt your vocal cords!” and make you mute for some length of time.

With greasy fingers, you are incapable of playing flutes or harps, which require fine finger control. Attempting to do so just gives a message “Your fingers slip on the strings/valves”.

Possibly, attempting to play any instrument with greasy fingers makes you fumble and drop it, since even things like horns and bugles which don’t require finesse still need to be held.

Playing a cursed tonal instrument accepts your input sequence of notes, but then prints “Your finger slips. You play ‘XXXXX’ instead”. This is either a random sequence of notes, or a sequence which is mostly the same as your intention but with one or two notes shifted slightly.

Artifact instruments that are actually useful.

Using a cursed tonal instrument makes the gears and tumblers in the castle drawbridge lie to you.

Blessed charging can select a nonmagical instrument, converting it into a (uncharged?) magical version of the same instrument.

Soldiers occasionally drop piccolos, which act similarly to wooden flutes (but made of metal).

This could also be done in the object materials patch without adding a new item for piccolos, by simply having them drop metal flutes.