Enhance Minetown with a bunch of new NPC denizens:

• Dwarven trainer: found in a largish room.
  • Chatting to him makes him ask if you want to train, for a fee. If you say yes and pay it, he shouts “Defend yourself!” and begins to fight with you. This lasts until you chat with him again. While you are in this training fight, neither of you deal damage to the other one, though you can still deal damage normally to other things.
  • If you don’t want to train, he offers to teach you how to disarm for a large sum of money. Disarming is a technique you can use with the #disarm command after you have learned it from him. Possibly, it unlocks a “disarming” skill that you can’t get elsewhere. When you use the disarm command, you are prompted for a direction to pick an adjacent monster. The monster must be wielding a weapon, and you must have some minimum amount of skill in your weapon (which can be martial arts). The chance of success is 20% base, +1% per point of Luck (or -1% per negative Luck), +5% for every skill level above Unskilled you are in either your weapon skill, or the disarm skill, +2% per level you have over the monster, and -2% per level the monster has over you.
• Elven enchantress: Mutually exclusive with the trainer. Chatting with her prompts you for an item to enchant.
  • Items that are not naturally enchantable with enchant scrolls get refused.
  • Artifacts or items at their maximum enchantment get refused; she gives a line about how it is already surrounded by powerful magic and she dares not attempt it.
  • If the item is damaged, it gets repaired, for a modest amount of money per level of damage.
  • If the item is undamaged but not blessed, it gets blessed, charging a slightly higher amount of money.
  • If the item is blessed and undamaged, its enchantment is increased by 1, charging a larger amount of money that scales in direct proportion to the preexisting enchantment on that item.
  • She possibly fooproofs the item if it’s at maximum enchantment.
• Dwarven innkeeper: also found in a large room.
  • Chatting to him has him offer you an ale, for either 5 zorkmids or the appropriate buy cost of a potion of booze, and accepting produces the effects of an uncursed potion of booze, as well as identifying the potion of booze. 50% of the time, he also gives you a random rumor as if from an uncursed fortune cookie. (Criticism of this is that on-demand confusion makes several early-game challenges involving confused effects of scrolls trivial.)
  • He will also offer you a room to stay the night if the Watch is not angry at you, for either $50 or the cost of a potion of full healing. Accepting fully heals you (or produces the effects of an uncursed potion of full healing, without identifying the potion since one wasn’t involved). Not specified how it should deal with the time you are sleeping, whether that means literally putting you to sleep or something else.
• Old gladiator: found 1/3 of the time, possibly in the inn; chatting to him produces some old battle stories and a request for an ale (same price as if you were buying it yourself). The first time you buy him an ale, he will teach you a random weapon skill. Subsequent times he only thanks you drunkenly for the drink.
• Aged traveler: found 1/3 of the time, possibly in the inn, mutually exclusive with the gladiator; chatting to him has him offer to tell you the depth of the Oracle level for 50 zorkmids, or offer to “teach you some things he’s learned in his travels” for 1000 zorkmids, which acts like a blessed potion of gain level, but is not available after you get it once. Alternatively, he could teach you several random item identities.
• Dirty drunk: found 1/3 of the time, possibly in the inn, mutually exclusive with the gladiator and traveler.
• Bar brawler: found in the inn, interacting with him in any way will make him angry and start a fight. You’re allowed to fight but not kill him (which would anger the Watch), and you can pacify him by putting him to sleep, paying him off, beating him close enough to death to make him give up, or whatever. If the fight breaks out in the inn you owe the innkeeper money for broken furniture.
• Criminal or mugger: chatting to them makes them aware of you and they will try to steal from you later.
• Merchant: Wanders around Minetown, slightly weaker than a shopkeeper. Will sell you food rations at the standard price. Criticism of this is that an unlimited source of food rations is unbalancing and makes a delicatessen obsolete. To add balance, he might have a limited quantity of them to sell, but then he is still kind of pointless.
• Beggar: Has one randomly generated item, which he will sell at either its standard price or a discount. Most of the time this won’t be useful, but occasionally it could be something good.
• Bureaucrat: sits alone in a small room. Chatting with him makes him sneer at you, “I’m busy”. However, if the Watch is angry, he will offer to take a large amount of gold from you to pacify them.

A secondary proposal is to make some of the denizens who teach you things actually useless a random amount of the time. For instance, the gladiator is a liar who’s good at spinning stories and not much else, or the aged traveler is a charlatan who gives misinformation, abusing Wisdom or sapping your experience points.

Add a #pour command, which allows you to pour a potion on your own or an adjacent space. This allows you to do things like pour healing potions on your pet rather than smashing them with it, possibly pouring acid and other harmful potions on adjacent monsters, pouring water on fire elementals and other fiery monsters, etc.

A command that enables you to mark a stash. When you die, the contents of any containers on such marked stashes are displayed.

Add a #notes command, which opens up a blank text editor window where you can type anything you want. The notes are saved along with the game and can be referenced anytime from within it.

To prevent this being a hugely complicated undertaking (basically implementing a text editor in the game, which won’t mesh particularly well with players used to other text editors), one suggestion is to use the shell’s default editor, but then this becomes akin to just using out-of-game notes anyway.

Another suggestion is to implement it using a system similar to autopickup exceptions: the player can add, edit, list, and delete one-line notes, which doesn’t require implementing any text editing capability the game doesn’t already have.

Make #polyself a non-wizard-mode-exclusive command. When used in regular play, it will:

1. Cast the polymorph spell at yourself, if you know it.
2. Otherwise, attempt to activate a polymorph trap you are standing on.
3. Otherwise, fail like the #teleport command would when you are unable to teleport at will.

New command, #use. It is undocumented and hidden in the list of commands so that only experienced players or source divers will know about it. It translates into the typical command an experienced player would situationally use. E.g. on a throne with no items it turns into #sit, on a box it does #loot, on an altar it turns into #offer.

A #shove command, which allows you to shove a monster back one space, and will not anger most peacefuls, for the purpose of pushing peaceful monsters out of an altar room when they start crowding the altar you are trying to sacrifice things on. (Presumably, shoving a shopkeeper or priest or anything trying to stick to a specific location would not work the same.)

A #drag command, which enables you to transport items heavier than you can lift across the ground, such as corpses, stash chests, and ice boxes.

Wizard mode command #wizforget, which unidentifies all carried items to the greatest extent possible.

An #alarm command that allows you to set an alarm for X turns in the future or on turn Y, at which point the game will print a reminder for you that requires a –More– by default.

Implement a wizard mode command that freezes all monsters (done by blocking their normal movement point gain), which is useful for debugging.

A much more fleshed out interaction system for sapient monsters. It is initiated by chatting, which opens up a menu offering four key verbs: Ask, Tell, Show, and Give.

Ask is used to gain information from a monster; this could be a whole bunch of things, from rumors to identification to information about the dungeon. Each type of monster you can ask things of has a limited knowledge base, and this knowledge base may contain some inaccurate information. Especially interesting is the possibility that you can ask someone for identification, and they tell you what they think it is - which could be right or wrong, but a good clue either way. You can also ask someone to join you, and pay them some gold to tame them for a certain amount of time.

Tell is currently a less developed part of this idea; the only thing suggested so far is that you can tell a creature about traps you’ve discovered, which will make those traps known to the creature. You can also use “tell calm” on your pets to make them refrain from attacking peacefuls.

Show lets you select any item from your inventory to show to the monster. This can be used for intimidation (e.g. showing a stack of iron skull caps to a goblin).

Give lets you give items to a monster, which in some cases, depending on the AI, lets you test the effects of items.

Note that a potential pitfall of such a system is that if it’s complex enough to do interesting things with, it is probably going to be hard to use without spoilers. And if it’s uncomplex enough, it runs the risk of most possible responses being “I don’t know/care about that”, which also makes it hard to use without spoilers. A middle ground between these is likely to require an enormous amount of work.

The player can shove things, dealing no damage but pushing the monster back. The monster can resist and fail to be shoved; it will resist a lot if the terrain you’re trying to shove it onto is bad for it (like water). You can only shove if you have hands, and you cannot do it to small or tiny monsters. Possibly an AT_SHOV attack should also be introduced for monsters to shove the player.

Command that saves your non-default, non-duplicated options to an autogenerated config file, or appends them to your existing config file, or writes out a config file with the wrong name and location (so you can copy and edit it).

Separate command to pick up an item and put it into a bag immediately after, in 1 turn. Or an option that changes pickup behavior to this effect.

A #ragequit command, that quits the game without any confirmation. But it’s a non-autocompleting extended command, so you do have to type the whole word out.

A command that you can prefix some action with to voluntarily make that interruptible action uninterruptible.

Command that marks a given square with something that’s visible on the map but doesn’t exist in the actual game.

Escape as its own key should be used as an actual escape command, so you can do things like try to get out of pits and engulfers with it.

Have the tab key be a shortcut for auto-attacking monsters (at range or at polearm range).

Valkyries can fly at will with the #fly command, but it costs Pw per turn/flying action to maintain.

Command (generalization of #tip, or #dump, have both been suggested) to transfer all items from one container into another container without having to temporarily place them in your inventory. It would be better but perhaps harder to implement if you could pick and choose which items were being transferred, rather than all of them.