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.

Rarely, a player monster will be generated as following a random conduct or conducts. This influences both their gear (e.g. a nudist player monster will not have armor, a zen player monster will wear a blindfold) as well as their behavior (a pacifist player monster will not attack).

Player monsters who spawn at a certain depth have a very low chance of generating carrying their quest’s artifact. This chance is highest when deeper than the Castle, but is still low.

Doppelgangers that transform into player monsters may adopt a name from the top 10 list when they do so (but not always). When they transform into something else, they discard the name.

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

Player monsters on the Astral Plane can be named after people on the top ten list (note that they don’t all have to be; some can use the same names they have now). Possibly, pick a different name if a player monster would be generated with the player’s own name, in order to avoid problems on single-user installs where everyone on the top ten list could have the same name as the player. Then again, that could be cool.

Assuming an implementation in which player monsters can steal the Amulet of Yendor from you: they may instead steal an imitation amulet you are carrying in main inventory.

Up for debate whether they should have, say, a fixed 50% chance of stealing the real Amulet regardless of how many fakes you are carrying, or whether they should pick one of your apparent Amulets at random, which would give an advantage to carting around more fakes.

If Mjollnir is thrown and would hit a valkyrie player monster wearing gauntlets of power, they catch it instead.

General artifact-stealing attack; like the Wizard’s quest-artifact-steal attack but applicable to all artifacts and without Amulet of Yendor theft baked in. Archeologist player monsters might use this (“That belongs in a museum!”).

Player monsters can pray and become invulnerable and have their problems fixed by their god.

Inside the Wizard’s Tower, the player encounters some of the Wizard’s hostile apprentice wizards.

One or two softball easy player monsters that generate early in the dungeon, with mostly starting gear, and are not hard to kill.

If you get another role’s quest artifact through bones or wishing, player monsters of that role will gradually start to be spawned of increasing difficulty who pursue and hunt you down because you are now their quest nemesis.

Player monsters, crossaligned priests, and hostile angels on the Astral Plane are able to steal the Amulet from you. Should they get it, they will try to make a beeline to their high altar to sacrifice it. The player is also able to steal the Amulet back, though; and wearing the Amulet acts as one turn of protection against it being stolen; an attempt to steal it will just remove it from your neck. If something else ascends, your game ends in an escape. However, all these monsters are hostile towards the Amulet-bearer, not you; so if it gets stolen from you, the pressure will let up a bit.

Allow taming of player monsters in bones with one prerequisite: you must tame its ghost, draw the ghost over the corpse, and then revive the corpse. To facilitate this, killing a player monster should always generate a ghost over the corpse, possibly with a gravestone and 80% of inventory being cursed.

Player monsters should always resist conflict.

Whenever a player is killed by a mind flayer, they become a thrall in their bones file. In FIQHack, this means they leave an active hostile player monster in the bones with 100% chance instead of 33%.