Skills that you have enhanced in the past, but haven’t used for a long time, slowly lose their training points and, eventually, revert back to lower skill levels and require you to practice the skill again before you can re-enhance it, similar to how amnesia works.

Further nerf drain-for-gain tactics by having the game remember what you spent each new experience level’s skill slot on and automatically restore those skill slots when you regain levels you lost. If you want to reskill, you can use amnesia.

When you enhance a skill, the message should be “You now have [level] skill in [skill name]”, instead of simply “You are now more skilled”.

Artifact book (novel?) that when read teaches you one level of any skill. This may include skills you are restricted in (though it might only raise it to Unskilled) and skills past your role’s cap.

The Oracle offers a service in which she reallocates some skills of your choice, costing some amount of money. Perhaps she can only skill you up to skill levels you formerly had before forgetting them, or else she can only make you forget skills (but you get to choose which unlike with amnesia).

Skills automatically enhance themselves when you have trained them sufficiently. Also, the skill slot system is removed so that you don’t have to worry about training a skill you won’t want later and wasting its slot.

Gloves of skill (or “gauntlets of weapon mastery”): magical gloves which raise your effective skill level in your wielded weapon by 1.

• If you’re Restricted in your weapon, this only treats you as Unskilled, not Basic.
• If you’re Expert in your weapon, they do nothing.
• If the gloves are cursed, they instead reduce skill level by 1, and if they become cursed while wearing them and wielding a weapon, you get a message about how you find it more awkward to wield your weapon.
• Also, you get a message about holding your weapon more confidently when you put them on and your effective skill is raised. This automatically identifies them as well.

Replace the current Basic-to-Expert skill system with a skill tree. Each role is given affinities for skills in this tree, which represent how easy it is to for them to enhance that skill. The baseline value for an affinity is 100. The lower an affinity number, the better it is for that role, because enhancing a skill costs (some base cost * affinity / 100) skill points. Skill points are awarded on each level up.

The end result is a system without arbitrary skill caps, where anyone can theoretically become expert in whatever they want, but if it’s something they’re unsuited for they’ll have rendered themselves unable to become skilled in much else.

Unicorn horn skill should factor into, or even be the primary factor in, whether using a unicorn horn cures you of an affliction.

Differentiate spellcasting greatly for the different types of spellcasters:

• Intelligence casters have a spellbook limited by their level, where higher level spells take up more space.
  • Specifically, they can store up to (10 + XL) levels of spells.
  • Higher skill in a spell’s school provides a discount: 1 level for Basic, 2 for Skilled, and 3 for Expert.
  • So for instance, a level 5 character has 15 spell levels available. If they know force bolt and are Unskilled in attack spells, that takes up 1 level. If they know cancellation and are Skilled in matter spells, that takes up 5 levels (7 - 2 because they are Skilled).
  • When they learn a new spell that cannot fit into their existing spell list, they are prompted to forget known spells until they have enough space, or decline to learn the new spell (which still uses up a read charge on the book).
• Wisdom casters always have all the spells they have learned available so long as they haven’t forgotten them, but are strictly limited in whether they can cast a spell of a given level by their skill in its spell school.
  • If Restricted in a spell school they can only cast spells of up to level 1. If Unskilled, up to 2. Basic, 3; Skilled, 5; and Expert, 7.
• Charisma casters (which only exist in a couple variants) always have all spells available to cast, but can never cast spells twice in a row; there is always a cooldown of (5 - skill) * 2 * spell level. (Skill ranges from 0 at Restricted to 4 at Expert.)

A ring which gives you effective Basic skill in all weapons when you wear it. (Not specified exactly how the #enhance interface would display your skills when using the ring.)

Coaligned (or unaligned) intelligent artifact weapons let you use them as if you had Basic skill, even if you don’t have it. Flavored as the weapon helping you out.

Remove most specific skills for ranged weapons, reducing them to a set of bow, crossbow, sling, and “thrown” (including darts, boomerangs, thrown rocks, etc). When wielded, missiles are always treated as unskilled.

Attacking with a boomerang in melee should use the club skill rather than the boomerang skill.

Spell staves should remove a much greater share of armor penalties for spells of their associated school than they currently do.

Another possible bonus they could have to make them more worthwhile is to treat any spell of their associated school as cast at one higher skill level than your current skill in it (does nothing if you are already Expert, since defining Master effects for spells is likely out of scope).

The hero gains levels twice as fast, for instance by putting a new level cutoff between each existing set of cutoffs (10 for level 1’s 0 to 20, 30 for level 2’s 20 to 40, etc). However, the player must choose with each level gained whether to take most of the effects of gaining an experience level - HP and Pw increases, etc, but NOT a skill slot - or a new skill slot.

The blessed effect of the scroll of amnesia allows you to choose the skills (and spells?) you want to forget, which allows you to reskill more efficiently.

Possibly only do this if your Intelligence is sufficiently high.

Scroll of training, which allows you to readjust your skill slots. Blessed it allows more readjustments than uncursed, whereas a cursed scroll could do something bad like make you choose 2 categories to lose skill in and choose only 1 to regain skill in.

Show the number of available skill points in the #enhance menu.

Rename the lance skill to “jousting”, and make lances not count as polearms for the purpose of applying them at range.

Your skill practice points gradually decrease with time on their own. They will decrease slowly enough that if you are using a weapon infrequently but regularly, you won’t notice anything, but if you go many thousands of turns without using a skill, you may need to retrain and bring it back up to speed. There should either be a message when your skill falls a level due to this decrease, or when you try to start using the skill again only to discover that your skill has decreased.

Minimize the impact of enhancing a skill. Effects that changed with the threshold should be migrated to scale directly with practice as much as possible. If you have maxed a skill to its next enhancement threshold but haven’t or can’t enhance further, further practice is not counted.

Amnesia makes you forget spells and lose skill points instead of forgetting discoveries and maps. Normally, spell recall is drained; if a spell is at 0%, it is completely forgotten.

The player can never learn, or can learn but never cast, spells that they are restricted in.

Priest characters are allowed to choose the pantheon of gods they follow. This gives them Basic proficiency in one or two of the skills of that pantheon’s corresponding role.

When viewing skills with #enhance, show the maximum skill caps for all listed skills.

Merge crossbow and bow skills so that gnomish rangers don’t get hurt by the lack of ammunition.

Track “did not enhance any skills” as a conduct.

Add a “summoned” bitfield to struct monst, which is used to identify monsters that have been created through magical means. Should be a bitfield rather than a flag so that it can track different details of how it was summoned (from trap/wand/etc, by player or by something else; it probably doesn’t warrant a mextra struct). Summoned monsters can have various anti-farming nerfs applied to them: no training skills, no corpses, no deathdrops, no starting inventory, no experience, etc. Possibly, summoned monsters also disappear after a few hundred turns.

The game makes fully clear to the player, in-game, how the skill system works and what the consequences of investing points in a skill means.

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.

Jousting should be affected by riding skill, not just lance skill.

Put more intermediate levels into the skill system, such as Unskilled, Basic, Competent, Skilled, Advanced, Expert, Master, Grand Master.