Convert the sleeping gas trap to just “gas trap”, and make it scale based on the difficulty. Each individual trap releases a single type of gas; which type is partially dependent on the level difficulty. At low levels, they all emit sleeping gas like normal. At higher levels, they emit stunning hallucination gas like container traps, clouds of poison gas, and maybe even nastier gases that reduce speed or miasmas that cause illness.

Artifact cloak of invisibility Death’s Embrace, which grants phasing, immunity to death effects, and half physical damage, but reduces speed.

Boots of fleeing: they give bonus movement points based on how many turns ago your last offensive action was (offensive actions are things that would fade an Elbereth underneath you). For the first several turns after combat they grant no speed bonus, then gradually scale up to full speed. This means that remaining in combat grants you no speed advantage but lets you travel very fast if you avoid it.

Speed boots can give you additional movement points equal to their enchantment. There are a couple non-mutually-exclusive options for doing this:

• This only works for blessed speed boots.
• If the enchantment is negative, they subtract movement points, to a minimum of 1.
• To avoid the amount of movement points being predictable, the number of bonus movement points is slightly fuzzed by adding a random number from -1 to +1 each time it’s applied.
• The boots do not themselves provide any bonus movement, or provide a smaller one than they do now. The bonus from enchantment makes up the bulk of it.

A monster carrying a loadstone is slowed to half or 2/3 of its normal speed.

Implement a player fear system that unlike many other proposals, does not take away agency from the player by paralyzing them or forcing them to flee using a predefined algorithm. Instead, it incentivizes the player to flee by making continued combat unattractive.

Create a new intrinsic called “Panic”/”Panicking”. Sources of fear (including existing sources of paralysis-fear, e.g. ghosts) give you temporary amounts of this intrinsic. While you are panicking:

• You have a large to-hit penalty, possibly making it so that you can only land a hit when rolling a natural 20. (Directly subtracting a large number from to-hit could still be overcome by wearing rings of increase accuracy and would be hard to balance the exact number.)
• You deal half damage for any attack you can make land.
• Ranged attacks have a high chance of misfiring in the wrong direction.
• Spells not in the escape school or designated as emergency spells (or healing spells, for variants that remove emergency spells) have a higher failure rate or are uncastable.
• Your skills may be treated as if they are the levels you started the game with.
• Your speed is slightly boosted (if possible, only your movement speed, not your general attack/item use speed).
• If you die, your death reason will have a “while panicking” appended to it.

Boots with the random appearance of “hiking” slightly decrease the speed penalties if you are encumbered.

Additional temporary effects accompany drinking a potion of booze. The effects wear off when the confusion does (so if you extend it by, say, drinking a potion of confusion, the effects are prolonged). There is consensus that there should be both positive and negative effects; all of the following have been proposed:

• A damage bonus, or even double damage
• Temporary HP
• An accuracy penalty (or a Dexterity penalty)
• Slight reduction of speed
• Temporary cold resistance (debatable; if possible it should probably make you not feel cold attacks but still take regular damage from them)
• Attacking an enemy makes you automatically keep fighting it until one of you is dead
• Monsters are treated as having higher charisma (currently no monsters are treated as having charisma at all, but this could also hurt or nullify your ability to refuse a foocubus removing your clothes)
• You may pass out when the confusion ends, and end up with a hangover when you wake up. (Not described what the effects of a hangover would be). You may also find yourself suddenly on a different level when you wake up.
• You are protected from gaze attacks due to not being able to focus enough to meet someone’s gaze.
• If you’re a dwarf, the effects get magnified
• If there is any such thing as a player-is-scared effect, it is canceled when you drink the booze and blocked while you’re under the influence. This goes for however long the confusion persists, so you can extend it by drinking potions of confusion if you want.
• Any AC from your armor is nullified (this would also contribute to monk “drunken boxing” proposals, since monks don’t usually have as much armor AC)