Dynamite in SLASH’EM should be changed so that it uses a digging explosion, and carves out tiles in its blast radius, rather than just a really powerful fiery explosion that doesn’t affect terrain. It should probably also create pits randomly in the blast radius.

Also, Archeologists should start with some dynamite (though perhaps they, or at least Lawful ones, ought to get alignment.penalties for using it, since blowing up your dig site is poor archeological practice).

Tourists start the game with a fake Amulet of Yendor, or else have it pre-identified.

Add a Druid role: intended to be a more balanced form of SLASH’EM’s doppelganger race, druids are highly attuned to nature and possess innate shapeshifting abilities.

• You begin the game with polymorph control and get polymorphitis at XL 5 or so.
• Possibly you start with a wand of polymorph, or potions of it.
• Inventory could be severely restricted, so you have to figure out how to do most things through polymorph.
• You have the power to change into a tree, which will make most monsters ignore you. While in tree form, you are immobile but regenerate HP and Pw faster. Orcs might attack you with axes, a la Tolkien.
• Without extrinsic polymorph control, your polymorph control limits you to changing into forms with the M1_ANIMAL flag.
• Possibly have limited access to #polyself outside of wizard mode, so they can change intentionally and not randomly. Would work best as an ability with a timeout, or cost Pw outside of wizard mode.
• Possibly, the monsters you can polymorph into must have a certain base level or difficulty that’s tied to your XL somehow (maybe XL/2). If their base level is too high, you can’t polymorph into them.
• Your controlled polymorphs always succeed - you will never accidentally fail and “feel like a new woman” with the 20% chance that all other roles have.
• You are seriously bad at combat in your regular form, having very little weapon skill (nothing can be advanced to Expert, possibly not even to Skilled), and physically weak in your normal form. Combat in a polyform should be incentivized enough so that it isn’t really worth it to wear any armor. Maybe you should get to-hit and damage bonuses while in a wild form?
• Diminishing returns on polymorph time limit that prevent you from reusing the same form(s) over and over and over again. (This may actually be applicable as a general YANI for polymorph control).
• The critical balance needed is to make polyselfing powerful and awesome to play with and use for typical combat, but simultaneously polyselfing needs enough restrictions that it doesn’t just turn into Master Mind Flayer: The Game.
  • One proposed restriction: you can only turn into monsters you have already encountered, or if that is too lax, into peaceful or tame monsters adjacent to you at the time. The druid should be able to pacify most animalistic monsters to take advantage of this (temporarily?)
• The starting pet is a woodchuck (or wolf). Pantheon is probably drawn from Celtic mythology, though hopefully not overlapping with Knights.
• Some heavy polymorph / monster / player as monster tweaking is probably required, in the sense that there should, ideally, be valid reasons to exist in any given polymorphable form.

Address startscumming by introducing a point buy system for starting characters: unrandomizing starting stats and inventory and letting the user spend points on stats and equipment however they like. (Note: dtsund’s class overhaul proposal also addresses unrandomization of starting inventory by simply removing all the random chances to get items, but it doesn’t involve point buy.)

Starting stats

• Any point buy for stats is likely to involve a tedious interface. Developers could get around this by making it options-only, perhaps in a way that allows the user to say “buy to get my Strength up to 10, and my Int up to 9, and randomly pick the rest”, but specifying it per-role could get annoying.
• It’s important to allow people who want to start and splat games rapid-fire to do so, and it would be preferable if new players didn’t have to learn the complexities of a new interface.
• The rc file must allow the user to specify starting stats per-role in this case, or specify that they want random stats.
• “Dump stats” like Cha, and Int and Wis for non-spellcasters, allow people to buff their important stats at the expense of unimportant stats, which may indicate some underlying balance issues with these stats or that the stats can have too wide of a starting range.

Starting inventory

• Even in a non-point-buy system, for starting inventory in cases like for Monk and Wizard where the player gets a random spellbook with equal weight among the possible choices, the player should be able to select which.
• Any point buy system for inventory should probably be options-only, since designing an interface to do so would be complicated.
• Naturally, items like magic markers and rings of polymorph control cost lots of points, whereas things like apples and oil lamps cost only a few.
• Some items should probably have maximums.
• This would come at the expense of players who actually want different nonrandom starting inventories and don’t want to have to edit their rc file every time.
• If the player’s options leave some or all of the available points free, the game will randomly buy items until there are no points left.
• Unspent points should probably convert into a certain amount of gold.
• Possibly the default items are expressed as a list which consumes most or all of the points and is sorted from highest priority to lowest, and ones the user specifies get moved to the beginning of the list, which will push the low-priority items into the range of not being able to be purchased.
• Certain items, like the knight’s lance and probably most armor, should not be purchasable, and the character always gets them.
• FIQ proposed a system in which you can specify one item, and the game will try to reroll your starting inventory many times until it gets that item. Since this is effectively built-in tool-assisted startscumming, it gets tracked as a conduct. However, making it a conduct could be self-defeating in that people who don’t want the game to show they broke the conduct will not use this system and continue to startscum.

Incantifiers should not be eligible to receive a spellbook of detect food at the beginning of the game, because it’s pretty much useless to them.

Hobbit players should always start the game with a non-harmful ring.

Elvish players start the game with knowledge of one low-level enchantment spell that is not sleep or charm monster. They do not start with a spellbook of that spell, though. (If they get the same spell in a spellbook as a Wizard, it could either choose a different one or just not count.)

Either guarantee that the potion of healing will be smoky for Healers, or guarantee that it will never be smoky. Guaranteeing them to be smoky is basically an open invitation to startscum them, though.

Any rings the player starts with can’t be more than +2 or +3, because randomly starting with +5 rings is rather overpowered.

Rogues start with a stack of knives instead of daggers, but their dagger skill cap isn’t changed; if a Rogue wants to use daggers, they have to go find some themselves rather than beginning the game with them.

Archeologists begin the game with a grappling hook.

Monks start with potions or a wand of enlightenment.

Elven priests start with an elven shield instead of a small shield.

Beartraps are much lighter so as to make them feasible to carry around, and Rangers start out with two or three of them.

Stealing gloves (also possibly named “rogues gloves” or “gauntlets of thievery”). 0 base AC, and Rogues begin the game wearing a pair. When you hit a monster barehanded while wearing them, you deal no damage (and don’t train bare handed combat skill) but you get a Dex-versus-monster-AC chance of stealing a random non-equipped item or some gold out of their inventory. You can also attack a peaceful monster with them to attempt to steal something; in addition to the Dex-vs-AC roll, this requires passing both another Dex check and a Cha check for them not to notice. If the Dex check fails, you don’t steal anything successfully; if the Cha check fails, they notice (waking up if asleep) and get mad. If the stolen item is currently equipped, there’s no Cha check; the monster just gets alerted and angry.

Don’t maybe give Wizards a scroll of punishment in their initial inventory.

Tourists begin the game with walking shoes.

You can set some fixed inventory letters in the config file, so you don’t have to adjust them manually. In its simplest form, this would apply only to starting inventory, and would allow things like a Tourist’s credit card to be guaranteed to be placed on a familiar letter.

New type of book “encyclopedia”:

• Appears as a “hardback book” when unidentified, base price 300.
• Nonmagical and always polypiles into a blank spellbook.
• When read, it adds the appearance of some unknown magical items (1d4 if blessed, 1d3 if uncursed, 1 if cursed, plus 1 if you are an Archeologist) to your discovery list.
• It doesn’t disappear when read, but will set a flag that prevents its effects from happening again. This flag will be cleared when creating a bones file.
• Archeologists start with a special blessed encyclopedia (using a different flag), which is their research (the starting one comes pre-read and isn’t useful to this character). Reading an unread archeologist encyclopedia gives the message “These seem to be an archeologist’s notes. You pore over them intently.”, and type-IDs two unknown scrolls, rings, amulets, and wands, and puts two blessed scrolls of magic mapping into your inventory.
• The Archeologist home level contains another encyclopedia.
• There has to be an incentive for archeologists carrying around their encyclopedia so it doesn’t just get discarded as dead weight. A flavorful way to do this would be to award them extra experience points (say, double or triple) when they learn new object types while carrying an encyclopedia.

Sunglasses, an eye-slot tool that protects versus being blinded by flashes of light from things like lightning bolts, cameras, and yellow lights, either completely or with an 80% chance. (They probably shouldn’t block blinding from spat venom.) May also block certain gaze attacks. They should have some downside when worn, such as limiting your maximum vision radius or impeding searching.

Tourists start with a pair of sunglasses.

Tourists start with a leash.

Gnomish characters get some interesting starting items, like tin openers, candles, oil, or cans of grease.

Remove the bell from the list of musical instruments that Elf characters can receive at the start of the game. This is because it’s atonal and its only half decent use is to attract pets (note that elves can’t get tin whistles, so clearly summoning pets is not important enough to qualify something for initial inventory).