When a magic trap tames monsters, it should give a message beyond “You feel charismatic” - the scroll of taming “neighborhood is friendlier” message probably works fine here.

Add a throne effect which either copies the confused noncursed effect of a scroll of taming, or mass-tames monsters in the current room. Either of these gives the player an incentive to sit on the throne without killing everything in the room first.

You can tame (or at least pacify) hostile dwarves by throwing potions of booze at them, which they catch.

Charm monster is generally considered too powerful and too low-level, and should probably be nerfed. Ideas:

• It only works if you’re not wearing any armor. (This is apparently how D&D does it.) Alternatively, its chance of successfully charming is reduced the more armor you’re wearing.
• Make it more reliable than it is now, but it always fails if you have other pets. (You can then only have one pet at a time without using scrolls of taming.)
• It only tames one monster at a time. (Make it a directional beam with a maximum range of 1.)
• It only pacifies monsters, and can’t be used to tame an always-hostile monster.
• Make it do what the temporary pet code in the Bard patch does: the monster remains tame for a fairly short amount of time and then reverts to whatever it was originally.
• Split into three spells: pacify monster (peaceful for charisma*2 turns), charm monster (tame for Charisma*2 turns), and dominate monster (tame permanently or for a long time).
• It only works on monsters, and doesn’t work on intelligent beings.
• It can’t directly tame a hostile monster; it can only pacify it. Peaceful monsters can then be tamed by subsequent casts, but attempting to tame a peaceful intelligent monster may anger it instead. The pacification step is dependent only on monster MR, but the taming depends on the player’s level relative to the target. The scroll of taming should remain comparatively powerful.
• Scale with skill: unskilled attempts to pacify one adjacent monster, basic to pacify all adjacent, skilled to tame one adjacent, and expert to tame all adjacent. All of these are subject to normal monster MR checks.
• Whatever nerfs do get applied, they should ensure that the scroll of taming is more powerful and reliable than the spell.

If you are a werecreature in your were form, you can chat to monsters of the same form to tame them.

Give a special message when you fail to tame a dragon as a knight (for whom it’s impossible to tame dragons under any circumstances).

Taming attempts on sandestins, including things such as throwing food at them to eat if they are a domestic animal, are measured against the sandestin’s stats, not its current form’s stats, because they are intelligent.

One of the random throne effects is to tame monsters nearby. However, monsters that normally generate in throne rooms are immune to this effect.

Certain roles have a small set of monsters that they can tame through non-magical means (such as Valkyries and winter wolves).

Some mechanic for Valkyries that involves escorting the spirits/ghosts of those who die in battle.

One take on this idea: you can chat to ghosts to tame them, and then they will follow you around as pets do. Then you can release their spirits by praying on an aligned altar. Doing this successfully gives you some sort of reward. However, hostile monsters will attack the ghosts you are escorting without provocation, making this not trivially easy.

Magical taming is easier to do on coaligned monsters and harder on crossaligned monsters.

Petless conduct: increment when the player starts with a pet or tames a monster.

This conduct could be accidentally broken by the taming effect of a magic trap, which is problematic. One solution is to have magic traps pacify instead of tame if the player has the pet option turned off, but mixing options and gameplay like that seems like a bad idea. Worth noting that polyselfless is another example of a conduct that can be broken accidentally and is far more likely to happen. Note that xNetHack’s implementation of petless conduct just turns the charismatic magic trap effect into a pacification of adjacent monsters regardless of whether you’re petless or not.

Another issue is the guardian angel; it would be especially cruel to unexpectedly break the conduct on the final level of the game. xNetHack’s implementation prevents the angel from appearing if you still have petless conduct intact when arriving on Astral.

You can wish for friends. This duplicates the effect of casting create familiar.

New artifact The Mirror of Venus, a mirror that confers slotless reflection. If you are female, you can invoke it to charm monsters; otherwise, invoking it will only pacify monsters. Will only be gifted to a female character.

(Male counterpart artifact is the Spear of Mars, #2756).

Chatting to the ghost of a dead player may tame it. At least one of your role, race, name, or alignment must match the ghost’s, with an increased chance the more factors match. If the attempt to tame fails, it may become peaceful or remain hostile. In either case, subsequent chatting attempts won’t work.

Soldiers and watchmen can be tamed by throwing gold at them. In order to make them tame, you must give them over a certain initial amount X, which will give 1 point of tameness, and giving them additional gold will increase tameness by 1 for every Y gold. Tameness steadily declines over time, removing Y gold from their inventory each time it drops by a point. Should tameness drop to zero, they become hostile. Chatting with them while tame will give you a clue about how tame they are: they will either talk about how they’re going to spend all their money, or wonder when the next payment is coming, or threaten you for more gold, depending on the amount of tameness. Normal magical taming methods do not work on them (as currently happens).

Throwing a treat at most non-domestic d or f will make them devour it, and will often pacify them and occasionally tame them.

Unicorns can only be tamed/ridden if you have never consorted with a foocubus.

Foocubi can be pacified or tamed by throwing a ring of adornment at them.

Orcish characters will never be able to tame elves, and elvish characters will never be able to tame orcs.

You can convince peaceful intelligent monsters to join your cause (taming them) by chatting with them. The outcome depends on several factors: your respective alignments (lawfuls have a very hard time recruiting chaotic monsters), respective levels, respective races, your Charisma (which should be a large factor), and possibly others. Failing might turn the monster hostile, or do nothing. You only get one attempt per monster; if they don’t want to join you, trying again will never work. More complex behavior could possibly be implemented with the monster demanding something from you or making you do something before they will follow you. E.g. “I’ll only join you for 100 zorkmids,” or “Bring me the helms of three goblins to prove your worth!”

Internally, this would probably work by having a new flag “recruitable” on a monster, which is only set to true when a monster generates as peaceful (and is not set at all for certain monster types like shopkeepers and priests). Chatting first checks this flag: a taming attempt is only made if it is true, and it is set to false regardless of the taming outcome. Some peaceful monsters of a recruitable species could also generate with the recruitable flag as false.

To avoid this conflicting with existing #chat, there are a few options:

• Recruitment attempts only happen when you use the m movement prefix before chatting. This has the disadvantage of not being very discoverable.
• Chatting to recruitable monsters could bring up a menu of possible things to discuss with them, one of which is recruiting and another of which is regular chatting. This has the advantage of being extended to other possible interactions in the future.
• After the regular chat interaction occurs, you are asked if you would like to try recruiting them. There could be an option that disables this prompt.

Rock moles can be tamed by throwing a metal weapon at them, which they will catch and eat.

Add more non-magical ways to get pets that are better than what your starting pets can level into. Such as pet stores with figurines, or being able to tame watchmen by paying them money, or by healing a monster at low HP.