Rather than the replacement for techniques being certain roles learning new spells from nowhere once you achieve a certain experience level, have the spells be known from the beginning, but uncastable unless you are above that level.

This also helps disincentivize drain-for-gain tactics, since keeping yourself at a lower level will cut off your access to certain spells.

A “spin attack” technique, a la The Legend of Zelda, that you can do if you are wielding a sword. It indiscriminately hits every space in a radius of 1 around you. Possibly if you take passive damage you stop spinning, but possibly not.

All monk techniques should have shorter timeouts, but if a technique is used in chained blitz, it has a one-off very long timeout.

Monks get shorter cooldowns for techniques as their experience level increases, to a minimum of 50 turns.

In variants that have techniques, use the unused ! key as a shortcut for #technique.

Monks, and possibly other roles, can learn martial arts techniques out of spellbooks similar to dnethack wards and SLASH’EM bard spells.