If a dwarf sees you eating a dwarf corpse, he grows enraged and gains to-hit and damage bonuses. This may also extend to other races seeing you eat their fellow kin, though orcs might just laugh instead.

In a lot of folklore, iron wards away elves. This could be implemented in the game in several ways:

• Elves take extra damage when hit by iron. Not as much as silver, but still appreciable.
• Elven players take a small amount of damage when putting on or wielding iron gear, but get no further penalty. (dnethack hurts their regeneration rate while wearing iron, which is another option).
• Possibly some detrimental effect when wielding iron weapons as well, a to-hit or damage penalty, or negating bonuses from dexterity, strength, and skill, or something.
• This is balanced by elven racial equipment being better (not improved; it’s already better).

Wearing the “fencing gloves” type of gloves gives you a +1 to-hit bonus in melee combat.

A reduced version of the Wands Balance Patch in which there is still a new wand-use skill, but not varying wand effects at different levels of skill (because the skill of the wielder shouldn’t affect the magic in the wand). Instead, increased wand skill gives you higher accuracy (no more/much less missing Rodney with a death ray, for instance) and perhaps other perks such as being able to zap a wand once per turn as a bonus action, as with a stethoscope.

Fix vampires shifting into fog clouds as an escape method because this doesn’t currently work with fog clouds being slow and easily killed.

• Normal fog clouds can still be slow, but vampshifted fog clouds should have their regular form’s speed.
• Fog clouds in general should be very hard to land a hit on, with “your attack passes harmlessly through” like a ghost nearly all the time (allowing critical hits only?), or all of the time, if you are not engulfed. Fog clouds that are fleeing, like vampires running away, will not engulf the player.
• If a vampshifted fog cloud is pinned down and has nowhere to go, it can pass through the squares of a number of monsters blocking its way and land somewhere else, provided that space is within a few spaces. This prevents the player from trapping it in a corner and beating it to death.
• At some point, the vampire must turn itself back to normal, and not stay in fog cloud form forever.

Luckstones, when wielded or thrown at a monster, have an inherent +3 to hit.

Rename the gauntlets of dexterity to gauntlets of accuracy. Similar to gauntlets of power, their enchantment doesn’t matter for anything beyond AC. Instead, they now grant a +5 to-hit bonus when equipped, which applies to all to-hit rolls (thrown objects, wand and spell zaps, etc).

Give iron balls a fairly large to-hit penalty, because they are so heavy that they must be pretty unwieldy.

Spell of foresight, a high-level divination spell that gives you a short amount of a temporary buff which gives monsters a massive to-hit penalty against you, possibly giving yourself to-hit bonuses as well. It also gives you automatic searching; searching while you have the foresight buff active is guaranteed to find traps.

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.

When you’re brought below 20 HP and also below 10% of your HP, with no status ailments, a special adrenaline buff automatically kicks in that grants to-hit and damage bonuses for a short time, but causes exhaustion debuffs after it times out.

The player gets a small to-hit penalty when nauseous (about to vomit).

If your legs are unwounded and free, Skilled or better martial arts has a chance of dealing a kick instead of a punch. This has a small to-hit penalty but has better damage. If you want to always punch, you can either attack with F or set an option which prevents you from kicking.

New artifact Sinsword, a chaotic two-handed sword. If your alignment is positive, it behaves just like a regular two-handed sword. If negative, it gains a bonus to to-hit and damage (capped at 6) based on how negative your alignment is. Deals double damage to angelic beings.

Spells that give temporary to-hit or damage buffs. Must be carefully balanced; this is intended for fighter roles more than wizards. It also shouldn’t last long enough or be cheap enough to be perpetually castable.

Creatures that are stuck in a web (either the player or monsters) get a to-hit penalty.

Cavemen get a large damage/to-hit bonus when throwing spears at large mammals, or an alignment bonus for killing large mammals with spears.

Give unicorn horns a to-hit penalty: they are not a manufactured weapon, and are not designed to be wielded in your hand.

Haste self or other extrinsic speed sources hurt your AC and/or to-hit.

When the player is afraid of a monster, to-hit is reduced and they may not be able to attack that specific monster at all.

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)

Yendorian Army units surrounded by fellow army units have higher AC, to-hit, and damage.

Strength should not give a to-hit bonus; the encumbrance system is already there to address that.

Rather than giving Monks a flat -20 to-hit for armor, base it on the armor delay - the factor that determines how many turns armor takes to take off or put on.

Most artifacts should have a negative to-hit bonus, so you’re encouraged to train the weapon’s skill with some weapon that isn’t the artifact.