Vampires shifted into some other form should appear on warning as their true difficulty, rather than the difficulty of their current form. Attentive players are then rewarded for noticing that a wolf or fog cloud is an unusual difficulty 4.
Add a way to show nearby unseen pets and possibly also peacefuls. Using a warning-like system, they render as green 1-5 (pets) and blue 1-5 (peacefuls) using the same scale as warning does.
Initial idea was to tie this to intrinsic warning or when wearing a blessed ring of warning, but this has flavor problems since warning exists to alert you to threats, which pets and peacefuls aren’t. Plus, a lot of roles get intrinsic warning anyway, and rings don’t generally change behavior based on beatitude. It might be better off coming from some other source.
Allow the player to configure what warning level a given monster species will show up as. If they’re terrified of floating eyes, allow them to be warned of them as 5s on the map.
This has the disadvantage that the player can manipulate it to get warning of a few limited sets of monsters, giving them extra information about the identity of the monster they cannot yet see. In the worst case, if these values are allowed to change after the start of the game, a player could reassign warning numbers until a particular monster changes to find out what it is.
The ring of warning, and only that, should indicate the exact amount of turns you have left to live when afflicted by a timed instadeath such as sliming, stoning, or strangulation. (And drowning and other forms of suffocation in variants that have that.) This feedback is conveyed by the ring vibrating that number of times, e.g. “Your [ring] vibrates twice.” Possibly it should only happen when the amount of turns to live is low because it doesn’t make that much sense for it to vibrate 20 times in one turn and have the hero count that accurately.
The player shows up as a 4 on warning whenever at least burdened, because they are a danger to their own self.
Anything that is carrying a cockatrice corpse, including the player, shows up as a 4 or 5 on warning due to its high threat level.
Extend the warning scale up to level 9 (and possibly down to level 0) to offer more granular information on warning threats. However, provide an option to keep the scale at its old 1-5 for players who want to assign monsters to the 6 through 9 glyphs.
Warning levels should either be set directly in the permonst struct or be mapped from a monster’s difficulty somehow, instead of being based on the monster’s level; it’s rather silly when a monster gets drained a level and decreases in warning intensity, when it likely hasn’t lost any offensive capability.
Artifact ring Nenya (Galadriel’s ring from Lord of the Rings): a mithril ring of warning that also confers unchanging. If possible, its warning should apply level-wide, not in a specific radius.
