A much more fleshed out interaction system for sapient monsters. It is initiated by chatting, which opens up a menu offering four key verbs: Ask, Tell, Show, and Give.

Ask is used to gain information from a monster; this could be a whole bunch of things, from rumors to identification to information about the dungeon. Each type of monster you can ask things of has a limited knowledge base, and this knowledge base may contain some inaccurate information. Especially interesting is the possibility that you can ask someone for identification, and they tell you what they think it is - which could be right or wrong, but a good clue either way. You can also ask someone to join you, and pay them some gold to tame them for a certain amount of time.

Tell is currently a less developed part of this idea; the only thing suggested so far is that you can tell a creature about traps you’ve discovered, which will make those traps known to the creature. You can also use “tell calm” on your pets to make them refrain from attacking peacefuls.

Show lets you select any item from your inventory to show to the monster. This can be used for intimidation (e.g. showing a stack of iron skull caps to a goblin).

Give lets you give items to a monster, which in some cases, depending on the AI, lets you test the effects of items.

Note that a potential pitfall of such a system is that if it’s complex enough to do interesting things with, it is probably going to be hard to use without spoilers. And if it’s uncomplex enough, it runs the risk of most possible responses being “I don’t know/care about that”, which also makes it hard to use without spoilers. A middle ground between these is likely to require an enormous amount of work.