User:Phol ende wodan/YANI/IRC archive
This page lists YANIs that have been discussed on several NetHack-related IRC channels on Freenode, so they don't end up ignored and forgotten.
Attribution will be listed whenever possible. I make no claim to any of the ideas. Feel free to add any other YANIs from IRC to this page, and to use or implement any of them as you see fit.
How these are retrieved: I log the #nethack, #nethack-dev, #hardfought, ##nethack-discord, ##nethack-variants, and #nethack4 channels. (If people are discussing YANIs on channels not listed here, let me know!) The logs are searched for strings like "yani", "yet another", and "feature request", with some surrounding context. Sometimes there's enough discussion of an idea to warrant more than a row in the table, and so it gets own section here.
Things that are not added to this page include:
- Variant developers (and only variant developers) talking about planned changes to their own variant. Possible changes to their own variant that are variant-agnostic are still fair game.
- Evil Patch Ideas.
- Ideas which are fully realized already in some variant or have been in previous versions of vanilla NetHack.
- YANIs by only me, which are here instead.
- YASIs, which grew to be a long enough list that I moved them to their own page.
Identification mechanics
Contributions by ais523, FIQ, jonadab, aosdict
The main idea here is to make the identification game less regimented. Currently, a rational player (who will not take the risks associated with direct use-ID) is restricted to indirect use-ID (and monster use-ID) of most objects until such time as they can find a general, book, or scroll shop, at which point they can price-ID the scroll of identify and other items. Once identify is known (and could be blessed), the good items (as determined by price ID) can be fully identified. This is problematic because it's not at all a gradual process, and it feels like it should be.
Some ideas have been floated to remove price ID outright (presumably, a shopkeeper would pay the same amount for each item of an object class as they currently do with amulets). This has some advantages; price ID is tedious, encourages stashing to some extent (because stashing near a shop where you can ID new things is good), and roguelike players who don't primarily play NetHack tend to hate its price ID system. In this case, either the scroll of identify should start out identified for all characters, so that identification doesn't take forever to get off the ground, or some other mechanic should be added so identify is easy to pick out for spoiled players.
If price ID is not to be changed, it should become less regimented and predictable, and less necessary of a strategy. The entire idea of price tiers doesn't appear to be based on anything much, and having items nicely organized into tiers makes it easy to disregard entire classes of items once their base prices are known. Ideas include:
- Change price ID so that each item is assigned to a "band" of possible prices. There are four price bands, and each item class has its base price randomized based on its band. The price bands show up on unidentified items, e.g. "an expensive scroll labeled KIRJE". Some items might fall into more than one price band.
- Fuzz the prices of items so that it's not possible to definitively say what an item is, only that it's cheap or expensive.
- One way to do this is to scatter the base price of each previously tiered item each game on an interval so that it overlaps with the intervals from other previous tiers, perhaps a random number from 1/2 the original price to 2x the original price.
- Or, do away with tiers entirely and simply scatter the base costs permanently. A ring of free action might be 240 or 260 base, because it's on the higher end of usefulness in the former 200 tier. Some fuzzing would probably be needed here to keep things from being unambiguously identified.
Other ideas to reduce the reliance on shops:
- Reduce the potential consequences of use-testing items so it's not as terrible of an idea, such as giving a warning for reading way out of depth spellbooks.
- Make scrolls and spellbooks in particular partially identifiable outside of a shop without having to formally identify them or guess based on frequency (which are currently the only ways to identify them outside of a shop):
- Higher level spellbooks could be heavier. D&D does this.
- Make spellbook appearances more complex based on level. A simple color indicates a 1-2 level book, an unusual color or appearance indicates a 3-4 level book, a very odd or ridiculous appearance or material indicates a 5-6 level book, and a completely over-the-top appearance indicates a level 7+ book. (Example: "red", "steel", "bone", "jewel-encrusted"). Shuffling of the random appearances would need to be changed so that the books retain an appearance in their original bracket.
- Make scroll label length (or, more complicated, its number of syllables) roughly correlate to its cost. The correlation could be fuzzed a bit, so MAPIRO MAHAMA DIROMAT is probably a 300 zorkmid scroll, but is certainly no less than 200, and NR 9 is probably something really cheap, but might be 100 zorkmid.
List of existing informal ID mechanics
- Weapons: don't usually need to type-ID since there aren't randomized descriptions. Currently there is no way to learn enchantment like there is for armor.
- Armor: most of it doesn't have randomized descriptions, but for those items that do, there is basically only wear-testing and price-ID. Wear-testing is fine assuming the player is able to check for curses, but only on armor types that don't have autocursing gotchas (a rare uncursed helm of opposite alignment or dunce cap).
- Amulets: price-ID doesn't even work; the player has to use-test (safe enough assuming they can verify it isn't cursed or remove its curse, since none of the bad ones autocurse).
- Scrolls: only price-ID
- Potions: monster use identifies most of the beneficial potions (with the notable exception of gain energy), but this is a slow process. Dip-testing identifies the potions of polymorph and sickness, and a few other harmful potions can be dip-tested with a unicorn horn. However, there are still some bad potions (paralysis) that remain unidentified by these processes, so quaff-IDing is only safe if the player has
- Spellbooks: only price-ID
- Rings: sink-ID is pretty unambiguous, but the chance of losing the ring makes it unhelpful unless you have duplicates, which isn't very likely until later in the game.
- Wands: engrave-ID (and fallback on zap-ID) seems sufficient.
- Tools: not many are randomized, but none of the ones that are have debilitating use-IDs, so use-ID seems sufficient.
- Gems: touchstones and unicorns, seems sufficient.
Spells
Contributions by ais523, FIQ, Chris_ANG, aosdict, jonadab, NeroOneTrueKing, stenno
Charm monster nerfs
Most people agree charm monster is too powerful, too low-level, and needs to be nerfed.
- It only works if you're not wearing any armor. (This is apparently how D&D does it.)
- 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.
- It only pacifies monsters, and can't be used to tame an always-hostile monster.
Making utility spell failure matter
The problem: casting utility spells at high failure rate, such as identify at 95% fail, is a mere inconvenience to players, since they can sit in a closet with a stack of food and wait for their Pw to recharge until they succeed. This is not really a problem with combat spells, since the penalty for failing to cast the spell correctly is a disadvantage in combat, where time matters.
- Large penalties for failing to cast a spell, like a 1% memory loss and 50 hunger.
- Failing to cast a spell locks it for a certain period of time. It would be hard to make this not turn into an even slower grind for utility spells, since the lockout period could just be waited out.
- Make spells never actualy failable, but Pw cost is increased proportional to the failure rate, specifically:
real Pw = base Pw / success rate
. Under this formula, a 15 Pw spell at 95% fail becomes a 300 Pw spell at 0% fail. This means the Pw cost should be exposed in the spellcasting menu rather than failure rate, even though failure rate still needs to be calculated. Maybe use different colors in the spellcasting menu to denote spells you can cast now, spells you can cast by waiting to recover more Pw, spells you can't cast even at your current maximum Pw, and forgotten spells.
Changes to advanced spell forms
Advanced spell forms are slightly problematic. Certain spells (fireball and cone of cold) which have advanced versions automatically kick in when the player is Skilled or above, and can't be cast using the lesser form even if the player wants to.
- Some variants give you the choice of casting the basic or advanced form, but this suffers from an interface annoyance (an extra y/n prompt) and the fact that the advanced form is not actually any more difficult to cast.
- Advanced forms are castable even at Basic skill, but have a higher failure rate.
- The advanced form appears in the Z menu once you are Skilled.
- The advanced forms are implemented as higher-level never-generated spellbooks, e.g. "fire storm" and "frost storm". Reading the basic spellbook automatically teaches you the advanced spell as well.
- This allows you to balance them separately; in the case of fireball and cone of cold, the lesser spells could be dropped to level 3 or so and the advanced forms elevated to level 6.
- The advanced forms are broken out into completely separate spellbooks that must be discovered and learned separately.
- This makes the balance of spellbooks a concern, since it would add more books of a certain school.
- Both of the ideas that involve higher level spellbooks may create a problem with the Z menu only allowing 52 different spells if more advanced forms come along, not that that can't be worked around.
- Skilled+ casting does nothing to the actual spell effects, but allows you to cast the spell mentally.
One-time-use spellbooks
Instead of books having spestudied charges which leads to a lot of issues with polypiling, you read them once and they disappear, but you get 3 times the spell memory.
- This is intended to remove spellbook micromanagement.
- Spellbooks would need to be considerably more common than they are in vanilla. In FIQhack, where this was originally discussed, spellcasters generate with books, and the level of dropped spellbooks scales well as the game progresses since more dangerous monsters carry higher-level books.
- This addresses polypiling by allowing the player to polypile the book as much as they want, but they can only read it once.
- Slight nerf for people who finish their games in under 60,000 turns, since they can't use a spell for free confusion.
- Also a problem for people who play very long games, because they will need to find or write replacement spellbooks; however, this was sort of already the case.
- May make polypiling unknown spellbooks too popular, since an unknown spellbook is likely not to be the one you want, or you have price-IDed it and know it's something you will never use, and you can now poly without consequence. Perhaps address this by giving polymorphed spellbooks an elevated chance to become blank, and blank spellbooks do not poly into anything else.
Wielding spellbooks
The wield slot is fairly underused among object classes, and there are a number of interesting bonuses we can add to spells if the corresponding spellbook is wielded.
- Decreases failure rate of the wielded spell (utility spells might need to be made higher-level/harder to cast to maintain balance).
- Or decreases Pw cost of the wielded spell.
- Allows you to cast the wielded spell even if completely forgotten.
- Allows you to cast the spell without knowing it already - the Z menu gets an additional "-" option to cast from the spellbook in hand if you don't know what that book is.
- Casting from an unknown spellbook will immediately check for reading success as if you had read the book: if you succeed, it then moves on to other checks like whether you have enough power, etc and you may cast the spell. If you fail, you get a random failure effect appropriate to that spellbook.
Object materials
Contributions by AmyBSOD, aosdict, Chris_ANG, jonadab, bug_sniper, ais523
Properties of weapons
- Iron - good against fairy, elf, and fae creatures
- Gold - associated with the sun, so good against undead. Blunt gold weapons get a d2 damage bonus due to being heavier.
- Platinum? Copper? Metal? Wood?
Effects of gear
- Mithril body armor prevents bisection.
Elves and iron
- 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).
Metalworking
Would be a pretty neat addition as a service that offers things the player can't do on their own (probably not a shopkeeper service though), and some things they could do on their own but lack the resources. In particular, silvering has a lot of potential if the object materials patch is used. Also see #Crafting on this page.
Point buy for starting characters
Contributions by ais523, jonadab, aosdict, Tarmunora, FIQ
Point buy is an idea originally from ais523 that is intended to address startscumming by unrandomizing starting stats and inventory and letting the user spend points on stats and equipment however they like. dtsund's class overhaul proposal also addresses unrandomization of starting inventory by simply removing all the random chances to get items, but doesn't involve point buy.
Starting stats
- Any point buy for stats is likely to involve a tedious interface. Developers could get around this by making it options-only, perhaps in a way that allows the user to say "buy to get my Strength up to 10, and my Int up to 9, and randomly pick the rest", but specifying it per-role could get annoying.
- It's important to allow people who want to start and splat games rapid-fire to do so, and it would be preferable if new players didn't have to learn the complexities of a new interface.
- The rc file must allow the user to specify starting stats per-role in this case, or specify that they want random stats.
- "Dump stats" like Cha, and Int and Wis for non-spellcasters, allow people to buff their important stats at the expense of unimportant stats, which may indicate some underlying balance issues with these stats or that the stats can have too wide of a starting range.
Starting inventory
- Even in a non-point-buy system, for starting inventory in cases like for Monk and Wizard where the player gets a random spellbook with equal weight among the possible choices, the player should be able to select which.
- Any point buy system for inventory should probably be options-only, since designing an interface to do so would be complicated.
- Naturally, items like magic markers and rings of polymorph control cost lots of points, whereas things like apples and oil lamps cost only a few.
- Some items should probably have maximums.
- This would come at the expense of players who actually want different nonrandom starting inventories and don't want to have to edit their rc file every time.
- If the player's options leave some or all of the available points free, the game will randomly buy items until there are no points left.
- Unspent points should probably convert into a certain amount of gold.
- Possibly the default items are expressed as a list which consumes most or all of the points and is sorted from highest priority to lowest, and ones the user specifies get moved to the beginning of the list, which will push the low-priority items into the range of not being able to be purchased.
- Certain items, like the knight's lance and probably most armor, should not be purchasable, and the character always gets them.
- FIQ proposed a system in which you can specify one item, and the game will try to reroll your starting inventory many times until it gets that item. Since this is effectively built-in tool-assisted startscumming, it gets tracked as a conduct.
New roles
Contributions by Demo, aosdict, Grasshopper, Tarmunora, jonadab, ais523, FIQ
Alchemist
Not really being seriously considered because it would require overhauls of several systems, but fun to discuss what the mechanics of such a role would be.
- The main form of combat is to create phials of potion (where 1 potion splits into many phials), which can be tossed at enemies to cause potion effects on them. The main potions used are things like acid, paralysis, (lit) oil, and confusion.
- Phials come in all the same types as normal potions but have somewhat weaker effects.
- Phials can be dipped into potions, but nothing can be dipped into phials.
- The quest artifact is the Philosopher's Stone.
- The quest leader is Nicolas Flamel and the nemesis is an Avatar of Death (like Death, but weaker).
- The stone can turn metal objects into gold or can turn rocks into gold pieces when rubbed on them.
- Its base item type could be a ruby (but perhaps not because dnethack makes the Heart of Ahriman a ruby) or a garnet, based on its color in Harry Potter, or an opal.
The invoke effect of the Philosopher's Stone is heavily debated.
- It creates potions of the Elixir of Life. This potion cures disease and restores lost attributes, but most importantly it grants temporary intrinsic lifesaving. If you die with intrinsic lifesaving, you lose the remaining time for the intrinsic.
- Creating potions is way too powerful since the player will be able to bank them, so nerf this: perhaps you can only get Elixir of Life by dipping the Stone into a potion of full healing, or something.
- The Elixir should not be _more_ powerful than a potion of full healing, or the invoke effect of the Staff of Aesculapius - healers should be the best at actual healing. Probably, getting lifesaved from intrinsic lifesaving will only restore enough HP to stay alive a little longer.
- The Elixir gives a large temporary boost to HP regeneration.
- No Elixir of Life; it instead turns potions of sickness into (extra? full?) healing.
Artificer
- Artificers can innately see charges on things and use wands at a higher skill level than everyone else.
- Starts with an inventory of consumables comparable to vanilla wizards', a scroll of charging, offensive wands, a magic marker, and random tools.
- Restricted in nearly all weapon skills like a monk, or can only reach Basic in a few ones like knife.
- Quest involves lots of golems.
- Quest artifact grants double damage with tools and gives blessed charging when invoked.
- Gnome is a playable race.
Also see User:Jonadab/ClassOverhaul#Item User: Tinker.
Cantrips
Contributions by K2, aosdict, jonadab, ais523
Cantrips are level 0 spells that cost d2 or d3 power to cast. In order not to let them be unbalancing, they don't train skill and are mostly useless, except in certain circumstances or for low-Pw spellcasters who can't do much of the bigger stuff yet. ais523 suggests that good candidates for cantrips might be things that have little combat use, and whose effects could be duplicated by backtracking or other tedious things, but would be useful to avoid boredom. Given their cheapness, they should probably not train skills, and may not even need spell schools. Most ideas for cantrips seem to be a little too powerful and would do better off as normal spells (and are added to this page as YANIs for separate spells); however, those that seem like they would fit are listed here.
- Increase the odds of monsters dropping a corpse in the next few turns.
- Create an empty unlocked chest. (This would need some restriction so you can't farm and sell them.)
- Mark a map square with a symbol, perhaps a comma, that is no different from normal floor but shows up on #overview and the normal map view.
- Deal some small damage, such as d5 or d6, to a nearby creature. (Acid Bubble from D&D is a nice corresponding cantrip.)
- Dig out a single square.
- Create a cancelled hostile yellow light. It cannot explode at you since it is cancelled, so it becomes an autonomous light source of radius 1, which can't follow you down levels like a pet can. Killing it should not grant you any experience; otherwise this would be easily farmable.
- Light a radius 2 or 3 area permanently, like a weak form of the spell of light.
- Mage hand: you indicate a direction and the nearest item on the floor in that direction, assuming it's under 100 weight or so, is brought to you and is placed in your inventory. This can be used > to get things out of pits.
- Create an illusion of yourself at your spot. The illusion never moves. Monsters that see it assume it is you and will attack whichever one is nearer.
Monster AI changes
Contributions by jonadab, FIQ, aosdict, flump, mtf, Chris_ANG
Monster intelligence and AI strategies should be much more fleshed out than the current definition of "having hands and neither mindless nor animal". A clear way to do this is to implement different degrees of intelligence or even just an Int stat for monsters, which affects their strategy for doing certain actions like fleeing (do they flee intelligently like monkeys do, or in a random direction?) and using items (a dumb monster might try to read a scroll of fire and burn itself to death).
Smart monster attack strategy
Very intelligent monsters calculate whether it is more advantageous in terms of damaging the enemy versus taking damage themselves to pursue a target in melee, keep a safe distance and attack from range, or flee. Complex solutions would involve the monster storing lots of data about which attacks it has seen its opponents perform; however, this might get memory-intensive and expand save files quite a bit. A possible algorithm that relies only on game state and is based on FIQhack's dragon AI algorithm is as follows:
If able to attack at range (spit/breathe/shoot missiles/use items/etc): If the target is in range but not adjacent: Attack at range. Else if the target is adjacent, and is at least as fast as the monster: Attack in melee, or use ranged attacks point blank. Otherwise: Try to move somewhere aligned with the target, as far away as possible while still being in range. Else if the monster is unable to attack at range but will be able to soon (dragon): Stay out of line with the target. Otherwise: Close to melee range.
Group AI
Monsters that spawn in groups are currently completely individualistic and try nothing more complex than charging towards the player and hitting in melee once they get there. This makes it easy for the player to cheese what would otherwise be tough battles, e.g. by standing in a doorway and killing them one by one, or by kiting them. There are some proposals for smarter AI:
- If a single monster in a group is next to the player, try to pull back until allies can get next to the player.
- Avoid doorways and narrow corridors; if you are in an open space, stay there unless you decide to move to another open space, and hang back from the doorway where the hero is, forcing them to enter the room in order to pass.
- Groups of intelligent monsters also try to stay out of the way of ranged fire if possible.
- If the current strategy is to defend a certain area, form ranks to block the player from reaching it.
- Pincer maneuvers; some monsters of a group will split up and try to get behind the hero or attack from another side. If the pincering group hasn't gotten in position yet, the other group will fall back until they catch up.
- Group "leaders" (loosely defined as a M2_LORD or M2_PRINCE monster in a group of monsters of the same monster class) will try to put the group between them and the player. The presence of a leader could also buff the strategy or intelligence of the group it is in.
- Wolf pack: the monster of the class with the highest level, or failing that the highest max HP, "leads" the pack, and all other members key in on this leader and follow it. This means if you get the leader to flee, the rest of the pack will flee as well.
Golem AI
Golem AI/strategy could be selected from a set of possible directives when the monster is created. They follow this directive completely and literally, which may result in some interesting behaviors. The player can #chat to the golem to have it mumble its directive.
- Kill all humans - golem attacks the nearest human it can find, not necessarily the player.
- Gather gold - golem pathfinds to the nearest gold on the level. If that happens to be carried by a monster, attack it.
- Build a castle - golem seeks out boulders and tries to pick them up and pile them into one small collection of spaces on the level. If you destroy or move them, it becomes hostile.
- Get corpses - golem tries to collect corpses, but will not hesitate to make more if there aren't any more on the level.
- Build more of myself - golem tries to collect the material it's made of. It attaches these to its body, increasing its HP and maximum HP; when its maxHP is high enough, it splits into two golems like a blue jelly.
This would probably require a general AI overhaul.
Miscellaneous strategies
- Default: Monster roams aimlessly unless they can see hostiles, in which case they beeline towards those hostiles. Smarter monsters might remember the last place they saw a hostile and beeline towards that square when the hostile goes out of sight.
- Lure: Active only when a monster is fleeing and knows about a trap in the vicinity. It tries to get the trap between itself and you.
- Blocking: Monster tries to get between the player and a certain space. Won't work well when there's only one of it, but will do nicely in small or large groups.
Resistances
Contributions by FIQ, aosdict, ais523, jonadab, NeroOneTrueKing
The current resistance system is unsatisfying, because most resistances separate the effects of something into a binary outcome: worse effects with no resistance, ameliorated effects with it. Most resistances also are eat-once-and-be-protected-forever, which is uninteresting in the long term. Proposed solutions to this generally assume that there will be some distinction between resistance and immunity, which offers better (or total) protection but is not normally obtainable as a permanent intrinsic effect. This also enables partial resistances (as found in SporkHack) to be used, though some ideas still treat them as binary - either you have it or you don't. FIQHack recently implemented a form of this.
- Possibly extrinsic immunity isn't as good as inherent immunity.
- Resistance halves HP damage and cuts attribute loss down to 1 point.
- Role benefits should probably only be resistance and not immunity.
- For partial resistance, damage is easy enough to do (express your resistance as a percentage and cut damage by that percentage), but many effects, particularly those protected by MR, are binary, and will be tricky to adapt.
- Resistances could start at 100% when you get them, but decrease by 1% every time it protects you from something.
Thief stones
Contributions by ais523, aosdict, jonadab
Add a new gray stone, the "thief stone":
- It is a magical gray stone that one-way teleports items out of your inventory into a particular square on the level it was generated in.
- This works across levels; carrying a thief stone to another level and using it will teleport items to the same square on the original level.
- If you pick up the stone while it is unidentified, it will teleport both it and some item back to its spot, and become identified.
- The chosen location will be somewhere suitable for stashing: a vault, closet, or any space with a container on it is good.
- Barring this, pick any square that is walkable and not specifically unsuitable: the insides of shops, doorways, etc.
- An empty chest will be generated on the chosen location if there is not a container already there.
- When formally identified, a stone will say "(keyed to branch:dlvl)" where that is the branch and level that it sends items to.
- The player can rub it on items or apply it on items to teleport them to the keyed location.
- Items that teleport from the stone will go into the topmost container on the keyed location. (The player can put an ice box or there instead if they really want to...)
- The stone cannot teleport mundane items, in order not to encourage massive stashing of every item in the game. It will normally only work on treasure and magical items (oc_magic).
- Hitting a gold golem with the stone will levelport the golem (and possibly also the stone) to the keyed level. This works on the player too, if polyselfed into a gold golem but not carrying the Amulet.
- The stone can be cancelled and become "inactive", which will make it not teleport anything anymore. Possibly, blessed charging re-initializes it.
- Beatitude determines what the stone will teleport:
- Blessed stones work on all magical items, artifacts, gold and gems (including glass).
- Blessed stones also intervene automatically when you would lose gold from a spellbook, leprechaun, throne, fountain, or whatever. The gold will be sent to the stash instead of being removed.
- Uncursed works on all magical items but not artifacts, gold or gems.
- Cursed works on all the same things uncursed does, but will not work when the player tries to use it intentionally.
- Additionally, cursed stones have a 10% chance of activating whenever the player tries to pick something up, sending the item to the keyed location instead.
- Attempting to pick up a cursed stone will always teleport it back to the keyed location, regardless of whether it is identified. Unless the player is standing on they keyed location, in which case they may pick it up normally.
Crafting
Contributions by aosdict, ais523, jonadab, mtf
Craftsmen's Guild
- Populated with master craftsmen who work on the principle of "valuable junk items + very large sums of gold = desirable items". They can also do some things available to the player, like increasing weapon enchantment, without needing the specific consumables needed for the player to do it.
- Would serve as a replacement or stand-in for the black market. Resolves some of the problems with balancing black market shopkeepers: if you kill the black market staff, you can have every item in the market, so black market staff must be insanely powerful. If you kill a master craftsman, however, you don't get anything of value. Therefore, master craftsmen don't have to be insanely powerful, or even good fighters.
- Not as good as wishes; there are some things they cannot make for you, like magic lamps, and many magical tools. You cannot specify enchantment or blessing either. For items for which enchantment doesn't matter, the material cost will be higher.
- The interface works by #chatting to them. They will ask you what you want to create, and you enter it (using the wish parser logic to extract the proper object class), and then they will tell you the items and gold they will need for it. These could either be randomized or use certain fixed ingredients with some randomization or use completely fixed recipes; if randomized it will be deterministic for that item for that craftsman in that game. You are then prompted to select the items from your inventory.
- For gold and other balance reasons, this would probably work better the farther it is into the game; maybe it could even be found deep into Gehennom. Maybe you even have to liberate it from a demon lord.
- Craftsmen might include:
- Metalworkers (see below)
- Wandmakers (produce wands)
- Scribes (produce scrolls and spellbooks)
- Alchemists (produce potions)
- Toolsmiths (produce mundane and some magical tools)
- Jewelers (produce rings and amulets)
- Sculptor (produce statues and figurines)
- Leatherworkers (produce leather items and saddles)
- Chefs (produce food)
- Arcanologists (transfer charges/enchantments from one item into another, consumes only gold and not items)
Metalworking
Probably the most important sort of craftsman for many characters. There could be multiple types, each specializing in one type of metal, or just one type that does everything.
- Silvering items (or gilding, or copper-coating) should require you to use up junk silver items equal to some amount of weight proportional to the weight of the new item. The zorkmid cost of silvering should be very high.
- A forge room type (probably containing lava and maybe some junk items like iron chains) could be added which has one or more smiths in it (silversmiths, goldsmiths, blacksmiths).
- Goldsmiths seem rather pointless right now, since there is only one gold item (the ring). They would be more useful if gold equipment existed and conferred some benefit.
- Blacksmiths don't have much to do as far as turning items into iron goes, but they could produce iron weapons of a type the player wants, or repair and improve iron weapons and armor (increasing its enchantment).
List of shorter YANIs
Idea | Variant(s) | Source |
---|---|---|
Monks, or anyone skilled in martial arts, can kick weapons out of an enemy's hand | Tarmunora, NeroOneTrueKing | |
Dragon scales can be enchanted into dragonhide gear that is not scale mail | GruntHack | Demo |
The Watch start with a small amount of gold, and will throw it at a player of the opposite gender while the player is disrobing | Demo, Grasshopper | |
Engraving with Fire Brand burns the engraving as a wand of fire does. | Tarmunora | |
New headstone messages:
|
Chris_ANG, jonadab, Grasshopper | |
Blank spellbooks in flooded libraries generate with the "number of times read" counter full, so they can't be polypiled into readable books. | dNetHack | NeroOneTrueKing |
Add a high level monster spell "raise dead", which resurrects nearby corpses as hostile monsters. | Grasshopper | |
When attacking into a pit or falling while fumbling and wielding a pointy weapon, you have a chance to fall on your weapon. | bezaban | |
Boots of shock resistance, which have a thick rubber sole to prevent you from being grounded | Grasshopper | |
Scroll of detect magic shows magic fountains on the level as well as magical items. Fountains discovered this way are then displayed as "magic fountain" when near or farlooked. | GruntHack | aosdict |
New monster: green cube, which combines the abilities of a green slime and gelatinous cube: both sliming and paralysis. | Grasshopper | |
Merge the P and b monster classes, on the grounds that puddings and blobs are both classes of amorphous monsters that are sparsely populated. This was followed by a long discussion with several people about monster class rearrangement in NetHack Fourk. | jonadab, Grasshopper, bug_sniper, aosdict, Tarmunora, FIQ | |
Necromancer patch / necromancer class added to dNetHack, including: creating skeleton armies, binding the undead via rituals similar to the Binder, launching rocks that contain small petrified animals that transform into undead animals, bone chains, encrusting undead minions with different jewels to grant them different powers | dNetHack | introsp3ctive, Demo |
Opening a cursed bag of holding does not tell you what has disappeared, or it just says "Things have disappeared from the bag!" without describing them | AmyBSOD | |
Role whose quest artifact's base item is a helm of opposite alignment. (This is apparently in SLASH'EM Extended, but so are probably half the things on this list and I'm not going to bother cross-checking everything.) | jonadab | |
Conflict affects things in a radius. The ring of conflict is a chargeable item, affecting this radius. Wearing multiple rings of conflict stacks the effects. | jonadab | |
Monster status "discord", which causes a monster to be seen as a target and be attacked by other enemies. On the player, discord is the same as wielding Stormbringer. Discord is available through the spellbook of discord. | Fourk | jonadab |
Applying a stethoscope tells the target's gender, and the hunger status of pets. | Grasshopper | |
Easter eggs as an actual item, in addition to monster and chicken eggs. | Grasshopper | |
The Bell of Opening is carried by your quest leader, who gives it to you when you return to them with the quest artifact. This solves the problem of making a game unwinnable by permanently changing alignment, since you can also get it by killing the quest leader. Should the leader leave the level (by levelporting down, for example), they are considered derelict of duty and the player can start the quest. | jonadab, Grasshopper | |
Leprechauns steal anything made of gold, in addition to plain gold pieces. (In vanilla, the only gold item is the gold ring, but variants have other gold items.) | FIQ | |
Add rumors to FIQHack that warn about dragons, which can be fairly dangerous. | FIQHack | flump |
More acid resistance sources in FIQHack, to balance yellow dragons' exploding acid breath. Possibly a ring or amulet of acid resistance. | FIQHack | ais523, FIQ, flump |
Asmodeus should wield an artifact called the Ruby Rod. | dNetHack | zombifier |
Pets on the Astral Plane always go with you when you ascend, regardless of whether they're adjacent or leashed to you. | AmyBSOD | |
Roditaur: new humanoid monster that has an oversized rat's head and four arms. Has a powerful bite attack and four weapon attacks. | SLASH'EM Extended | jonadab |
Add "numeric prefix" as a hallucinatory monster. | ChrisE | |
Gehennom should be half as long, 10-12 levels, and should be mostly or all unique levels that are randomly chosen from a larger set | Duam | |
Oilskin cloaks should be MC3 instead of MC2. | jmr | |
Dragon eggs can be used as special types of thrown missiles. Black dragon eggs specifically have a disintegration effect. | Wooble | |
Level sounds on every level with a branch stairs. For spoiled players, the main benefit of this is to help locate the stairs to Vlad's Tower. | aosdict, jonadab | |
Chicken eggs identify as such when you formally ID them, and all eggs of a known type stay identified for the rest of the game. | Grasshopper, jonadab | |
Gauntlets and boots of reflection | Tangles | |
Water walking boots protect inventory from water and protect against drowning attacks | jonadab | |
The timeouts for intrinsic invisibility and see invisible from eating a stalker corpse should be very long. | SporkHack | jonadab |
See invisible operates on a scale that determines what level of invisible monsters the player is allowed to see. (A low-level monster that drinks a potion of invisibility should be visible even with weak see invisible, an arch-lich casting disappear should require very strong see invisible.) Invisibility should do this too and have a scale as well (one notable place on the scale being that invisibility is kept only until the invisible thing takes an offensive action). | NeroOneTrueKing, greqrg | |
Asmodeus and Baalzebub demand gold proportional to their difficulty or monster level, not the player's wallet. Possibly, if the player does not pay, they remain on the downstairs and will not move until the player has paid, which allows the player to return with the requisite amount of gold. | jonadab, zombifier, aosdict | |
Several small spellbook additions:
|
aosdict, raisse | |
Instead of pushing pets out of the way as they do other monsters, the Riders can trample over pets, instakilling them. | AmyBSOD | |
Net gnomes - wield tridents and have a sticky attack (the net), which causes subsequent attacks to hit automatically | Grasshopper | |
Players can polymorph dungeon features by zapping a polymorph beam down at it, with some special cases:
|
raisse, aosdict, jonadab, AmyBSOD | |
You can wear an empty bag over your head to blind yourself, but this sets charisma to 6. If you wear a bag of tricks on your head, you get YAFM and instadeath. | Grasshopper | |
When invisibility is about to time out, give the player a warning message "You thought you saw yourself for a moment" ("You seem to unfade for a moment" if you can see invisible, "You feel introspective for a moment" if hallucinating. | raisse, aosdict | |
Monster damage armor spell ignores erosionproofing and damages the armor anyway, rather than removing the erosionproofing first. | SporkHack | AmyBSOD |
Merge the ring of hunger and the ring of slow digestion into the same item; one is it with a positive enchantment and the other is with a negative enchantment | jonadab | |
Untrapping a lavender trap gets you potions of lavender essential oil. Ants naturally dislike lavender oil, so ants will flee from a player that has been sprayed by a lavender trap or used a potion of lavender oil. | SLASH'EM Extended | aosdict |
Uranium wands glow in the dark. | Grasshopper | |
Special room "ruined church" that contains ghosts, pieces of glass scattered around the floor, maybe an altar, maybe a spellbook, and blank paper/scrolls of junk mail scattered around the floor | rdplatypus, aosdict | |
Bump the cloak of displacement up to MC 2. | rdplatypus | |
Add a conduct for tracking whether the player has not used any of each class of objects. | AmyBSOD | |
Tripe rations should not generate randomly very often, but they should appear in the inventories of monsters that like tripe, such as orcs. | jonadab | |
Luck's effect on whether a projectile breaks is nerfed. Instead, the enchantment is the primary factor, and is not just simply "+2 or above". | AmyBSOD | |
Polymorphing a highly enchanted object will vaporize it if it turns into something that normally can't be enchanted that high. | AmyBSOD | |
Any gaze attack which is prevented by blindness (one which is visual in nature) is prevented by hallucination, or at least the effects are reduced or mitigated. Possibly archons' blinding gaze should be exempted from this, with the hallucinatory message being "The power of the Aurora overwhelms you!" | FIQ, Chris_ANG, aosdict | |
Give monsters their own XP, because the system of "all kills are equal experience" is weird | FIQ, greqrg | |
While wielding a polearm and attempting to move in a direction where there is a monster 2 spaces away, attack with the polearm instead of moving. Also attempt an attack for monsters 2 spaces away diagonally if polearms are Expert. To hit a monster a knight's move away, it still has to be applied. If preceded by the M key, don't try to attack. | FIQ | |
Make the Ranger quest artifact a crossbow if you are a gnome. | K2 | |
Limit the amount of tamed monsters you can have at once. | FIQHack | FIQ |
Rust monsters and disenchanters are quadrupeds, and should be q. (This would leave R empty though.) | jonadab | |
Add some effect to Snickersnee so that it's not just a slightly better katana. Ideas include confusion resistance, stunning resistance, displacement. | K2, jonadab, Mandevil | |
Buff late-game undead, because undead's significance in Gehennom tends to be pointless since they aren't scary by the time the adventurer gets there.
|
jonadab, aosdict | |
Gnomes get a racial bonus using aklys and crossbow. Should probably be done by affiliating an item type with a certain race, adding this as a new object attribute, and only specifying it on racial items (elven armor, orcish weapons, the aklys and crossbow, etc.) | jonadab, aosdict | |
A skill system with more intermediate levels, such as Unskilled -> Basic -> Competent -> Skilled -> Advanced -> Expert -> Master -> Grand Master. | jonadab | |
Most artifacts should have a negative to-hit bonus, so you have to train the weapon's skill with some weapon that isn't the artifact. | jonadab | |
Monsters get bonus AC against attacks coming from allies (hostile versus hostile, or pet versus pet). | Chris_ANG | |
Roles which are good with melee weapons (Bar, Val, Kni?, Cav?) should be able to see the enchantment of their weapon after using it for a while, or perhaps right when wielding it. Alternatively, seeing the enchantment of a weapon should be based on skill: basic will reveal enchantment on 1% of hits, skilled on 10%, expert as soon as you wield the weapon. | Chris_ANG, FIQ | |
Have the game display your base to-hit bonus (presumably excluding circumstantial modifiers) at all times, perhaps for both ranged and melee to-hit. | Chris_ANG | |
Allow the player to disable things that display on the status lines, like ability scores, gold, dungeon level, and experience level, none of which have to be monitored constantly like HP or Pw do. | Chris_ANG | |
Bull rush command that lets a player shove a target monster back one or more squares. The relative size of the monster and player and the strength of the player are important factors. The character might move into the space of the displaced target. | Chris_ANG | |
Split up the effects of magic resistance, as it is too extensive. It protects against magical force, death magic, teleportation, polymorph, etc.
|
jonadab, FIQ | |
Maximum HP should have some ceiling that depends on your race/role combination, proportional to what you would get by leveling up to 30 as that race/role. | Chris_ANG | |
A way to search for hidden passages behind a boulder you are pushing. | loli | |
A role whose starting pet, if eaten, confers amazingly good benefits, so that the player has to make a hard choice of whether to deliberately kill and eat their pet, and suffer the penalties. | SLASH'EM Extended | aosdict |
Artifact arrow that auto-returns to your pack and cannot break. But there is only one of it, so it can't be multishot. | bug_sniper | |
A way to transfer contents from one container to another without moving through your inventory. | bug_sniper | |
A number of ways for weapon enchantment to be learned without formal identification.
|
Tarmunora, aosdict, jonathanhanes | |
Wind dragons, a cyan D whose breath is a wind beam: it doesn't damage you, but blows you backward, and can't be reflected. Their scales grant flight, which now confers resistance against knockback and Newton's Third Law. | Tarmunora, aosdict, jonadab | |
Some roles get food appraisal as a permanent intrinsic. Caveman at level 6, Tourist at level 10, maybe Healers at level 1 but they already get poison resistance so maybe not. | aosdict, raisse | |
In Orcish Town, have a powered-up hostile orc shaman who has taken over from the dead Minetown priest. | K2 | |
Dwarf kings have a chance to carry a silver dagger. | raisse | |
Lightning attacks deal more damage to monsters in water. | AmyBSOD | |
Cavemen get a berserking bonus if their pet gets killed. | tesko | |
A side effect of a ring of three wishes: while wearing it, if you die, a wish gets used up and you get lifesaved. | dnethack | NeroOneTrueKing |
You can #invoke a ring of hunger to make yourself more hungry immediately so you can eat dragon or giant corpses. | bug_sniper | |
You can apply an amulet of strangulation to an adjacent monster (that has a head and neck) which will strangle it in 5 turns. | bug_sniper | |
Magnet traps that attract metal items out of your inventory, but also attract loadstones and are a means of getting rid of them. | bug_sniper | |
Applying heat to loadstones demagnetizes them and turns them into flint stones. | bug_sniper | |
The effectiveness of the protection spell depends on how your off-hand is being used (open is better than carrying a shield, which is better than using it to wield a weapon). If your off-hand is free, the spell gives you a "spectral shield". | NeroOneTrueKing | |
There is some expensive and complicated ritual the player can perform to remove the "graveyard" status from a level. Perhaps read the cursed Book of the Dead and raise the dead, then stand on 7 different headstones and read a blessed scroll of remove curse on each. The same headstones cannot be used twice for this purpose. | aosdict, jonadab | |
Amulets can be flushed down toilets to identify them. | SLASH'EM | bug_sniper |
The game should allow you to reread a spellbook and relearn the spell whenever you want. The prompt should be "You know <spell> quite well already. Read the book anyway? (yn)" | ChrisE, AmyBSOD | |
MSGTYPE:replace to replace a specified message with another one. | stenno | |
A monster that stands helpless if you can see it with normal vision (not infravision, or telepathy, or detect monsters or anything else), and attacks viciously if you cannot. | jonadab | |
Blessing a corpse prevents it from being tainted or (ordinarily) rotten (the "Blecch! Rotten food!" effect). | ais523 | |
Greed as an object property for containers: the container will refuse to open 80% of the time, costing a turn. Either any gold put into the container vanishes permanently or gold weighs nothing when in the container. | FIQhack | FIQ, jonadab |
Archeologists should start with searching rather than having to get to XL 10 for it. To compensate, they now get stealth at XL 10 instead of 1. | hothraxxa | |
Searching finds everything in your range, but takes multiple turns. The s command by default will take this many turns and will either tell you about all the hidden things around you or tell you that there is nothing interesting; you can specify a numeric prefix to search for less than that if you want. | jonadab | |
Amulet of zombification. Increases your zombification counter while you are wearing it. Taking it off cures the zombification. | FIQhack | jonadab |
You can jump over swimming monsters in water, and over tiny monsters. | ais523, raisse | |
Your starting cat can have kittens. | Wooble | |
The helm of opposite alignment may turn lawful or chaotic characters neutral, instead of always converting to lawful or chaotic. | xyzyxx | |
Armor should make use of its corpsenm (monster index) for efficiency and to do interesting things that are not currently done. For example, this would allow dragon scales and scale mail to be merged into two items that use the various dragon monster indexes to figure out its special effects, and it would allow for fireproof low boots created from polypiling a crocodile corpse to be flavored differently. In variants where applying dragon properties to other pieces of armor is being considered or planned, this would provide an easy way to do so. | ais523, FIQ | |
The preparation method of tins should be deterministic, so that tins that stack together will have the same method. | jonadab | |
Add shallow water to the Gnomish Mines (not GruntHack's deep water). | Fourk | FIQ |
Move enchant armor/weapon scrolls to the 200-zorkmid tier. | FIQ | |
Some version of key breaking, perhaps when trying to use a cursed key. However, this should not go the SLASH'EM route of allowing any unlocking device to break, since that just makes the player carry around extra keys. Skeleton keys should be made of bone and can break. Perhaps add a new key that is not breakable but is rarer than skeleton keys (stealing some of skeleton keys' probability). | jonadab, FIQ | |
Stethoscopes and probing on a pet shows when that pet is satiated. | GruntHack | aosdict |
Stealing from shops via your pet doesn't directly anger the shopkeeper, but the shopkeeper is aware of it and raises their prices to compensate and eventually won't let you reenter the shop. Alternatively, the shopkeeper simply will block the entrance as long as any monster in the shop is carrying unpaid items, but this could be circumvented with a magic whistle. | FIQ, jonadab | |
Add a dogcatcher, who will come and impound your pet if it misbehaves (stealing from shops, killing Minetown citizens) and you don't get it leashed before a certain amount of time has passed. | jonadab, aosdict | |
Grandmaster skill in martial arts allows you to shatter enemy weapons like two-handed weapons do. | K2 | |
Add a silvery potion, either as a random appearance or a dedicated potion like dNetHack's potion of silver starlight, which will silver ammunition dipped into it, perhaps temporarily. It might also silver other weapons (spears, daggers) or other items. Random appearances have the possible problems of the potion potentially having a defined dip effect already (polymorph, for example), and it potentially not appearing in the game if there are extra random appearances. Dipping fragile silver items, like silver arrows, into a potion of acid could create a silvery potion. | ais523, aosdict, NeroOneTrueKing, FIQ | |
Silver weapons should be rarer than they currently are outside Gehennom and fairly common inside it. | ais523, jonadab | |
Make T-shirt messages not depend only on the object id, so that two shirts generated shortly after one another don't have predictable messages. | AmyBSOD | |
80% of locks on containers, determined by the object id of those containers, can't be opened by a credit card because they're a latch or padlock or something that can't be jimmied open. Perhaps Tourists get a bonus that allows them to open more locks. | aosdict, jonadab | |
NetHack4 impossible() should not imply that the save file is corrupted, and the distinction between impossible() and panic() should be less blurry. | NetHack4 | AmyBSOD, FIQ |
Change the impossible() message (in NetHack 3.x and variants) so that it doesn't imply the user should quit the program (thus destroying their save file). | FIQ | |
Moving in Sokoban by jumping and hurtling from an iron ball doesn't actually work to bypass boulders in 3.6, so it shouldn't incur a Luck penalty. | AmyBSOD | |
You can wish for object properties in FIQhack, but only on items that aren't inherently magical. | FIQhack | aosdict |
Throwing a cockatrice corpse into water turns it into a hard floor, or possibly ice, with the corpse buried in the new floor. | bug_sniper, jonadab | |
Blessed potions of gain ability allow you to choose which stat to increase. Possibly, since this would ordinarily be a nerf, max that stat or give you a few points in it. | jonadab | |
Fumble boots cause you to toss and turn in your sleep if you are sleeping, making you wake up sooner. | bug_sniper | |
Conflict removes murder penalties since you acted in self-defense. | bug_sniper | |
Carried loadstones prevent knockback, including Newton's Third Law effects. Possibly it prevents levitation entirely. | jonadab, Tarmunora | |
Tourists should be able to swim. Alternatively, tourists should specifically NOT be able to swim, but other roles might. | FIQ, aosdict | |
Mind flayers seek out your pets to eat their brains and turn them into thralls, which makes them effectively a pet of the mind flayer instead. | aosdict | |
Whenever a player is killed by a mind flayer, they become a thrall in their bones file. In FIQhack, this means they leave an active hostile player monster in the bones with 100% chance instead of 33%. | FIQhack | aosdict |
Barbed orcs, which are more deadly than regular orcs. | Andrio | |
Many different thoughts centered around creating a bard role with distinct and useful gameplay:
|
aosdict, FIQ, jonadab, ais523 | |
Player monsters should always resist conflict. | FIQ | |
If the metal spellcasting penalty were to be removed entirely for one armor slot, it should be the boots slot. | aosdict | |
Sphere conjurer: a monster who creates hostile spheres. | FIQ | |
Dragon with slowing breath. The effect stacks with previous effects of slowing breath. | jonadab | |
Remove instances of "bad RNG" contributing to forms of instadeath or a disproportionate bad effect for a RNG decision made mostly or completely independently of the player's decisions, because they just add randomness or variance to the outcome of the game:
|
stenno | |
Add spell of summon pets, a level 2 or 3 matter spell that duplicates the effects of a magic whistle. The name needs work. | aosdict, K2 | |
A "morale" stat which replaces charisma, and decreases when you die and get lifesaved, eat terrible food, and so on, but it needs effects other than making you lose the will to go on if it gets low enough. | jonadab | |
Getting lifesaved has permanent detrimental effects. Perhaps it reduces the stat maximum for an attribute as well as the attribute's current value, like Wis or Con (Con is preferred, because it hits both carrying capacity and regeneration), and if the attribute it would reduce is 3 or below, life saving does not work at all. It could also possibly drain 1d3+1 levels. | aosdict, jonadab, FIQ, K2 | |
Getting lifesaved gives you experience points (because it's a near-death experience). | jonadab | |
Bards as a monster, who spawn in a group of same-race monsters with a (sometimes but not usually) magical instrument, and they keep their distance and play songs to buff their allies. | FIQ | |
The Watch should turn hostile when you apply a cursed tin whistle within earshot of them. | FIQ | |
If you die with zero points, end-of-game enlightenment says "You were a noob." | SLASH'EM Extended | aosdict |
Disintegration blasts don't reflect from a wall; they dig it out instead. If the wall is undiggable, the ray merely stops - it never reflects. | FIQ, jonadab | |
You can #loot trees to get less fruit than you might by kicking it, but the chance of getting bees is much reduced. This might fail, in which case you might fall out of the tree and abuse Dexterity or something similar. If polymorphed into a Y, it has a 100% chance of success; if a human or elf, probably 80%; if an orc, 40-50%; if a gnome or a dwarf, 1-5%. | aosdict, jonadab | |
The list of monsters that ignore Elbereth should be increased, but the list of monsters that ignore scare monster should remain the same or decrease (3.6.0 Quest nemeses excepted). Perhaps scare monster should be renamed to "scare creature", as it scares humans and elves, which are not really monsters. | FIQ, jonadab, bhaak | |
Gold generated from monster inventories should be tracked by the game and tail off after a while. | jonadab | |
Reduce the amount of gold generated on the floor, and probably also that buried under the floor and in rock so it doesn't incentivize the player digging out a level. This is an attempt at gold rebalance. | Elronnd | |
Quest artifacts, and probably all artifacts, blast other monsters when they enter their inventory, subject to the same checks and chances as the player (however, the artifact will never evade their grasp). This is most likely to be observed when the Quest nemesis or the Wizard of Yendor steals a Quest artifact from the player. | jeremiahL | |
A colorless or colorblind conduct, settable with OPTIONS=colorblind or something similar at the start of the game, as a permanent affliction. When you are colorblind, it is as if the color option is forced off, and any items with colorful random appearances cannot be distinguished from one another (all gems are just "a gem", all colored potions (but not ones such as fizzy, bubbly, white, black) are just "a potion", ditto for colorful spellbooks) until formally IDed. Figuring out how calling object classes works might be tricky, because having it work as it currently does would mostly nullify the identification challenges of being colorblind. | aosdict, jonadab | |
A new "illusion" monster spell, which makes the caster or an allied monster appear as another monster until something disrupts the illusion (you attack it, it attacks you, it takes damage from some other source). Monsters specifically cast it when you cannot see the target monster. The illusion favors nasty monsters, but low-level spellcasters may only be able to create illusions of somewhat higher level monsters. A potentially evil addendum is that high-level spellcasters may use the spell to make themselves or other powerful monsters appear to be weaker monsters. | aosdict, jonadab | |
Rays should reflect erratically or not at all from non-wall rock terrain, Walls are smooth, but rock is rough. | aosdict, FIQ, jonadab, ais523 | |
Fire and cold should both work as a cone, and should spread out over distance and possibly hit multiple targets, but with damage decreasing over distance. | jonadab, FIQ, hothraxxa | |
When trying to descend stairs while stunned, and possibly confused with some probability, you fall down the stairs. | AmyBSOD | |
A Word of Recall spell, which after a sizeable delay (3d5 or 5d6 turns) levelports you to one of several possible locations: Minetown, dungeon level 1, the Oracle, the Castle, the Quest. You will not travel anywhere you have not already visited. Does not work if you have the Amulet. | ais523, jonadab, FIQ | |
King monsters should spawn with an entourage of monsters; e.g. a gnome king should create several other gnomes around him upon generation, with preference given to gnome lords and possibly gnomish wizards. If monster pets are implemented, they should behave as the king's pets, and the king may generate with a magic whistle. | FIQ | |
The ring of protection from shape changers should apply to the wearer as well as other monsters; if the wearer has lycanthropy, they will not transform; if the wearer is a different shapechanger like a vampire, they cannot transform. | aosdict, FIQ | |
All characters should start with a minimum of 11 HP, so they don't get one-shot by a falling rock trap on turn 1. | FIQ | |
Magic traps should not blind you and summon monsters at the same time, at least not until a depth where the player could be expected to survive it. Alternatively, create the summoned monsters with a -N difficulty modifier. | ais523, jonadab, FIQ, aosdict | |
Statue traps generate monsters with a +N difficulty modifier (+5 was proposed, but may be too high.) | FIQ | |
More monsters should be locked to the grid and can only move orthogonally, like grid bugs. | ais523, jonadab | |
Have a record in the xlogfile of whether the game was likely a startscum, for analysis purposes. It's easier for the game to track things like fountain quaffing and using obvious dangerous items. How exactly this would happen is not determined; the game probably shouldn't try to make a decision itself, there will be some false negatives and positives, but storing fields for everything like "number of times quaffed from a fountain" is probably bad too. | ais523 | |
Nonwishable unique items or artifacts that would be "nice finds" in the dungeon. | FIQ | |
Race and polyform should not be distinct; they should be merged into a single permonst or corpsenm-like variable. Role is independent of race, and perhaps every monster should be described with a monster/role pair, with the role being null for most monsters (i.e. gnomish wizards are just gnomes that are also wizards). This might eliminate the entire concept of player race, internally, but transferring some of the racial effects on players (e.g. elves' sleep resistance at XL 4) might be tricky. | ais523, FIQ | |
Change zombies' and possibly mummies' claw attack to a bite attack. | jonadab, aosdict | |
Split curse resistance off from magic resistance. Curse resistance is granted only as an extrinsic by a couple of artifacts, including Magicbane, and maybe some mundane item that isn't any good otherwise (a mummy wrapping?), and behaves like Magicbane's curse resistance does currently ("You feel a black aura surround the <item>.") Half spell damage without curse resistance no longer helps limit the number of cursed items, and a curse may still manage to bypass resistance, with current probabilities. | jonadab, aosdict, NeroOneTrueKing | |
Make Quest nemeses death-magic resistant. | ChrisE | |
You can cook corpses. This lets them go longer without spoiling, or unspoils them. May also remove poison from some kinds of poisonous corpses. | Agafnd, ais523, aosdict, Grasshopper | |
Alchemy only lets you alchemize a single potion at a time, but the potion you dip into also converts and is not used up. | FIQ | |
Implement "spoiler novels", cheap books like 3.6 novels that contain spoilers. (Not described in what form the spoilers would be. Several true rumors?) | FIQ | |
Lycanthropy triggers much more rarely, every couple thousand turns, but while you are in your beast form you lose all control. | FIQ | |
Invisibility works completely when the invisible monster and the detecting monster are far away. When within 5 (or 4?) squares of each other, its location is known to within 1 space (fuzzing the real location by 1 space in all directions). When the invisible monster takes a direct offensive action, or with some probability when it is adjacent, its position becomes known. It still appears as I, but the I will move wherever the monster goes until it becomes 5 or more spaces away, at which point invisibility once again works fully. This could work differently if the invisible monster is stealthy. | FIQ, ais523, aosdict | |
Change the message for gaining intrinsic shock resistance to be "Your current health feels amplified!" | FIQ | |
Since boulders are round (clearly so; any character regardless of low Strength can roll it easily), and corridors are presumably not round, you can always squeeze yourself into the opening between the boulder and the corner of the passage. Inventory weight does not matter, because any reasonable character would push their knapsack through the opening first, rather than trying to go through while carrying it. | aosdict, jonadab | |
You can #invoke the Amulet of Yendor exactly once for a wish, with some unspecified major drawbacks. | FIQ, jonadab | |
Finger of death is renamed to touch of death, and works equivalently to the monster spell (melee range only, and it may fail). Because of this, its level should be reduced, which for some people means that there should be a replacement level 7 attack spell (ball/ring spells might work here). | aosdict, FIQ | |
Shop generation chance increases for every level with no shop, and decreases/is reset when one is generated. | bug_sniper | |
In UnNetHack and other variants with a black market, you never hear "You hear someone cursing shoplifters" in the black market, unless you have angered One-Eyed Sam. | UnNetHack | aosdict |
Remove the bell from the list of musical instruments that Elf characters can receive at the start of the game. This is because it's atonal and its only half decent use is to attract pets (note that elves can't get tin whistles, so clearly summoning pets is not important enough to qualify something for initial inventory). | aosdict, ais523 | |
Soldiers occasionally drop piccolos, which act similarly to wooden flutes (maybe they're made of metal though). | bug_sniper | |
New artifact Aegis: is a bronze roundshield (which is supposed to have Medusa's or another gorgon's face impressed on the front). Can be invoked sideways at a monster, which petrifies it or, failing that, causes it to flee (regardless of difficulty or monster MR). Can be invoked downwards to burn a Gorgoneion in the floor. Possibly grants stoning resistance or gaze resistance while equipped. | dNetHack | NeroOneTrueKing, rikersan |
Thrones will not disappear in a puff of logic unless at least one interesting effect from sitting on them has happened. | ais523 | |
Saddlebags, a rarely generated container that can be applied to a saddled mount and then have gear put into it, allowing the player to offload some of their weight onto the mount. While they are as nonmagical as a sack, they have a higher base cost and weight. You can loot it on an adjacent mount by using the directional #loot command. Knights may start with one. | aosdict, yuring | |
Make all magic portals on the Elemental Planes immediately visible. The challenge should be surviving for long enough to get to the portal, not wandering around till you find it. This is because "Hunt for the Magic Tile" already exists on the vibrating square level, and is not very compelling. | jonadab | |
Implement a strangulation or "can't breathe" timer, which unifies strangulation, suffocation, food choking, rope golem choking, and drowning, and also provides a clean way for monsters to have a suffocation attack.
|
jonadab, aosdict, FIQ | |
Ankh-Morpork levels in the Tourist quest should be populated with some peaceful humans, dwarves and trolls. However, the levels should also then avoid having lots of narrow corridors so it's not incredibly frustrating to traverse them. | aosdict, jonadab | |
You take fire damage from standing next to lava, levitating or flying over it, or walking on it. Damage from standing next to it is (number of adjacent tiles)d8, whereas being over or on lava has rather higher damage. Fire resistance does not prevent this damage completely. | aosdict, FIQ | |
If you eat the corpse of something and a monster of that same class sees you, it becomes angry. (This is from ADOM). | FIQ | |
Luck factors into enchantment wishing. | rikersan | |
For Luck balance, there should be some Luck-based effects that are really good at low Luck but get kind of meh at high Luck. | aosdict, rikersan | |
Poison is either changed or extended so that it is a lasting status condition that gives you negative HP regeneration, or some other source of this property is added. | jonadab, AmyBSOD | |
Skeletons, or any monster with the MS_BONES sound, rattle their bones periodically, which frighten the player into helplessness for a few turns. | AmyBSOD | |
Potion equivalent of extra healing for magic power, or else some consumable way to recover 20-40 power in one go; the normal potion of gain energy is currently more useful for raising maximum power than it is for restoring it. This new thing need not be more effective than gain energy is at raising maximum energy. (Perhaps "potion of restore energy", which does not raise maximum at all.) | aosdict, ais523 | |
Attempt to address the ascension kit problem: make the highest-tier, really good quality, +8 or +9 gear be generated on the toughest monsters or even bosses deep in Gehennom. The high enchantment makes it incredibly hard to get through normal means, even if the base gear is wished for elsewhere. Overall difficulty would need a bump if the average player is expected to pick up and use some of this gear. | aosdict, rikersan | |
Non-inaccessible closets have a small chance to contain a monster on level generation. | jonadab | |
Pets eat at a consistent rate that does not depend on their speed, so the number of turns to eat something depends only on corpse size. Pets should also stop eating when hostile monsters approach. | Grasshopper | |
Reduce the cost of a major Oracle consultation; the current price could be too high for unspoiled players to consider it worth it. | ais523, aosdict | |
A Barbarian rage mechanic (possibly an effect on Cleaver replacing its current damage bonus) where a damage bonus is assessed based on how long ago you last killed a monster. Originally a buff to Vorpal Blade where it beheads anything it hits if the last behead was N turns ago, but this is unbalanced. | ais523, aosdict | |
Druid role, intended as a more balanced form of SLASH'EM's doppelganger. You begin the game with polymorph control and get polymorphitis at XL 5 or so, possibly starting with a wand of polymorph. Inventory is severely restricted, so you have to figure out how to do most things through polymorph. | jonadab, FIQ, ais523 | |
A form of alchemy known as "1+1=2": no matter how many potions are involved in the dipping, only two are consumed, and two alchemized potions produced.
|
FIQ, ais523, jonadab | |
Elaborations on the Fort Ludios minesweeper proposal by ais523:
|
ais523, aosdict, jonadab, FIQ | |
Land mines should blast the player away in a random direction, not make them not move and fall into a pit. | FIQ | |
Add some region code preventing monsters from generating in (or even better, moving into) the pit corridors in Sokoban until the level is solved. | jonadab | |
Replace Venus with Diana and Mercury with Apollo in the Ranger pantheon. This is nice because Apollo and Diana are actual gods of archery, and it removes the Mercury/Hermes conflict with the Healer pantheon. | aosdict, Mandevil | |
Liches drop or are generated with fairly good magical items, like potions, scrolls, spellbooks and even wands, to incentivize not genociding them. | aosdict, NeroOneTrueKing, rikersan | |
Mummy rooms, a new special room that contains a very desirable item: highly enchanted gear, magic markers, items with object properties, etc. However, when you pick it up or interact with it in any way like teleporting it or having a pet collect it, a bunch of mummies appear around you (they would obviously need to be more threatening than they are right now). | FIQ | |
Candle additions:
|
aosdict, Khor, FIQ | |
Djinni (except on the Plane of Air) may drop a scroll or wand of wishing when killed. But when you kill a djinni, all future djinni will spawn hostile. | bug_sniper, jonadab | |
Add rare drops to some monsters, with a very low probability (around 0.1%). These could be artifacts or otherwise unattainable items. | Khor | |
There should be one major monster of each alignment that is ungenocideable: Archon for lawful, deep ettin for neutral, arch-lich for chaotic. | FIQ | |
Allow taming of player monsters in bones with one prerequisite: you must tame its ghost, draw the ghost over the corpse, and then revive the corpse. To facilitate this, killing a player monster should always generate a ghost over the corpse, possibly with a gravestone and 80% of inventory being cursed. | aosdict, FIQ | |
Services center: a shop containing shopkeepers who offer services but have no goods to sell. | SLASH'EM | bug_sniper |
A "spoopy ghost" monster that will scream "Boo!" and teleport away when it reaches you. If you fail some kind of a saving throw here, you are paralyzed as with a ghost from a milky potion. | Khor, AmyBSOD | |
Ideas revolving around a new "fire terrain", a terrain type of .:
|
aosdict, AmyBSOD, bug_sniper | |
If crafting were added to the game, saddles should be one of the craftable items. | AmyBSOD | |
Mind flayers cannot tentacle you if they are cancelled. | FIQ | |
A new type of "fence" terrain that is like wooden iron bars: it cannot normally be moved onto but it can be burnt or kicked down, and it does not block line of sight. | aosdict, AmyBSOD | |
Ideas to move change terrain symbols to reduce overcrowding of #:
|
aosdict, jonadab | |
Foocubi levelport instead of teleport. | jonadab | |
If you ascend with your alignment mismatching your align0 (meaning you changed alignment at some point), the death is extended to "ascended in dishonor". | Neko-chan, FIQ, aosdict | |
Make candle stacking for more light actually useful and realistic: the number of candles required for another square of radius increases quadratically instead of exponentially, so 1 candle gives radius 2, 4 give radius 3, 9 give radius 4, 16 give radius 5, etc. | ais523, aosdict | |
Several improvements to the level-defining des files:
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aosdict, rikersan, jonadab | |
Slope terrain, which is a terrain that appears like walls but does not block line-of-sight. It blocks movement unless levitating or flying, and cannot be dug down on or into. If you somehow get onto slope terrain (such as by stopping levitation while on it), you can move off it in any unblocked direction. This would allow interesting level designs like pyramids and switchbacks. Is still a bit problematic, since for things like a large pyramid, you would be able to see straight over the top of the pyramid and down the back side. | aosdict, NeroOneTrueKing | |
Change the Knight quest artifact to be the Holy Grail. When quaffed from, something good happens; perhaps it needs to have charges or #invoking it fills it up so you can drink from it (and you don't have to drink from it immediately, allowing strategic choices). Should give magic resistance when carried. Possibly gives the effect of a random potion when quaffed: always a "good" potion when blessed, a random one if uncursed, and a "bad" potion if cursed. Or it blesses items dipped into it. | aosdict, Anag, Neko-chan | |
Make the Magic Mirror of Merlin give slotless reflection instead of magic resistance; this is more thematic and makes for more interesting strategy. | Neko-chan, stenno, aosdict, Anag | |
Rebalance armor so that all "mail" armor and most of the iron body armor in general is not useless. Ideally, the worst iron armor (orcish chain mail) should be considerably better than studded leather, but they are equivalent. The ideal balance, keeping leather armors and all weights constant and not accounting for to-hit or damage reduction, is probably something like the mails going up to 9 or 10 AC, and splint and plate getting up to around 14, but this is not possible to implement without changing the combat system. | aosdict, stenno, Anag | |
If you try to eat an artifact and it blasts you to death, put YAFM in the death message: "killed by trying to eat the [artifact]". | Wooble | |
Cancelling shades should remove their incorporeal ability to not be hit by anything, and they should then be hittable normally. | HTTPS | |
Monsters that are in a "wait for the player" state should use different AI for decision-making (i.e. not using their teleport control to attack the player). | FIQhack | jonadab |
Pool rooms, a special room type that consists of a perimeter of normal floor surrounding a region of water taking up the rest of the middle of the floor. It is populated with sea monsters and some sunken treasure. It could also contain a fake bones pile, a pun on "bones pool". | Unknown originator, aosdict | |
Elves should be able to squeeze between two trees diagonally. | jonadab | |
Knights start mounted, or else are trained enough to mount their horse from turn 1. | ais523, FIQ, jonadab | |
Level teleport in the Quest never goes down unless you have beaten the nemesis and never goes up unless you have shown the artifact to your quest leader. | AmyBSOD | |
Wearing a cloak of displacement allows you to displace pets 100% of the time and also peacefuls; this still works if you are confused, stunned or hallucinating. | AmyBSOD | |
Player monsters, crossaligned priests, and hostile angels on the Astral Plane are able to steal the Amulet from you. Should they get it, they will try to make a beeline to their high altar to sacrifice it. The player is also able to steal the Amulet back, though; and wearing the Amulet acts as one turn of protection against it being stolen; an attempt to steal it will just remove it from your neck. If something else ascends, your game ends in an escape. However, all these monsters are hostile towards the Amulet-bearer, not you; so if it gets stolen from you, the pressure will let up a bit. | aosdict, jonadab, FIQ | |
Invisible monsters wearing a mummy wrapping show up as an I (you don't get to see what they actually are), but an I that moves and doesn't persist on the map. | aosdict, jonadab | |
Gentle relaxations for the quest XL requirement:
|
aosdict, AmyBSOD | |
Sickness resistance negates the effects of potions of sickness. However, a cursed potion of sickness will now give you fatal illness instead of the normal poison effects. | bug_sniper, aosdict | |
Your god respects any conducts you currently have when giving you stuff. If illiterate, will not give you a spellbook. If weaponless, will not give you artifact weapons (maybe could give a +1 intrinsic damage bonus instead). If pacifist, may send tame minions. However, this is only if your deity is lawful or neutral - chaotic gods will ignore these rules and give you whatever. | FIQ, aosdict | |
If the hero has see invisible while ascending, swap the line "An invisible choir sings, and you are bathed in radiance..." out for some other YAFM. Perhaps even something as subtle as "A visible choir". | LichenSink | |
Blessed potions of polymorph, when quaffed, grant you immediate polymorph control over just that one polymorph either 50% or 100% of the time. To compensate, cursed potions of polymorph will ignore changing into a dragon and will try several times to roll a monster that will make you break out of your armor. Or the cursed potion could have a wildly variable duration, so you have no idea when it will end and cannot rely on it. | rikersan, aosdict, ais523 | |
Attempts to analyze good instadeaths versus bad instadeaths (loosely defined as ones that are instant hard-to-avoid deaths that aren't really similar to running out of HP):
|
NeroOneTrueKing, aosdict | |
Chemistry golem, which spawns with some potions that it will either throw at you or quaff. | AmyBSOD | |
You can go to the Astral Plane early, and by waiting around there long enough, eventually a player monster will spawn with the real Amulet, at which point you must prevent them from ascending and claim the Amulet yourself. | AmyBSOD | |
In variants or proposals where you can kill your quest leader to get the Bell of Opening, if you have permanently converted alignment already, killing your Quest leader does not give you a massive alignment penalty. | aosdict, ais523 | |
Decide once and for all whether alignment record should be god-specific or god-agnostic, because NetHack currently tries to do both and fails. Things like the massive penalty for killing a Quest leader make way more sense for lawfuls than chaotics. | ais523 | |
If the Wizard of Yendor's monster ID is a multiple of 1000, he should be named the "Warden of Yendor". | FIQ | |
Gods are more likely to give gifts for higher-difficulty sacrifices. | aosdict, Wooble | |
Rename the amulet of restful sleep to the amulet of narcolepsy. | thelemur | |
Lawful and neutral gods are angered (or do something angry) if you consort with a foocubus on their altars or in their temples. | Porkman | |
Make permaconverting harder to do by accident, since confusing the actions of rededicating an altar and rededicating yourself seems unlikely. Maybe make it happen if you sacrifice or pray on a crossaligned altar while confused. | ais523, aosdict, thelemur | |
Zapping a corpse with a wand of cold will increase its decomposition timer (making it take longer to rot). If already rotten, only scales it back to rotting age. | thelemur | |
Apply or zap corpses with a wand of fire to cook them, which makes them unsuitable for sacrifice but makes them last longer. | thelemur | |
If attribute changes from exercise and abuse are blocked due to the ring of sustain ability, they accumulate, and once you take the ring off they will all gradually apply over the next few exercise cycles. | aosdict, jonadab | |
Add in master lichens as a real monster, which are only a bit more threatening than normal lichens (maybe speed 2 or 3, have a passive sticky attack like mimics) but have an increased difficulty so that they generate deeper in the Dungeons, and are a source of nonrotting corpses. Possibly, the passive sticky attack should also be given to regular lichens. | aosdict, greeter | |
Add a scroll of air (as well as the scroll of flood, which is renamed to the scroll of water) so that there is one scroll for each element. When read normally, it could give a message "You feel a fresh breeze" and either reset your strangulation counter or give you temporary breathlessness. (Breathlessness seems like a potion effect more than a scroll effect, but then again, during those times when you need emergency breathlessness, you're probably not capable of quaffing a potion. If you read any of the water, earth, fire, and air scrolls while confused, it summons elementals, whose tame/peaceful/hostile state depends on the beatitude of the scroll. | FIQ, bhaak, AmyBSOD, aosdict | |
Erosion has more than four states, though it still only displays as "eroded", "very eroded", or "thoroughly eroded"; different rusting sources can cause different levels of rust (e.g. dipping a long sword in a fountain or getting hit by a rust trap would probably only cause a small amount of rust, whereas a rust monster might cause a lot.) This would enable a more fair way to have things "erode away completely" like they do in Grunthack, since you would be able to disengage any thoroughly eroded piece of gear before it was at serious risk of vanishing. | jonadab, NeroOneTrueKing, aosdict | |
Cut all map sizes in des files down to at most 20 lines tall, so that there is extra space for messages and status line in an 80x24 terminal. Few levels currently use all 21 lines. | FIQ, ais523 | |
Give the player a slightly different warning if they attempt to go up on the DL1 upstairs after handling the Amulet, if they do not have the real one. | NeroOneTrueKing, aosdict | |
Gods' "Prove thyself worthy or perish" message is flavored as "Prove thyself worthy, because I can do no more for you". On the Planes, the gods' balance of power prevents your deity from granting you any extra help (apart from sending angels when you arrive in Astral). If this were not the case, one would expect to be able to breeze through the Planes, with your god smiting down any enemy that might threaten you getting them their Amulet. Prayer will not work, though it will still break atheist conduct. | aosdict, NeroOneTrueKing, Tarmunora | |
A priest-friendly artifact that is a potion or tool that acts as a "holy water well" - maybe it slowly but infinitely fills up with holy water, up until it is full? | Porkman | |
Shattering a lit potion of oil on the ground will create the normal fireball blast on that spot. | FIQ | |
Every hit with a wielded weapon, up to 20, decreases the chance of being given a non-weapon artifact. | dNetHack | rikersan |
Farlook allows you to see a list of all items on a square as if each were the only item on that square. Items hidden under others are not obscured. Also works if there is a monster standing on the square; you can still see the items under it. | raisse, ais523, aosdict | |
Bed, a \ which if you #sit on it makes you fall asleep for d10 turns or you have fully recovered your health. While sleeping on the bed, you get hungerless regeneration. Found in barracks and some special levels. Breakfast not provided. | aosdict, Grasshopper | |
Store type "sushi restaurant", which sells ; corpses, kelp fronds, various sushi rolls, and sushi mats, tools which allow you to combine kelp and ; corpses into higher-nutrition sushi rolls. Sushi rolls include kraken sushi, eel wrap, and shark tempura. | bug_sniper, aosdict, Grasshopper | |
You can #force boulders where there is a monster behind the boulder to displace it, or crush it if it is in/on a pit or a hole. Based on Strength, only works if monster is medium or smaller. Always displaces unsolid monsters, of course. | bug_sniper | |
A lamp with the same unidentified appearance and base cost as a magic lamp. It is a charged magical tool (has a lifetime, comparable to an oil lamp) that sheds no light, but instead detects unseen in its range whenever it is turned on. This includes invisible monsters, secret doors, and all traps. Cloud terrain in the range of this lamp is treated as if it is not there. | rikersan, raisse, aosdict | |
Change the sickness instadeath to a HP-based form of damage, since it is very obscure about how long you have left to live and can be drastically reduced.
|
NeroOneTrueKing, aosdict, Tarmunora | |
Unicorn horns no longer cure afflictions completely; they will only reduce the duration of one. | NeroOneTrueKing | |
When rock-eating is implemented (or in variants that already have it), eating a luckstone gives you -1, +1, or +2 Luck depending on the beatitude of the stone. | aosdict, bug_sniper | |
#sitting on a trap will trigger the trap while ignoring any magic resistance you have, so that you don't have to disrobe. | rikersan | |
The Master of Thieves has a stealing attack that allows him to choose intelligently what to steal. | FIQ | |
Expert-cast levitation, or a blessed potion of levitation, grants flight instead of levitation. | Tarmunora | |
The game should ask to confirm when you try to throw something that is not intended to be thrown (for example, if you unwielded your bow and are now trying to throw arrows). | FIQ | |
You can teleport dungeon features (except high altars, of course.) | rikersan | |
When you ascend, you receive an elaborate role-specific message with your quest leader congratulating you (if they are alive). | AmyBSOD | |
Polymorph traps do not instantaneously polymorph you; instead they start a short timer during which the player has time to either stop the polymorph from occurring (through healing potions, or prayer, or some other decently common consumable) or put on a ring of polymorph control or amulet of unchanging. However, magic resistance no longer protects against this effect. | jonadab, aosdict, FIQ | |
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. | FIQ, aosdict | |
Attempting to move healers out of the petmastering role: they now have skilled medical knowledge that enables them to hit monsters in melee with a scalpel or knife to inflict a "bleeding" status effect which will cause the monster to lose HP continuously. Any role is able to do this with a scalpel, but the effect is much more limited than it is for Healers. This means that for a Healer, combat now consists of hitting a monster to make it bleed, then disengaging and keeping away from it in the hope that it dies on its own. The Staff of Aesculapius no longer drains, instead it heals the damage it would have dealt (unless the Cyclops has it, in which case it drains life like normal.)
Additionally, the Staff of Aesculapius no longer has level-draining powers. Instead it has a drain HP attack that heals the wielder. |
aosdict, FIQ | |
Add herblore (possibly as a non-combat skill). This allows you to brew various potions using herbs and potions of water. Healers are quite good at it, and their quest contains many herbs. Requires actually implementing herbs, which cannot be planted or grown like in ADOM. | aosdict, FIQ | |
If two-way level communication is implemented (meaning that trapdoors and such deterministically go to a specific space on a specific lower level), allow the player to go back up through holes in the ceiling with levitation or flying, or allow them to place ladders there that become a < to do the same thing. | bug_sniper | |
Yellow lights possibly have a light radius of larger than 1. Also add white lights, y, which are very bright and have a radius of 3 or 4. | jonadab, aosdict | |
The player is given the ability to seduce peaceful characters in a fairly weak, non-magical way (to get better shopkeeper prices and such). This is initiated if you #chat to them while wearing no armor. Works best when the target is the same race as you, you are opposite genders, and you have high Charisma. Possibly, seducing a priest in a temple risks the god smiting you. | Tokage, aosdict | |
Chameleons only transform into monsters close to them. | Tokage | |
Uncontrolled teleportitis counts as a minor trouble; a god may decide to fix it by removing it, but only if there are no other troubles. If there are other troubles, teleportitis will not be removed. | Tokage, aosdict | |
You can wish for magic items that have a "bane" versus one specific monster type. The weapon deals massive damage to that monster type but has no other advantages. | Tokage | |
Remove deathdrops entirely, and instead give monsters items in their starting inventory with the same rules as a deathdrop. | jonadab | |
Vary the monster AI for using miscellaneous items; some monsters like trolls are "hoarders" and will not use misc items unless there is a compelling reason to do so; others will use them at the first opportunity. | jonadab | |
If a player crafting system existed, tallow candles should be relatively easy to make (because they can be made out of slain animal fat). | aosdict, AmyBSOD | |
A flying monster with a displacement attack, which attacks from water in order to displace you into water. Also a bull monster that charges at you, and will either displace you if you pass a Dex save or gore you. | jonadab, aosdict | |
Elbereth should not work until the hero discovers it in-game. (Similar to dNetHack's wards.) | K2 | |
Elbereth should work from the very outset of the game, but get less effective over time. | jonadab | |
Bias the probability of bones files to be a general bell curve fixed on around level 10-15. | rikersan | |
Expert and higher martial arts lets you hit twice, but only if your first attack hits and you are wearing no shield. | jonadab | |
War hammers are a two-handed weapon, with much higher damage than they currently have. Slashing and (maybe) piercing weapons no longer get a Str bonus to damage, only bludgeoning ones do. Probably need to rebalance weapon damage types and attribute bonuses completely. | jonadab, aosdict, FIQ | |
When #turn destroys undead outright, it prevents them from leaving a corpse. | Tokage | |
The Archeologist quest has either a lot of fairly weak artifacts or a lot of mundane items (golden staffs, death masks, sacrificial daggers etc) that are worth a lot of money in the locate and goal levels of their quest. | aosdict, rikersan | |
If Orcish Town is generated, guarantee a "peaceful" Mines' End where all the inhabitants, surviving shopkeepers, watchmen and the priest have fled. Chatting to the priest will make him ask you to clear the orcs out of Orcish Town, upon which chatting to him again will make him grant you a protection boon and give you a luckstone. | FIQ | |
Alignment record changes: chaotics get -1 penalties over time for failing to do any chaotic behavior, neutrals get +1 alignment bonuses more slowly over time by not doing anything, and lawfuls get neither of these and need to get their bonuses on their own. Alternatively, lawfuls accumulate bonuses by doing nothing (not breaking the law). | ais523, FIQ, aosdict | |
The Heart of Ahriman grants half physical damage, and Thoth Amon is nearly guaranteed to pick it up. | rikersan | |
Weapons can rarely randomly generate as erodeproof. | rikersan | |
The Orb of Detection grants searching in a region of radius 2. | rikersan | |
The Norn and Valkyrie quest friendlies have different messages if you talk to them after having been changed into a man. | Jendic | |
Lizard scales, available as a drop from killing a lizard, are wearable as AC 1 body armor. They can be upgraded into lizard scale mail, which has AC 3. This armor protects you from petrification. | Porkman | |
Add a field to struct rm (or possibly reuse the flags field which is 5 bits) that determines the type of tree that is on that space, if typ == TREE. This enables you to control what kind of tree it is, and what kind of fruits you will get by kicking it, and whether you can get bees from it. Also add a level flag that allows a level designer to specify that all trees on the level should be barren. | jonadab, aosdict | |
Include a kitchen sink in plans that add a separate reward level above the top level of Sokoban, or in that level (so that anyone wearing a cursed ring of levitation there has some recourse to get back down). | ais523 | |
"Omnicidal" monster attribute: it attacks peaceful, hostile, tame, and possibly other omnicidal monsters. Suggested in relation to monsters reading cursed genocide or creating monsters. | ais523 | |
Female oviparous monsters sometimes drop eggs of their species when killed. The chance is reduced if the monster was dead and revived. | FIQ, jonadab, aosdict | |
Add "There's no replacement for displacement" to the list of random engravings. | rorre | |
Make the "Destroy old game? [yn]" prompt harder to destroy a game than simply hitting y. Probably ask "Are you sure?" and force the user to type out yes. | aosdict, jonadab | |
Knights instakill by checkmating all "king" monsters that are a knight's-move away and are surrounded or cannot move. | geoffspear | |
Knights pass over monsters in their way when doing a knight's-move jump. | FIQ | |
Samurai have an ability (maybe a special ability) to displace hostiles. | FIQ | |
Tame dogs and cats should not grudge each other. | FIQhack | aosdict |
Jousting should be affected by riding skill. | FIQ | |
Ring and amulet hunger should be counted all on turns that are a multiple of 20, to close the two-slow-digestion-rings loophole. | aosdict, greqrg | |
The ring of slow digestion has no ring hunger, but instead prolongs hungering by a factor of 20 (presumably hunger decreases only on multiples of 20 turns). Wearing 2 of them prolongs it by a factor of 400. | FIQ | |
When killed by a monster that brings you back as something else (zombie, vampire, green slime), you might not die; you may continue playing in that form with permanent intrinsic unchanging. This might make it actually beneficial to get killed by a vampire, so the chance of continuing can't be 100%, or else it can only work in a limited set of mostly-uncontrollable circumstances (like maybe a vampire's or zombie's bite takes you down to exactly -1 health). Green slime death is probably okay to stay at a 100% chance, though. Also needs some thought for how the unchanging squares with being a vampire and wanting to #monster into different forms. Perhaps intrinsic unchanging, unlike extrinsic, allows a monster to change into its normal alternate forms, but nothing else. Some other downsides should possibly be present too, like you don't get your normal amount of HP and are stuck with the amount given by your new form. | aosdict, jonadab | |
If someone throws a potion of sleeping at you and you die while asleep, the death should not say "while sleeping off a magical draught". | raisse | |
A t class monster that generates on a wall space and pretends to be part of the wall, then attacks/eats you when you step next to it. | jonadab | |
Artifact YANI: the Phial of Galadriel. It is a potion of starlight that has some neat carry effects and drink effects. | dNetHack | aosdict |
Regenerating energy consumes hunger. | AmyBSOD | |
In variants that give Geryon a lair, implement his two-headed dog Orthus. | aosdict | |
Tame monsters continue to hold grudges against each other, unless the master's Charisma is high enough. | FIQhack | NeroOneTrueKing |
If wind dragons are added, their scales should grant speed or slow resistance in addition to flight. | FIQhack | aosdict |
Reduce gnomes' Str and Con caps, but ensure they get decent Dex and Int. They should be obviously different to play than humans (rather than being mostly superior). Dwarves should have a Wis cap of 16. Elves' Dex cap should be higher than humans'. | jonadab | |
Expert lightning doesn't create a lightning explosion on the first target it hits; it creates chain lightning instead that may hit adjacent targets. | FIQhack | jonadab |
Add a few more sources of the uncursed charging effect, because charging resources are rare enough as so that things like common wands never get recharged by players. | AmyBSOD | |
Give YAFM when a monster uses a bullwhip on you while you are polymorphed into a foocubus. | AmyBSOD | |
Ovens, a dungeon feature (\?) that you can use to cook food, light items on fire, and test potions in a safe, controlled manner like you can with rings and sinks. This happens by putting the potion in the oven and it produces some cosmetic message that can be used to identify it. | statuesurfer | |
Jetpacks, a chargeable source of levitation/flying. They are worn in the cloak (or body armor?) slot and grant 0 AC. | statuesurfer | |
The scroll of remove curse's blessed effect is transferred to its uncursed effect. The blessed effect is now to uncurse everything in inventory, and then bless a few items. The cursed effect now randomly curses inventory as the curse items spell would do. May need to make this scroll rarer or more expensive to write in order to keep it balanced. | statuesurfer | |
The Master Assassin has an instakill attack (though not unpreventable; the player should be able to prepare and protect themselves some way). | FIQ | |
Add a scroll of polymorph. Blessed polymorphs you with polymorph control over this one occasion; uncursed polymorphs normally; cursed polymorphs you and everything adjacent to you. | statuesurfer | |
If you're hallucinating and get the "You can't handle <artifact>!" message, it gives a YAFM referencing A Few Good Men (presumably "You can't handle the truth!"). | amateur_hour | |
Ordinary monsters should attack any player monster with the same priority as the actual player. | FIQhack | aosdict |
Conduct that tracks whether you ascend with your original pet. | AimHere | |
Killer bees should hurt even more than they do currently, and their sting should poison 100% of the time, but they instantly die when they sting. | FIQ | |
Replace the passtune boon with something more useful, since it is only marginally useful to spoiled players. Then, let the Oracle provide the passtune as either a major consultation or as a service. The Oracle can also be used to tell you which prize is at the end of Sokoban. | aosdict, FIQ | |
Replace the Sokoban rewards with something that is still nice but not AS nice.
|
aosdict, Setneicum, FIQ | |
Replace Sokoban with some other game like mahjongg. Instead of a pass/fail, you can achieve a degree of success. Doing really well nets you both the amulet and the bag, doing slightly less well lets you choose, but ordinarily you will get only one. | flump | |
Wearing gloves prevents you from making touch attacks. Affects monsters too, so monsters that have touch attacks will avoid wearing gloves. | FIQ | |
Skills should be exercised even when damage output is 1 (but cutoffs would probably need an increase). Skill level cutoffs should probably be rebalanced anyway; for example, it should take longer to train long swords than it does for broadswords, and this could add an extra dimension to weapon choice. | FIQ, aosdict, jonadab | |
Unicorn horn skill is also trained by curing things with it, and its chance of fixing something increases with skill level. | jonadab | |
All Sokoban levels add extra spaces to the corridors to let you push spare boulders all the way into the room if you so wish, which lets you handle monsters zapping wands of digging in the doorway or corridor. | aosdict, elenmirie | |
Polymorph traps always choose a form considered to be "playable" - has hands, or is fast enough to run from threats, or is well-defended enough to sustain damage until transforming back, must have speed > 0 - but you do not re-form with your original HP when your polyform is killed, you merely die. | ais523 | |
Make Elbereth work the same as it did in 3.4.3 for animals or mindless creatures, but intelligent foes won't be scared by it, they merely won't attack in melee. | FIQ | |
Make instadeaths more consistent with respect to life saving: brainlessness destroys only the brain but cannot be life saved, whereas disintegration destroys everything but can be life saved. One or both of these should be changed. | AmyBSOD | |
Implement ZAPM super glue, which can be used to glue the elder priest's tentacles together so he can't attack the player with them. | dNetHack | AmyBSOD |
The scroll of create monster, when blessed, says "This is a scroll of create monster." and allows you to choose between 0 and 8 monsters to create. | FIQ | |
The chance of breaking items inside a container by kicking it is based on Str - Dex. The idea is that more force is likely to smash something, but more control will make it less likely. | rikersan | |
Archons should emit light. | jonadab | |
When a god decides to give you a gift and you are already wielding a weapon of the same type, the wielded weapon becomes the gift, and retains its original enchantment and beatitude. Erosionproofing is still added if the weapon doesn't have it. | rikersan, aosdict | |
Nerf the spellbook of identify so that it only type-identifies items (beatitude, enchantment, and charges will not be considered). If you want to learn these things, you must use scrolls of identify. Alternatively, blessed scrolls of identify could be buffed, for example they always give a full identification of everything in inventory, or they identify several additional object classes that are not yet in your discoveries list.
|
aosdict, jonadab, Porkman | |
When reading a scroll of identify when confused, you get enlightenment (you're "identifying yourself"). | Setneicum, aosdict | |
High level (maybe only XL 30) monks can get enlightenment by #sitting on normal floor. | Muad | |
Gnomish characters get some interesting starting items, like tin openers, candles, oil, or cans of grease. | flump | |
Humans have a slight advantage in their chance of taming creatures. | jonadab | |
When the game looks up the scoreboard to generate a corpse name, ignore any games that ended in an ascension. Also, make the rndghost function check the scoreboard. | mys, aosdict, raisse | |
Fire elementals and vortices have a light radius of 2. | jonadab | |
2-handed weapons can be enchanted up to +7 as normal, but one-handed weapons can only go up to +5. Alternatively, +9/+7. | flump | |
Elven gloves, which grant stealth and can be enchanted to +7. | flump | |
Monsters should not be able to unlock, open, and move into the space of a door all in one turn, or move and eat in one turn. | aosdict, FIQ | |
Eating brains recovers magic power instead of satiation. | Tarmunora | |
Give a YAFM when confused and trying to read a scroll of blank paper: "Being confused, you mispronounce the lack of words..." | aosdict, ais523 | |
Banana darts, which can be thrown around corners. | Grasshopper | |
Blessed charging can select a nonmagical instrument, converting it into a (uncharged?) magical version of the same instrument. | flump | |
You can break and destroy a loadstone in inventory by applying a pickaxe to yourself, or #rubbing the pickaxe on the loadstone. | aosdict, ais523 | |
Several things relating to making the upper dungeon feel more "eroded" or exposed to the elements/other adventurers, in keeping with NetHack flavor that other people have been seeking the Amulet:
|
Chris, aosdict | |
Falling rock traps are flavored as unstable ceiling (so that the flavor doesn't get weird for situations like . Alternatively, create a separate unstable ceiling trap for that purpose. | ais523 | |
In the uppermost levels of the dungeon, add (non-guaranteed) fake bones piles which contain starting equipment from some role. Gear is eroded or biased towards negative enchantment, most magical items are removed, and perhaps one or two non-starting items are added. Then the whole pile is mostly cursed as usual. | Chris | |
Traps in general scale as the game progresses:
|
aosdict, Chris, jonadab | |
New special room "rat nest": generates very high in the dungeon, and contains some r, some eroded/negatively enchanted armor, and some comestibles. | Chris | |
Minor special feature of a level "jackal kill": a corpse of a playable race surrounded by a few jackals. If fake bones piles are added, make this a fake bones pile with "killed by a jackal" on the headstone. | Chris | |
Stick some orc corpses in Orctown, because they can't have defeated the entire town without any losses. | flump, aosdict | |
Tourists start with a leash. | Webmant | |
Certain monsters (intelligent ones like Elvenkings that are smart enough to realize you probably will kill them) turn peaceful or generate peaceful depending on your XL. | statuesurfer | |
If an undead monster tries to put on an amulet of life saving, it will be either undead turned or destroyed, or brought back to life. | FIQ | |
Rangers start the game with all types of bows and arrows identified. | rikersan | |
Yumis are treated as "very well-crafted bows", and allow elf or orc multishot to be used with them (as opposed to the current where you need to use an elvish/orcish bow). The Longbow of Diana is now a yumi. | flump | |
Rather than giving Monks a flat -20 to-hit for armor, base it on the armor delay - the factor that determines how long armor takes to take off or put on. | FIQ | |
Covetous warping only works on teleportable levels. It should also count as a regular teleport and cost Pw for the warping monster. | FIQ | |
Kicking boots damage any monster standing on the other side of a door you kick. | flump | |
Instead of having Sokoban as a branch, generate occasional Sokoban puzzles in the Dungeons proper. They must not be mandatory. | ais523, raisse | |
Kicking option or game mode which changes your bump attack into kicking. | flump | |
Fire and frost horns' damage scales with level. | Luxidream | |
Fire and frost horns don't shoot rays of fire or cold: instead, they temporarily grant you the appropriate Brand effect (resistance, double fire/cold damage). | Entitas | |
If a pet nurse is next to you and you choke, it does the Heimlich maneuver on you and you vomit voluminously. | Webmant | |
Split weaponless conduct into melee-weaponless, ranged-weaponless, and spell-less conduct. | jonadab | |
Increase the damage of slung touchstones. Slung luckstones are low-damage but have a chance of getting "lucky" hits that do much more damage or instakill monsters. | flump | |
Reduce the base price of the scroll of blank paper to something low and unique. It should probably cost less than the scroll of identify, but not be incredibly cheap. | ais523, jonadab, FIQ, aosdict | |
Dwarven characters always see all gold on a level, with the possible exception of gold carried by a monster. | ais523 | |
If the player is polymorphed into a red or blue dragon, they can burn-engrave on the floor with their fire/lightning breath. | aosdict, flump | |
Rename the potion of gain level to "potion of level up". | ais523 | |
For variants with scrolls of consecration, the confused effect will remove the graveyard flag from a level if non-cursed, and add it if cursed. | various | aosdict |
Cursed potions of gain ability give you an ability point in something by taking it away from one of the other scores. | FIQ | |
If you have autodig enabled and a digging-capable pet is next to a wall or rock square you move into, it will dig that square out for you. | flump | |
When you fail to write a scroll because you ran out of ink, it will become a "garbled scroll" instead of disappearing. Garbled scrolls can't be read (or possibly they could be read, for a number of generally negative weak magical effects), but they can be re-blanked so the scroll can be written again. This could also happen when you fail to write a scroll by not knowing it. There is a slim chance, probably less than 10%, that you end up writing some random scroll instead of a garbled scroll. | aosdict, flump, Porkman | |
Artifact pickaxe that blows up the wall instead of simply digging it. | flump, Grasshopper | |
Polymorphs from polytraps, on monsters, revert on death/time out ala player polymorph. This is to prevent the mines having a balrog forever, or your nice pet archon becoming a leprechaun permanently. | rikersan | |
Dragons, and probably all MZ_HUGE monsters, can't enter corridor tiles or go through open doors because they're too big. (This would probably mean that corrmaze levels in Gehennom would need to be removed or not generate huge monsters.) | rikersan, aosdict | |
A blessed scroll of teleportation will allow you to follow monsters that recently teleported away, whether that is a levelport or a normal horizontal teleport. | FIQ | |
Kicking down a door may damage a creature standing on the other side. This is guaranteed if you are wearing kicking boots. | flump | |
Reorganize which roles get which special spells, based on the change that every role should always have a 0% failure rate at casting its special spell. | jonadab | |
To avoid the annoyance of disrobing in a closet to cast utility spells, add a bit to spellbooks that represents whether it is a non-combat, utility spell. Such spells have a much reduced armor penalty, but take several turns to cast. | aosdict, flump | |
The demon lords take no interest in you until you are on the ascension run with the Amulet. At which point they attack. | flump | |
Eating a shimmering dragon has the effect of quaffing a potion of wonder. | FIQhack | flump |
The Oracle stands on a neutral altar, but killing her sets your luck to -10. | flump | |
Maximum HP depends totally on three factors: function(role, race, XL) + function2(XL, Con) + (all bonuses or penalties from other sources, like nurses, full healing potions, fire traps, etc), with some diminishing returns on the third factor. | flump, aosdict, jonadab | |
Pets get a speed increase of (Cha + 6). | flump | |
Add a message for when the player first satisfies both conditions of having teleportitis and being able to teleport at will. | flump | |
Arch-liches sometimes generate with potions of unholy water in their inventory. | flump | |
Add air as a normal terrain type. If you step on air without levitation or flying, you fall to your death ("killed by gravity"), unless you're on the Plane of Air (where there's no place to fall to). The obvious glyph is but wouldn't work because players are used to thinking of it as rock; other possibilities are ~ or #, or giving the player a warning when they would be stepping out into open air. | statuesurfer, aosdict, FIQ, stenno | |
The spellbook of cure blindness can be read while blind. | FIQ | |
Water walking boots give you the same speed as speed boots if you are standing on water or a fountain. | flump | |
Multi-level shops, presumably with multiple shopkeepers or one shopkeeper that follows you to whichever level you're on. | ChrisE | |
Giant characters or characters polymorphed into a giant should have a boosted carrying capacity. | FIQ | |
Wands of digging kill any monster made of earth instantly. | deadnoob | |
The ascension run through the Dungeons of Doom (the instant you come back into your god's sphere of influence) is trivially easy: your god will regularly smite any enemy that dares attack you, and will ignore prayer timeout when answering prayer (but only to fix problems; if timeout is not 0, the god will not grant you any boons.) However, once you reach the Planes, the other gods step in and start interfering with the god so that they can't directly help you anymore. These other gods don't want to kill you since you're still bringing the Amulet closer to them. But when you reach Astral, the other gods will do all they can to kill you, relieve you of the Amulet, and bring it to their own high altar. Your god sends you several A (might be Aleaxes, ki-rins or possibly even Archons) instead of just one, but you are now faced with elite teams of player monsters, priests, and A sent by the other gods, who have amulet-stealing attacks. The gods' struggle to each get the Amulet manifests in all sorts of ways: disintegration beams blasting at you but being redirected onto a hapless monster nearby, inventory cursing, lightning bolts, resurrecting the corpses of dead player monsters or priests, and so on. | aosdict, ChrisE, Wooble | |
Remove the [yn] prompt for both looting and untrapping. Also maybe streamline the "You carefully open the box... --More--" | mtf | |
Energy regeneration should cause you to hunger faster. | AmyBSOD | |
If you get another role's quest artifact through bones or wishing, player monsters of that role will gradually start to be spawned of increasing difficulty who pursue and hunt you down because you are now their quest nemesis. | FIQ | |
Split containers into a dedicated object class, whose symbol is [. (Mimics can still be [ because the traditional disguise of a mimic is a chest.) | puck | |
Reduce the level of the spell of create familiar to 2, and give it a dedicated list of summonable monsters based on skill level: Unskilled creates only kittens and little dogs, Basic will pick a random non-fully-grown dog, cat or horse, Skilled will not create kittens, ponies, or little dogs but otherwise will choose any d, u, or f that isn't a unicorn. Expert will choose from the Skilled list, plus any q or w. If not doing that, as a more minor change, don't create any monster that is always hostile. | FIQ, jonadab, flump, rikersan | |
New object property, burden. Makes the item heavier than it is normally. Generates cursed 90% of the time. | FIQhack | rikersan, FIQ, jonadab |
Dragons can cast spells. | bug_sniper, Grasshopper | |
In the last level of the Dungeons of Doom (normally the Castle), the powers of your god and Moloch are approximately equal, and prayer may or may not work here. (The Valley is strictly Moloch's territory.) | aosdict, FIQ | |
Valkyries have some drain life power, as they are "choosers of the slain" in Norse mythology. | flump | |
Wishing for an artifact drains two charges from a wand of wishing. If it's a wrest wish or from a source that only gives one wish like a djinni, you merely get the base item type instead. | jonadab | |
If racial shopkeepers are implemented, they give the player discounts. This could be in the form of a direct buy price reduction (must be capped at 50% of the base cost though to prevent farming) or treating the player as if they had higher Charisma. If the shopkeeper hates your race (for example, elves versus orcs), they will also block the entrance to the store as if you were carrying a pickaxe. | rikersan, aosdict, jonadab, Webmant | |
Valkyries offering fire giant or frost giant corpses get double the sacrifice value. Possibly this could be generalized to other roles sacrificing "enemy" monsters. | Jendic, aosdict | |
Sunglasses that block gaze attacks when worn; this should possibly have some downside like limiting vision radius. | statuesurfer, aosdict | |
Add a message for a monster you can see that polymorphs via a polymorph trap (or, come to think of it, any source, like the player zapping it at them). | aosdict, jondab | |
Object properties are more likely to appear on poorer weapons and armor. | flump | |
Change trap symbols and colors to be more unique: holes should go on their own glyph, level teleporters should be ^, trap doors are ^. | FIQ, jonadab | |
Archeologists should be immune to rolling boulders. | HTTPS | |
Lions and tigers have a small chance of being pacified if you apply a whip on them. | jmr | |
Valkyries can fly at will with the #fly command, but it costs Pw per turn/flying action to maintain. | flump | |
Weight-based traps. Light monsters, gnomish characters not carrying much stuff, and so on don't trigger the trap, or trigger it to a lesser degree than a heavy monster or player carrying a lot of stuff. | flump | |
Aquaman role/race, which starts with magical breathing, a +1 trident, and an oilskin sack. Only regenerates health when in water. If a race, should be able to walk around on dry land (so merfolk are probably out, perhaps merlings or half-merfolk would work). Can drown surrounding enemies. Starts with scrolls of flood. | Luxidream, mdlp0716 | |
Dragonbane gives 100% reflection versus dragon breath. | FIQhack | rikersan, flump |
Erosionproofing projectiles greatly reduces their chance of breaking. | rikersan | |
You are not asked "Pay whom?" if you are standing inside a shop. | Andrio | |
New type of book "encyclopedia":
|
Luxidream, FIQ, aosdict | |
If the player starts the game with some random objects type-identified but not in inventory, use a different ID state so the player can have them type-IDed when they come across those items, but they can't startscum for "good" discoveries because the discoveries won't be known at the start of the game. | Luxidream, flump, FIQ, Entitas, aosdict | |
If you end the game by ascending, you get a fixed score instead of one based on the maximum dungeon level reached. Complementary YASI: this fixed score is zero, so that true zero-point ascensions are possible. | aosdict, raisse | |
Monsters can move through secret corridors as if they were normal floor, and use secret doors as if they were normal doors (even unlocking them if they have a tool). If the player sees this happening, the corridor/door is made unsecret. | AmyBSOD, aosdict | |
Wizard-mode ability to wish for "generic ascension kit", which instantly gives you (and auto-equips?) a bunch of gear for an ascension kit. | flump | |
If you have all three invocation items and have not yet performed the invocation, the Oracle always gives you the message about going to the bottom of Gehennom and performing the invocation. If you have the Amulet, she will give you an otherwise unreceivable message about continuing upward through the Elemental Planes. | aosdict, ais523 | |
Throwing a tin of cockatrice meat at a monster who will normally eat through the metal will instantly stone it, if the monster is stoneable. | Zaha | |
New msgtype intended to be even stronger than msgtype:stop, perhaps called msgtype:paranoid. Requires the user to type "yes" before continuing. | Deuce-Zen | |
The Master Assassin offers you the Bell of Opening if you will leave him in peace and let him keep the Master Key. If the player wants to play a chaotic good rogue, they are able to go back and kill the Master of Thieves (without immediately being kicked out of the quest), after which the Master Assassin will give you the Master Key. | aosdict, Webmant | |
Interface option to shorten "blessed", "uncursed" and "cursed" to three letters so that you get more use out of the inventory sidebar. | flump | |
Make monster stunning work like player stunning: it moves randomly and may cause them to miss turns. | flump | |
Ogresmasher doesn't need bonuses versus ogres, or confer beneficial properties. It is simply an oversized sledgehammer with such terrible crushing power that it splatters anything it's swung at. On top of modest damage bonuses, it has chances to instakill sufficiently small monsters, and may inflict negative status effects on large monsters like stunning or slowness (or bleeding, if that is implemented). Probably better if war hammers are made into two-handed weapons. | Entitas | |
Resting on a bench regains Pw as well as HP. | Fourk | flump |
Don't print a message or interrupt anything when your Pw reaches full while you are maintaining a spell, if you haven't actually cast a spell manually since the last time it was restored. | FIQhack | flump |
Zen or illiterate players get spells for free as a prayer boon, instead of spellbooks. | Luxidream | |
A way to dump the entire contents of one bag into another bag. | Luxidream | |
Strength should not give a to-hit bonus; the encumbrance system is already there to address that. | Webmant, aosdict, FIQ | |
The fireball spell's unadvanced form creates a single fire explosion at a targetable square, rather than a ray that explodes, so you can cast it at squares that aren't directly aligned with you. | aosdict, jonadab | |
Unicorn corpses have a chance of conveying teleportitis. | AmyBSOD | |
Players polymorphed into nymphs have infinite carrying capacity. | flump | |
Stepping on a square containing a cockatrice corpse while not wearing boots instantly stones you. | AmyBSOD | |
Petrification is a contact poison secreted by cockatrices, and only partially stones the body part it touches. If you touch one with your hands, you cannot use your hands anymore, etc. | flump | |
If the scroll of enchant weapon targets a wielded bow but you have arrows quivered, or you are not wielding anything but have thrown weapons quivered, it may switch to enchanting the quivered ammunition instead. | rikersan | |
The blessed scroll of gold detection also detects gems, and possibly type-identifies any pieces of worthless glass on the level as well (more to prevent interface annoyance than anything else). | aosdict, rikersan | |
On Valentine's Day, succubi (or any female seducer) steal candy bars you are carrying, and incubi give you candy bars. | Webmant | |
Artifact chaotic amulet "Amulet of Splendor": provides every single amulet effect, as well as unchanging-ignoring controlled polyself when invoked. Wearing it conveys life saving (this WILL disintegrate the amulet if used), magical breathing, unchanging, poison resistance, ESP, reflection, strangulation (doesn't kill you due to magical breathing but maybe it makes it so you can't eat food or something while wearing it, or it autocurses), restful sleep, and gender change for as long as you wear the amulet. Base type is a cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor. | Webmant, aosdict | |
Remove the ability of ID scrolls to give a full inventory ID, or make blessed ones give a guaranteed type-ID of everything in inventory. Confused blessed scrolls of ID give a full ID of charges, beatitude, and enchantment on all items in inventory, but NOT type-identification. | Webmant | |
A Minesweeper minigame where you start in an empty zone with a pickaxe. You can always move diagonally through gaps without dropping anything. The amount of mines next to a tile are represented by rock piles on the ground, and you can throw single rocks to embed them in walls to flag mines. Every mine hit causes an explosion that damages, wounds legs, scatters inventory, and penalizes Luck. | Webmant | |
Give all roles a warning when they might fail to read a spellbook, but make the numbers involved much less useful than the Wizard's warning. (Possibly, just give players "difficult to comprehend" when success chance is less than 100% and nothing else, and buff Wizard warning to add more levels: "somewhat difficult", "difficult", "very difficult", "extremely difficult"). | aosdict, Luxidream | |
Evil version of the Eye of the Aethiopica: it allows you to cast spells using HP when your Pw is depleted. | Deuce-Zen | |
Dropping an item on an altar to Moloch may, in some cases, curse the item. Ideally this should not be exploitable, so things like a very small chance per drop of an item would not be good. Maybe tied to object ID number if that can't be exploited. | aosdict, raisse | |
Anti-magic traps deep in the dungeon or in Gehennom may give you the cancelled status effect. | FIQHack | aosdict |
Change up and add new failure effects of spellbook reading:
Books no longer have a 1/3 chance of disintegrating when failing to read them; instead, a cursed book will always disintegrate. |
aosdict, Zaha, Deuce-Zen, Grasshopper | |
Eating a bag of tricks (as a gelatinous cube) does something interesting, maybe only YAFM, maybe more. | Wooble | |
Quantum mechanics' hits toggle your speed instead of teleporting you if you have teleport control. (You already know your position, so your velocity must become uncertain.) | Deuce-Zen | |
Pacifist option, which suppresses attack from normal movement. (You can still attack with the F command.) | Deuce-Zen | |
The scroll of destroy armor, when confused, cursed, and naked, grants temporary disintegration resistance. | Webmant | |
Golems hate existence so much that they attack all other creatures, but the other creatures don't hate golems, so they just defend. This is a special case of implementing one-way grudges. | flump | |
Zombies always try to path in a straight line towards the player (assuming they can see or otherwise are aware of the player), and get stuck on terrain. | ais523 | |
Make the Castle barracks have second doors that open onto the courtyard. | mtf | |
Soldiers surrounded by other soldiers have higher AC, to-hit, and damage. | mtf | |
The Oracle now prompts the user to ask a question. Her oracularities now have associated keywords (a many-to-many relationship); if you use keywords, she will select an oracularity matching as many of them as possible. If she doesn't know what you're asking about, she gives you a random oracle. This could even be leveraged to ask about information that's normally hidden from the player; for example, asking about the Sokoban reward or the location of branch stairs. | aosdict, jonadab, FIQ, mtf | |
The Oracle has the same item as the prize in Sokoban, so you can pay her to tell you what the prize is (because she'll have it with her). This opens up a strategic choice where players can decide whether to kill her and skip Sokoban, or not. She will need to be quite stronger than her current abilities are, with passive attacks that work even at range. Alternatively, she could carry the other Sokoban item, depending on how formidable she is. | Webmant, jonadab, mtf | |
Elementals fire back weapons you throw at them with additional force (so, usually, additional damage): water elementals in a geyser, fire elementals burning with primal flame, air elementals in a gust, earth elementals in a shower of rocks (or they just incorporate the weapon into themself and become stronger, dropping it on death). | Webmant | |
Cursed magic whistles send pets away from you. (This is perhaps exploitable with e.g. purple rain strategies on Astral.) | flump | |
Make object properties a boolean array, not a bitmask, so that the developer isn't limited by the number of bits in an integer. | FIQ | |
"streak_mode" option. Only allows one saved game at a time. | NetHack 4 | mtf |
A windowport that allows you to play local sound files when the game produces certain messages. | Deuce-Zen | |
Barbarian unarmed skill enhances for free when you finish the Quest, get crowned, or reach a certain level. | Fourk | flump |
Applying a blessed magic whistle while confused teleports you to one of your pets. | flump | |
Water elementals deal active water damage to the player, more broadly than rust monsters: blanks scrolls, dilutes potions, extinguishes candles, etc. | Luxidream | |
Autocursing armor always generates cursed; it is thus perfectly safe to wear any confirmed non-cursed armor the player finds. | aosdict, AmyBSOD | |
If escaping a prompt would use up an item or charge, re-prompt at least once (or maybe have an option configuring how many times it re-prompts.) | flump | |
Valkyries only gain wings (and Flying) after they are crowned. | Fourk | mtf |
Special room that contains a demon gate in the center. This continually spawns monsters who try to defend the gate; the player has to make it through the spawns to destroy it or block it off. The gate could be implemented as a magic portal to a special challenge level like an ADOM-style vault. | flump, aosdict | |
Make being on fire a status effect, which deals damage over time. (Other obvious things to make into damage-over-time effects: poison, bleeding/internal damage.) | jonadab, mtf, aosdict | |
Priests can #offer anywhere (that they can normally, so not in Gehennom), with no need for an altar. (This may be strictly worse than altar sacrifice - maybe it only reduces prayer timeout, not by as much as it would normally, and can't give artifacts or make holy water.) | Webmant, FIQ, aosdict | |
Other priest benefits: double the chance of receiving a sacrifice gift, increase the crowning chance or chance of a high favor, don't get an increased maximum prayer timeout when crowned. | Webmant | |
Werebane provides protection from shape changers and immunity to lycanthropy while wielded. | jonadab | |
Sokoban provides a choice between an oilskin bag of holding and an amulet of reflection and magical breathing. Neither of these is very likely to generate randomly. | FIQHack | flump |
Master wand of death kills and enslaves the monsters it hits. | FIQack | flump |
The Oracle sells type-identification of any one carried item for a fee. | jonadab, mtf | |
Shopkeepers type-identify any item they sell you. (This allows the player to type-identify an item by selling it and buying it back.) | jonadab | |
Rebalance Fort Ludios so that it can realistically only be completed after finishing the Castle. One way to do this is to make soldier AI better, another way is to put the entry and exit portals on opposite sides of the level (or put the exit portal inside the fort), so the player can't return to the Dungeons of Doom when things get hairy. The goal of doing this is to delay a large power spike due to collecting all of its gold until the player is truly ready for it. | aosdict, mtf | |
Rogues have a 20% (or 10%, or whatever is balanced) chance of stealing a random lightweight item (say, less than 5 aum) out of a monster's inventory with every successful melee hit they make. This chance is increased if they are hitting with no wielded weapon or have no secondary weapon or shield, and maybe should scale with experience level too. | aosdict, jonadab | |
Monsters who can use items and estimate that they are strong enough will attack crossaligned unicorns to get the horn. | jonadab | |
When a monster kills a monster that it grudges, it gets some bonus like a small HP boost or a level up. | flump | |
A level sound for when there is a dragon somewhere on the level. | FIQHack | flump |
Bards can sing one song without requiring an instrument. | dNetHack? | flump |
Consuming "smoked" meat from a tin may release a djinni. (To prevent farming, tins created by polypiling or from horns of plenty might need to be limited to the homemade-or-rotten that player-made tins can be.) | flump | |
Samurai can't use Excalibur, because it's cross-culture. The Tsurugi should be buffed to be quite good enough. | Luxidream | |
Revenant race. Only available for roles you have died playing and didn't leave bones. Gets death resistance and unbreathing from XL1, has an automatic counterattacking kick. Any starting gear is scattered randomly across dungeon level 1. No pet. | Fourk | flump |
On the Plane of Water, fire wands and fire spells expand your bubble, and throwing a bag of holding out into the water creates a new huge bubble (as a large but finite amount of the water is sucked into it). | flump | |
Tinning kits include tin openers implicitly, so if you wield it you can open tins. | jonadab | |
Wizards who can't cast spells while crowned (permablind?) receive something other than a spellbook of finger of death. | Luxidream | |
The Heart of Ahriman returns to your quiver when slung. Or at least add some returning sling-ammo artifact. | mtf | |
New slot for belts:
|
ais523, mtf | |
Monster spell that creates a wall, or possibly just a boulder, to block the hero's progress. | aosdict, Demo, Crawldragon | |
Fixed crysknives never revert. | jonadab, FIQ | |
Add a boulder-throwing skill for giants. The skill cap is determined by your role. | Fourk | AmyBSOD |
Kicking a lightweight object into a wall will cause it to "rebound" or "clatter" (for wooden objects) off the wall, not just "Thump!". The object might move a couple spaces. | aosdict, Demo | |
Touchstones no longer count as magical items. (Real-life touchstones aren't.) | FIQ, jonadab, aosdict | |
Statues block line of sight. | ais523 | |
Rock moles can be tamed by throwing a metal weapon at them, which they will catch and eat. | ChrisE, aosdict | |
Levels between Medusa and the Castle generate with roving contingents of the Yendorian Army, and have large open areas if they are maze levels. | aosdict, FIQ | |
Amplification trinsic which is a counterpart to reflection: an attack that hits you will be amplified and continue past you (greater range and greater effects). | ais523 | |
Allow edged weapons to be applied to force open door locks. (They can break like this.) | deadnoob | |
Make engraving an occupation. | FIQ | |
Bows might break, like boomerangs, when you whack things with them in melee. (Will require an AI rewrite so 500 gnomes don't break their bows on you.) | twrk, aosdict | |
q class monsters should have their difficulty rebalanced to at least roughly reflect their damage output; mumakil are the strongest q of all and have one of the lowest difficulties. | StatueSurfer | |
New unaligned artifact dagger Almagest: uses the powers of scrolls to augment itself, and bears a scroll label signifying which scroll ability it is imbued with. Opinions vary on whether this label should be randomly generated by the dagger (and the player may choose to read it, upon which it gives the uncursed scroll effect and disappears for 1000 turns, eventually returning with another label) or whether the label should be deliberately imbued by the player by #rubbing it on a scroll. It gains +d4 to damage and +d4 to hit when it has an inscription.
There are additional special effects if the player has formally IDed the scroll:
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Luxidream, aosdict, FIQ, ais523 | |
Cooked corpses don't cause vomiting or sickness or detrimental effects, but they also don't convey intrinsics because you destroyed all the vitamins. | AmyBSOD | |
Luck ideas:
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aosdict, jonadab, ais523, mtf, Jendic, FIQ, greqrg | |
Failed artifact wishes give you the base item type instead of nothing. | rikersan | |
Assuming a wand of stone to flesh is added: with high skill, it changes diggable walls into huge chunks of meat. | FIQHack | aosdict |
If hovering over a trap door and zapping an opening beam downwards, the trap door becomes a hole. | jonadab | |
The scroll of scare monster, on the ground, will do a check versus monster magic resistance before it actually scares them. | aosdict, statuesurfer | |
Add a mechanic like applying a scalpel to a monster to give healers a source of healing that isn't tied to magic. | Demo | |
Tabbing to auto-attack monsters (at range or at polearm range). | Pinkbeast | |
A type of boots, perhaps high iron boots, that protects fully against xans. | ChrisE, aosdict | |
When tame shapechangers polymorph, they attack creatures based on their current monster level (or perhaps the maximum of their current level and their new form's level), not blindly use the new form's level. | aosdict, ChrisE | |
Have different summon nasties lists, based on what monster is doing the summoning. If a demon summons, you get mostly demons; if an undead summons, you get mostly undead. Needs some more lists for lawful summoners like titans or Archons and Quest nemesis spellcasters. The current list is kept for the Wizard of Yendor. | jonadab, aosdict | |
Artifact bullwhip that grants extra damage against tigers and other animals, and grants better passive pet-control effects. | jonadab, aosdict | |
Make magic cancellation visible in the status bar. | FIQ | |
You can walk diagonally into or out of an open door if there is also another open door adjacent to both your starting and ending location. | FIQ, aosdict | |
Applying or invoking the Candelabrum with insufficient candles prompts you to attach more candles to it. | ais523 | |
Potions that you can drink from multiple times. | ais523 | |
Role-specific artifacts given to you only when you are crowned. | FIQ | |
Single-level branches whose portals, found in vaults, disappear after one use; they are subdivisions of the Magic Memory Vault, and modeled after ADOM "vaults". These are basically challenge levels, smaller and less rewarding than Fort Ludios (the master branch), that contain some nice loot and harder-than-usual monsters. Portals to them can also be found in vaults in Gehennom. | aosdict, ais523, mtf | |
Fort Ludios is a visit-once level: once you leave by the exit portal, the Dungeons of Doom portal disappears and the level becomes inaccessible forever. (Maybe if you leave any of the invocation items or the Amulet there, the portal refuses to let you out so the game doesn't become unwinnable.) | ais523, aosdict | |
Convert some of the Gehennom filler levels into ADOM-like greater vaults that contain many challenging monsters and an artifact. | mtf | |
When you try to loot a locked chest but have an unlocking tool, automatically apply it and then continue to loot the chest. | mtf | |
Keys only work on locks in one dungeon branch. | ais523 | |
Restore the Amulet Delivery Service to the game: demon lords in the Sanctum, but not the Wizard, will fight the current holder of the Amulet of Yendor for it. Only do this if lugging a demon lord down to the Sanctum is considerably harder than just fighting through the Sanctum is itself, and no demon lord is actually guaranteed to win against the High Priest. | aosdict, ais523 | |
Mjollnir confers shock resistance. | aosdict, Luxidream | |
More varied door traps (the trap would probably be determined when it is triggered based on the level difficulty; could hash it based on level and coordinates if it should be deterministic):
|
aosdict, mtf | |
Gods may grant a saddle as a sacrifice gift and unrestrict riding skill. | FIQ | |
Make death magic resistable by an amulet or ring. Possible names and corresponding exact effects vary:
|
ais523, FIQ, jonadab | |
Artifact shield of reflection that reflects thrown or fired projectiles. | Demo | |
Ranged attacks can be directed at the . space. If this ends up killing you, the death reason is "shot [him/her]self in the foot". | AmyBSOD | |
New role, the "Renegade", where your goal is to destroy the Amulet of Yendor. You start the game with the Bell of Opening (you found it as a child and had your mind opened), you are unaligned so all the gods hate you. No quest. | NCommander | |
When a monster decides whether you are peaceful and makes race or alignment checks to do so, they do it based on polyform, current alignment, and when they first spot you as opposed to when they are first created. If the player polymorphs into an orc and some other orcs are hanging out in an unexplored room across the level, they should be peaceful to the character as long as the character is polymorphed into an orc (but will turn hostile when she changes back). | aosdict, FIQ, Chris | |
When you violate a spirit's taboo, make it explicit which action broke it, either through the spirit verbalizing it or in some other way. | dNetHack | NeroOneTrueKing |
In variants with reviving undead, you can apply a weapon > at a dead zombie's corpse to destroy its brain (for simplicity, this destroys the entire corpse) and prevent it from reviving. This may take several turns. | aosdict, FIQ | |
If you are wearing silver armor without some sort of protection layer like a shirt underneath it and you contract lycanthropy, you immediately take silver damage all over your body and die. | GruntHack | aosdict |
In variants that have multiple selectable Sokoban prizes, one prize is multiple random rings and a random amulet, but there's no way to see what they are without sealing off the other prizes. | aosdict, Tangles | |
Paper bags that are a container but disintegrate when wet. They can generate with a potion of booze inside. | Grasshopper, aosdict | |
If you throw a bell (or possibly any non-cloth item), it makes a clanging or clattering noise that wakes monsters. | Grasshopper | |
Add pegasi, lawful u-class monsters that fly, have a slightly higher base level than a warhorse, and speed around 25. Might be tameable with vegetables, or only blessed vegetables, or one certain veggy food, though. | FIQ | |
Find some justification for making the flavor of Sokoban a branch where the ceiling collapsed and opened up pits and dropped rocks everywhere. | ais523 | |
Eating a cockatrice corpse only petrifies you 85% or so of the time, the rest of the time it "tastes like chicken". | jonadab | |
If you attempt to put on a helm of opposite alignment in the Astral Plane, your god is angered and disintegrates it off your head before your alignment changes. | FIQ | |
Change the sandworm tooth material to MINERAL (they are crystalline, not bone) rather than having no defined material. | aosdict, jonadab | |
H-class monsters are tall enough to stand above water, and don't drown in it. Or maybe they only drown on water spaces completely surrounded by other water. | aosdict, rchase | |
Squares containing burning candles ignite flammable monsters that move onto them. However, such monsters should stay away from spaces they can see have a burning candle. | Wayward_Vagabond | |
Charging a potion of fruit juice turns it into a potion of see invisible. Dipping fruit juice into confusion turns it into a potion of booze. | aosdict, Deuce-Zen | |
There is a cap on the number of smoky wish-granting djinni that can appear in one game. | jonadab | |
You can mark certain squares as "ignored" so that when you walk over them they don't show you the items on it. | ChrisE | |
Elves get low-light vision, which doubles the radius of light sources, rather than infravision. | ais523 | |
Pickaxe skill influences its digging speed. | bouquet | |
An option to disable statue glyphs rendering as their monster symbol. | FIQ | |
Wands may generate pre-recharged. | ais523 | |
Trap failure should be based on stats like Dexterity and maybe role and XL, not Luck. Also, success chance of writing an unknown scroll or spellbook should use Intelligence and not Luck. | ais523, aosdict | |
Revamp Astral so that the challenges to player mobility, options, and time don't all depend on being crammed in by monsters. One idea is to have spellcasters that summon force fields / temporary walls to block your progress. | aosdict, jonadab, mtf | |
As part of artifact rebalance: guaranteed sacrifice gifts should probably not be ascension kit quality gear, since otherwise sacrificing for such gear becomes a dominant strategy. (Most important for weapons; you don't want to be able to obtain a weapon early that will obsolete all other weapons in the game.) | aosdict, mtf | |
Add "You vaguely feel a vague sense of vagueness" as a hallucinatory message. | rumflump, jonadab | |
Remove the scroll of stinking cloud in favor of a potion that when shattered releases a stinking cloud. Drinking this makes you vomit or become ill. | aosdict, FIQ, jonadab | |
Jumping either acts on a timeout and can't be done right after a previous jump, or else it takes a full turn's worth of movement points (more so than the existing mechanic of reducing movement points to 0). | aosdict, mtf | |
More marginal corner-case uses for gems (similar to the amethyst/booze interaction):
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firemonkey, aosdict, elenmirie, jonadab |