User:Phol ende wodan/YANI/IRC archive

This page is an attempt to list YANIs that come up on several NetHack-related IRC channels, so they don't end up ignored and forgotten.

Attribution will be listed whenever possible. I make no claim to any of the ideas in this section. 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, and #hardfought channels, and perhaps also some variant channels in the future. (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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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 (and probably the other types of metalworking) 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).
• For gold and weapon balance reasons, this would probably work better the farther it is into the game; maybe it could even be found deep into Gehennom.

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.

Alchemist role

Contributions by Demo, aosdict, Grasshopper, Tarmunora, jonadab, ais523

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.
• 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.

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.

Intelligent monster behavior

Contributions by jonadab, FIQ, aosdict

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.

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.

• 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.

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: I'll just hit this thing a couple more times, it'll die. I don't need to unburden myself, they're only soldiers, I've been killing soldiers, it'll be fine. Maybe if I press this key a bit harder I'll hit for more damage next time.		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.		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 warning about dragons, which can be fairly dangerous.	FIQHack	rumflump
More acid resistance sources in FIQHack, to balance yellow dragons' exploding acid breath. Possibly a ring of acid resistance.	FIQHack	ais523, FIQ
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.)		NeroOneTrueKing
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: The thick spellbook weighs more than other kinds. The thin spellbook weighs less. Reading a dusty spellbook has a chance of making you sneeze (if you are in a form with a nose), which wakes up monsters. Reading a silvery spellbook as a silver-hater makes you "not able to handle" the book and drop it		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: Headstones can be created by polymorph and are more likely than other outcomes, but cannot be polymorphed into anything else. Trying to do so only polymorphs its epitaph. Polymorphing an altar angers that altar's god and any attendant priest since you effectively destroyed their altar Fountains either cannot polymorph into anything besides headstones or have a very limited chance of becoming something else; this is to prevent the player from being able to generate a bunch of thrones from fountains.		raisse, aosdict, jonadab, AmyBSOD
You can wear an empty bag over your head to blind yourself, but this sets charisma to 6.		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.		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. Zombies can resurrect in Gehennom akin to GruntHack zombies. Spectres, which are like wraiths but much faster and with more attacks. Vampire mages. Skeletal dragons. Minotaur zombies. Z might need to be made ungenocideable.		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. Death resistance conferred by a helm, an amulet, maaaaaybe as an intrinsic gained through crowning		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. Rubbing it on a blessed touchstone Making a number of successful hits with it SLASH'EM's weapon practice ability Making a number of attempted hits with it (they don't have to hit)		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: The bard and healer cannot both be focused around petmongering, so one of them would have to change. Most likely the healer, as the bard's traditional abilities are only good on pets. Instead of the standard little dog or kitten, the bard starts with a "party" of 3-4 player monsters, who are randomly chosen from other roles. This would make the primary strategy focused on having the party do the fighting for you, letting them level up, providing them with weapons and equipment, and not letting them die. Healers and archeologists, and possibly tourists, don't make very good additions to the party, and so should perhaps be ineligible. Party roles could be randomly chosen from distinct sets of "strong melee fighter" (Bar or Cav or Kni or Val), "ranged combat" (Ran or Rog or Sam or possibly Tou), and "spellcaster/cleric" (possibly Hea or Mon or Pri or Wiz). The party will not start with the full starting inventory of their respective roles. They will generally have the same weapons and armor, but will probably not have any of the scrolls, rings, wands they normally start with, and starting spellbooks should be either eliminated or unrandomized. YASI: the bard quest artifact gives party members the effects of their own quest artifacts. Healer strategy should shift away from petmongering - the easiest way to do this is change the protection formula in such a way that the protection racket doesn't exist; so that the player isn't incentivized to keep XL as low as possible until they can buy protection. Difficult for Healers to find a new niche. (Avoidance of combat is an option, but the Class Overhaul proposal calls for Archeologists to fill that niche). Perhaps something that focuses on pacifying monsters by healing them, but this has issues: you shouldn't be able to tame by healing since that turns Healers back in the direction of acquiring lots of pets, and most monsters start at full HP and don't need any healing. Bards (and probably all players) should be able to equip their pets by #looting them, or a similar mechanism. (This would also apply to mounts.) Intelligent monsters will prefer player-given items above all others and will never willingly replace them for other gear. Possibly make this behavior dependent on options, because some players may want their pets to be pragmatic in their gear choices. Player monster pets should perhaps not be able to detect curses. Songbooks, + class items which contain a song that the bard can learn. Balancing the songbook generation rate against spellbooks might be tricky, because although bards can still cast spells and other roles can play songs, each is not very likely to have that much use for the other set of books. Hardcoding different probabilities based on whether the character is a bard or not doesn't seem very clean. Possibly the bard should be able to discover songs by trial and error, although simple brute forcing is definitely not the way to do it. Maybe all spellbooks start identified. The bard could need to practice the song by using the songbook in order to restore "song memory". Song memory does not work quite like spell memory, it works essentially like direct success rate. There might be some mandatory delay between practices, meaning you can't take an unlearned song and practice it up to 100% immediately. Or there could be a possible failure of practice, maybe a dexterity penalty ("Dumb move! You strain your fingers.") to serve to prevent practice-spam. Playing a song would serve to Spellbooks do not eventually go blank, and can be used for practice indefinitely.		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: Poison instadeath GWTWOD Chameleons turning into out-of-difficulty monsters the player can't handle		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.		Agafnd, ais523
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. This means that choking over food is no longer instantaneous. Each turn while choking over food, you have a 20% chance to vomit and lose 1000 nutrition. At certain points while the strangulation timer is getting closer to 0, you take one point of Con damage. Drowning monsters now grab and pull you underwater in 1 turn, but you have until the timer runs out to kill the monster or escape in some other way. Lifesaving while drowning does not give you a free escape, but resets the drowning timer. Rope golems are now more dangerous, since they represent a delayed instadeath.		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
An extension to the #Metalworking idea above: a full craftsmen's guild (which includes metalworkers but also others). 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, but if you kill a master craftsman, 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. Craftsmen might include: Metalworkers (see above) Wandmakers (produce wands) Scribes (produce scrolls and spellbooks) Toolsmiths (produce mundane and some magical tools) Sculptor (produce statues and figurines) Leatherworkers (produce leather items and saddles)		aosdict
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. This is intended as a balance fix for the player's current ability to make stacks and stacks of full healing, gain ability, or gain level potions, and promote use of found potions instead of diluting them. Significantly, potions of holy water mostly work like they do now - the holy water does not mix with anything and is consumed, while the dipped item becomes blessed - but you can only dip a singular item into the holy water, including other potions. This loss of the ability to mass-produce holy water creates a significant balance change. Undiluted potions can be duplicated by dipping them in normal water, e.g. one potion of gain level + one water = 2 diluted potions of gain level. Diluted potions may need to have weaker effects to compensate for this, or undiluted potions stronger effects. Or potions in general should become rarer, and possibly generate diluted.		FIQ, ais523, jonadab
Elaborations on the Fort Ludios minesweeper proposal by ais523: Should spaces with 0 neighboring mines get 0 gold? Good because it makes the game possibly more instantly recognizable as minesweeper, bad because it makes the overall amount of gold less predictable Need to guarantee somehow that the person stepping into the room doesn't trigger a mine instantly, and set up the level accordingly. The column nearest the entry door could be clear of mines and gold. The whole border could be clear of mines. However, this means that the total amount of gold must end up being an even number - not ideal. What happens if a monster steps on a mine? Possibly this needs an Oracle consultation to explain it to unspoiled players. Or make an engraving when you enter - possibly "xyzzy" as a reference to the cheat code in Windows Minesweeper. Or start off with one mine uncovered and identified on sight. The number of adjacent mines could be expressed in the ones digit of the gold amount. Possibly with a large round number added, so every space is 3001 or 2002, which hopefully clues the player into the fact that it's a significant number. But this might be too restrictive. How to reach the magic number 69105, and do so in a way that guarantees it can be generated? May need to bias the level generator so that this must happen.		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: Wielding a candle gives it a light radius of 3 (at the obvious expense of not having a weapon). Hitting enemies with a lit candle (thrown or melee) has an 80% chance to extinguish the flame and a 20% chance to light them on fire, doing 2d3 fire damage. A lit candle can be applied to an adjacent burnable object (door, tree, wood golem, paper golem) to light it on fire.		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 .: Standing next to or on fire terrain grants cold resistance, but standing on top of fire terrain has the same effect as a fire trap whenever you end your turn on it. The fire eventually burns out and reverts to normal floor, the duration determined by the total weight of the burning objects. Killing a wood golem with fire or burning more than a certain weight of objects on a square creates fire terrain on that space. Throwing burnables onto a fire trap may make them spontaneously combust and produce fire terrain. Fire terrain can be used to cook corpses, which resets their rot timer to 0 if they are not already rotten and lets them go longer without rotting. You can create fire terrain by applying a candle to a space with burnables on it You can also create it by applying a tinderbox to a space, which is a chargeable non-magical tool. Archeologists and Rangers start with one. Fires provide a light source of radius 3, but cannot be moved. Monster AI will not travel over fire if the monster is not resistant.		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 #: Iron bars and fences render as cyan/brown |-. Sinks render as \ (color unspecified, could be blue). Closed drawbridges render as some color of + which is not currently used by terrain - perhaps red or orange. Corridors could be moved to . but this would probably be very unpopular and make levels look a lot worse. Trees could be +, or possibly \ to avoid spellbook confusion. Clouds could set the background color of a space and not change the foreground color, and could possibly be rendered with a blank space character, but this would probably have issues on non-color terminals.		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: General goal is to be able to get the MAP as close to pasteable into the wiki as possible. Interpret < and > on the MAP as STAIR commands for that specific spot. Interpret ? on the MAP as "terrain to be filled by this level's filler algorithm". (This would allow for things like Asmodeus' Lair to not have to be chunked into multiple pieces. Allow ^ to be placed on the MAP, and it is an error if there is no TRAP command for that space. Same for + and DOOR, and for boulders. Allow monsters' inventory to be specified. Allow objects to be specified by random appearance, with a flag that defines whether it will pick a random item or simply fail to generate if that random appearance does not exist in the game. Allow the level size to be specified so that ROWNO and COLNO are out of the question. Extend 3.6.0's REPLACE_TERRAIN to work with non-rectangular areas. Most importantly, parse the files with something not written in yacc, because this adds an additional layer of complexity to anyone who wants to work with the code. Maybe even read in the .des files at runtime, so they can be modified without doing a recompile of them and the intermediate .lev form isn't even needed. This would require giving each level its own .des file and distributing them with the game. This means you don't get the benefits of using a parsing library, but you no longer have to code for or depend on that library either.		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: It is waived if you have set the "descent into Gehennom" flag by going downstairs from the Valley. It checks maximum XL reached, not current; so if you have ever been XL14 it doesn't matter if you have been drained since. It is waived if you have the demigod flag set from killing the Wizard of Yendor.		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): Poison, digestion, lava, death magic, and drawbridge instadeaths can easily be converted into HP damage of max(damage dice roll, substantial % of your max HP). Drowning and choking would be well-suited to a breath system, where it becomes a delayed instadeath. Especially so if you can stop the clock by putting on an amulet of magical breathing or praying. Intelligence drain and level drain generally can't happen without the player being given ample time to escape, so they are fine. Starvation could be changed to HP loss, but you usually just die from side effects of fainting anyway. Instadeaths that almost always have to be intentionally caused by the player (self-genocide, divine wrath etc) are generally fine as-is. Instakilling artifacts are problematic, because there is currently no recourse except for the amulet of life saving. Eating or digesting the Riders should not instakill without warning, because it is now unexpectedly a bad idea to eat a reviving corpse, whereas it had been a good idea in the rest of the game. Good instadeaths generally use unusual resources to fix, or hit the player's reserves in an unexpected way, and allow the player a chance to get out or stop it before dying.		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