User:Phol ende wodan/YANI/IRC archive

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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.
  • When you read a spellbook, you are given a menu with three options:
    • Give the book a cursory glance-over. This can fail with low Int/XL but is fairly unlikely and has very minor failure effects. If successful, it identifies the spell level of the book. Takes 1/10 the usual spell study time.
    • Briefly study the book but don't try to learn its spell. This can fail with mediocre Int/XL but will be reliable at high ones. Moderate failure effects. If successful, it identifies the spell contained in the book. Takes 1/3 the regular spell study time.
    • Study the book normally with normal failure effects and normal spell study time. Learns the spell if successful.

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.

Set of possible items

Items (perhaps only heavily randomized object classes, so NOT armor) can be inspected somehow, or else come pre-inspected, and your character is able to conclude that the item is one of several possible things from that object class. The number of these possible things can depend on role, and the "fakes" are randomized every game.

Example: a character inspects a potion and confirms that it is either healing, acid, or sleeping. All potions with this appearance will provide the same three possibilities. It's actually acid, but without other identification methods, or ruling out healing and sleeping, it can't be discerned which of the three it is.

Has some problems with the interface; a character shouldn't inspect everything and then have to type-name it. Perhaps this could be automated somehow.

Spells

Contributions by ais523, FIQ, Chris_ANG, aosdict, jonadab, NeroOneTrueKing, stenno, K2

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.

Miscellaneous

  • Bump the spell of sleep up to level 3 or 4.
  • Wielding a quarterstaff confers the same benefit as wearing a robe but does not stack with it (implemented in FIQHack).
  • Wielding a wand of nothing confers the same benefit as wearing a robe but does not stack with it.
  • Wielding an identified wand which matches a spell (wand of light -> spell of light, wand of death -> finger of death, etc) drastically reduces your failure rate when casting it. Perhaps casting the spell while wielding the matching unidentified wand should identify the wand.

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, Chris_ANG, NeroOneTrueKing

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).
    • More fun possibilities here if you have the object materials patch.
    • 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.
  • Can also create alchemic gizmos: smoke bombs from potions of blindness, firebombs from potions of oil, all lighter and more numerous and useful than the base potions.
  • Start with all potions identified.
  • Could start with an alchemy kit, which is a rare tool find for other roles. NeroOneTrueKing proposed a set of mechanics for an alchemy kit:
    • Has 3 compartments. The first accepts only potions/phials of polymorph (or perhaps it just has charges and you can recharge it by using potions of polymorph).
    • The other compartments must each only contain items of the same material.
    • A success chance is displayed based on the amount of polymorph potion available, the weight ratio of the two compartments, and the materials themselves (metal can transform into metal relatively easily).
    • A successful use swaps all of the materials of the two compartments.
  • Needs mechanics such that in an Alchemist's hands, no potion is useless.

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. Or Elixir goes bad after a while and reverts to water, making it usable for before a fight but not for stashing.
  • 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.
  • The Stone can turn metal objects into gold or can turn rocks into gold pieces when rubbed on them.
  • When dipped into gain level or gain energy, transforms the potion into polymorph.

A really great Alchemist implementation would probably involve a full alchemy overhaul which adds herbs and fungi, harvesting ingredients from corpses, cooking, and interesting ways to combine everything. The challenge with making this is how to make it useful for other roles and not just the alchemist.

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.

Alchemy

Contributions by FIQ, ais523, jonadab, aosdict, Chris_ANG

NetHack's alchemy system is balanced around the assumption that the player will not hold onto nearly every potion in the game, turn them to water, and polypile them into alchemy ingredients; however, this is not hard to do. Should the player do this, they can amass hundreds of hit points worth of full healing potions, or all the gain ability potions required to max out every stat, or get dozens of potions of holy water.

For most potions in the game, diluting for holy water or alchemizing/polypiling for alchemizing is their ultimate fate, and there are enough potions so that the player never really has to agonize over what to do with a potion. One solution to this would be to make more potions than just acid effective for throwing at monsters.

The color alchemy and gem alchemy patches are unsatisfactory, as is any system that ties alchemy recipes to the random appearance of potions. This is because it makes the game choose at the beginning whether powerful potions can be produced out of junk potions/gems, or out of expensive potions/gems, or not at all; all before the player gets a chance to learn how alchemy will work in this game. It has a large impact on overall strategy that the player can't discover until probably the midgame. At the same time, having hardcoded alchemy rules is unsatisfactory because it's inflexible and carries a heavy spoiler requirement.

Random alchemy is also odd: dipping the same potions in the same way can yield different potion results.

1 + 1 = 2

A radically different system from how alchemy currently works: no matter how many potions are involved in the dipping, only two are consumed, and two alchemized potions produced.

  • 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.

Sink alchemy

Allow sinks to be catalysts for alchemizing things. (Or possibly add a "cauldron" as a new piece of dungeon furniture, but that's iffier.)

  • You can dip potions into sinks to pour them down the drain, experiencing the vapor effects in a safe way. (Pouring polymorph down the sink of course polymorphs the sink.)
  • If you don't pour the potion down the drain, you instead mix it with the fluid from the tap, which is usually water but can already be a random potion.
  • Possibly, doing alchemy in/on a sink is more efficient. There are many possible forms this could take, such as:
    • Potions not diluting when you mix them.
    • Reduced or zero chance of an alchemic blast.
    • You can get results from mixing potions that you can't otherwise (flavor for this is weak, are you... heating them somehow with the hot water?)

Alchemy skill

Non-weapon skill that has various effects on alchemy: make alchemical blasts less common (or zero at high skill), and increase the probability that mixing certain potions yields the right result.

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, xyzyxx, Pavel

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.
  • The Yendorian Army can form a phalanx, which is an ordered rectangle of soldiers. Will stick to wide open areas, try to stay out of the range of ranged attacks until they can swarm around you. Enemies forming a phalanx could receive to-hit and AC boosts.

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.
  • Zombie resurrection: If zombies can resurrect each other through physical contact, living zombies will try to move towards zombie corpses they can see.
  • Throw weapon versus wielding it: Mostly useful for things like daggers or knives. Most monsters should be smart enough not to throw away their last melee weapon when they know they can hit for more damage with it. They will, however, unwield weapons and hit you with fists if their only weapon left is grossly unfit for melee (i.e. crossbow).
  • Darkness: Try not to move out of darkness / into darkness unless there's no other choice. If in the wrong one and doing nothing special, beeline towards the nearest visible way out of it. Most useful for gremlins who want to stay in darkness.
  • Passwall: if monsters cannot take physical items with them when they phase through walls, they will not actually pass through walls while carrying any items they care about, unless they are fleeing, in which case they will abandon the items.
  • Food smells: If the hero is carrying a lot of food in open inventory, monster AI may be more effective at tracking the player, depending on if the food is anything the monsters like to eat. Carrying around lots of fleshy food like tripe rations or meatballs helps carnivorous monsters track, carrying around produce helps herbivorous monsters track, tins don't have any scent or effect, inediate pets get no tracking bonus.
  • Hero displacement: Monsters often attack each other because they think the hero is displaced where another monster is. The smarter a monster is, the more chances it should have to re-roll this displacement roll as long as it keeps landing on other monsters. Or else, if there's only one displaced image, smart monsters should conclude it's not where the other monster is and lash out randomly at empty space.

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).

Trap scaling

Contributions by aosdict, mtf, jonadab, FIQ, ais523, Chris, rumflump, firemonkey

Traps don't scale very much (floor traps' having minimum dungeon levels for random generation is about it), and this hurts their balance. Since a trap will have the same flat effect in all situations, it tends to become unthreatening to a player sooner or later, and then having it appear in the rest of the game is pointless. Conversely, some trap effects are too deadly to early characters. In Gehennom, the traps have probably literally been designed by demons, yet the only difference between Gehennom and the rest of the dungeon is the existence of fire traps.

Floor traps

  • Magic traps' blinding and summoning monsters effects should be split up, since both at once tends to make them much more fatal, especially to early players.
  • Perhaps magic traps' summoned monsters should be generated with a reduced difficulty.
  • Statue traps' summoned monsters should be generated with an increased difficulty. +5 was proposed for this, but this may be too high.
  • Falling rock traps can dump multiple rocks onto you at once, up to (depth/4). Damage is taken for each rock. If a trap would drop 4 or more rocks on you, it may instead drop (rocks/4) boulders on your head instead. Helms should be less effective at reducing damage from falling rocks, and almost useless at reducing damage from falling houlders.
  • Pits get deeper, which makes them deal more damage, might cause wounded legs with a chance that increases with depth, and take longer to escape from (or are so deep you can't climb out at all).
  • Rust traps might target your pack instead of your armor or gear. Probably should be renamed to "water trap". On deeper levels, when the game would generate a rust trap, it has an increasing chance of replacing it with an acid trap. These deal corrosion and acid damage (and quite a bit of it, like having multiple potions of acid dumped on your head).
  • Traps could trigger based on your weight. This makes the trap more likely to trigger on a heavily armored character or one who has collected a lot of loot. Would work nicely in the Gnomish Mines, since gnomes are light and don't tend to carry much stuff. Certain traps could also trigger to a lesser degree if you weigh enough to trigger it but not a whole ton.
  • Anti-magic fields in Gehennom can attempt to cancel you or your gear. (Would work better in something like FIQHack where there's a cancelled status effect).

Container traps

Container traps' effects also scale based on dungeon level (ideally on the level a container generated, not on the current level, so a player can't levelport a chest up to level 1 and cheese the trap.)

In addition to adding some more effects, also add some effects which cosmetically are the same as other ones, but are more or less damaging. This would, however, make untrapping containers even more useless than it is now; perhaps a trap should stay armed even after you set it off. Another idea is to give certain traps an arming item, like a potion of oil for the fire effect and a land mine for the explosion effect. Successfully untrapping it will deposit the arming item into the container.

Also, make container traps independent of Luck, because currently they encourage the player to ignore containers until Luck is maximized.

Unsorted new trap ideas:

  • A hand wielding a cream pie comes out and pies you in the face. Untrapping this will drop the cream pie into the container's inventory.

Door traps

Instead of making all trapped doors explode and stun the player, add more varied door traps. The trap should be determined based on depth. It should also be selected deterministically based on the coordinates of the door (a convenience so that a trapped door will always have the same trap effect without having to store which trap it is.)

Additionally, new traps can also be used with more door states, rather than have all traps trigger by trying to open the door. Nondestructive traps could also remain on the door until the door is untrapped, rather than vanishing.

An interesting addition would be if doors were made restrictedly or completely untrappable, in order to prevent optimal strategy from being attempting to #untrap every door that the player comes across. Or possibly an attempt to open or close a door should do a cursory trap check.

Trap effect Trigger Persists Minimum DL
Hinges screech loudly, waking nearby monsters. Opening or closing Yes 1
Closes and locks itself. Opening, closing, or stepping off the square No 1
Electric shock from the knob, dealing 1d(DL*2) damage, that doesn't destroy items. Opening or closing Yes 2
Bucket of water falls on your head and causes water damage to several items in inventory. Opening or destroying No 3
Your hand is stuck to the knob, causing you to be unable to move for the next few turns. Opening or closing Yes 3
Hingeless door: either falls on top of you and deals 1d(DL/2) damage, or (more likely) falls the other way and you fall over on top of it. Either way, you are stunned for a few turns. The door becomes D_BROKEN. Opening No 6
A boxing glove swings out from behind the door and punches you, dealing damage and causing you to stagger/hurtle back a few steps. Opening or destroying No 8
Object falls out of the ceiling on the player's head (copying an ADOM trap). Opening or destroying No 10
Knob burns your hand for 1d(DL) damage and causes you to drop your weapon. Gloves reduce damage and prevent the drop. Opening or closing Yes 12
Door that explodes in a fireball: possibly no stunning, but burns inventory as it does in GruntHack. Opening No 15

Magic traps

Based on the idea that magic trap effects specifically should scale based on level. Proposal by FIQ.

Effect Dungeon level or branch
Magical explosion: HP damage, Pw increased to full, maxPw increase Any (with fixed 25% chance)
Odd feeling (using standard odd feeling messages, no effect) Any (with fixed 25% chance)
Grateful djinni, wish 1 (with fixed 5% chance)
Remove curse (like uncursed scroll) Outside Gehennom
Curse items (like harassment) Within Gehennom
Horizontal teleport 1-6
Blinds for 1d5+10 turns 3-8
Hostile magic whistle; summons monsters that already exist on the level to appear around the player 5-10
Gain 1 charisma and charm surrounding monsters 7-12
Create a stinking cloud on the space 9-14
Polymorph 11-16
Randomly bless and curse inventory (like confused blessed remove curse) 13-18
Do both the blinding and hostile whistling effects above 15-20
Level teleport 17-22
Surround the player with Z that are buffed by having intrinsic monster detection, being blinded so Elbereth won't work, and being hasted 19+
Surround the player with & that are buffed in the same way Gehennom
Surround with nasties (like harassment) Gehennom
Surround with nasties that are buffed as above. Gehennom

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.

Note: several other people have commented that since such boots would prevent you from being grounded, you would actually take extra shock damage from other things, like touching grounded metal objects.

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", "microcode bug", "aklys bug", "bobble hat" and "puzzle fiend" as hallucinatory monsters. ChrisE, raisse, ais523
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:
  • 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. If you wear an oilskin sack on your head, it starts a strangulation timer. If you wear a bag of tricks on your head, you get YAFM and instadeath, or possibly it just constantly bites your head. 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
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.
  • 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.
  • GruntHack-like zombies, which inflict zombification sickness and eat your brain to drain Int.
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
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
Ideas around a system in which you can cook corpses:
  • The general idea is to unbreak the hunger system by making regular corpses unsafe to eat, so the shortage in resources isn't in food itself but is in safe methods of cooking it.
  • Cooking sets a corpse's rot timer to 0, lets them go longer without spoiling, or unspoils them.
  • May also remove poison from some kinds of poisonous corpses.
  • Cooked corpses are unsuitable for sacrifice and less likely to give intrinsics, or don't at all (because the vitamins are destroyed).
  • Can apply wands of fire to cook corpses.
  • Or maybe eating raw non-vegetarian corpses is just plain dangerous, causing vomiting or sickness or other bad effects.
  • Corpses can be cooked by killing monsters with fire or hitting monsters with fire attacks while they are carrying corpses.
  • The problem is that nobody has yet proposed a mechanism for cooking corpses that would work well. Having firewood or some similar thing would massively affect the early game between characters that can and cannot manage to find it, and roles that start with or without it. Wands of fire have been proposed as a resource but those are valuable. Introducing a new item like firewood means that a whole lot of mechanics have to be reviewed for whether they should interact with or create that item.
Agafnd, ais523, aosdict, Grasshopper, Chris_ANG, thelemur, FIQ, AmyBSOD
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
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 you start with a wand of polymorph.
  • Inventory is severely restricted, so you have to figure out how to do most things through polymorph.
  • You have the power to change into a tree, which will make most monsters ignore you. While in tree form, you are immobile but regenerate HP and Pw faster.
  • Without extrinsic polymorph control, your polymorph control limits you to changing into forms with the M1_ANIMAL flag.
  • Possibly have limited access to #polyself outside of wizard mode, so they can change intentionally and not randomly. Would work best as an ability with a timeout.
jonadab, FIQ, ais523, K2
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 traps, a new trap type that generates with 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). Also can have a "mummy room", a special room that contains one mummy trap and nothing else. FIQ, jonadab
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.
  • 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 (the parser will assume that ordinary floor should be the type of floor). 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
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. It also allows vision to penetrare through clouds. 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.
  • Instead of a death timer, apply a penalty to HP regeneration rate, with this penalty being variable and slowly decreasing as you recover from the sickness. This is nice because it allows for monsters to have a sickness attack in the early game.
  • This penalty can be large enough to make your regeneration rate negative.
  • Getting hit by a sickness attack while already Ill not only increases the severity/duration of your illness, it deals some extra damage proportional to the severity of the sickness.
  • Severe enough sickness only partially times out - you will need to take some actual self-healing action like quaffing healing potions, praying, casting cure sickness, applying a unicorn horn, etc. to be completely cured.
  • Unicorn horns no longer cure the entire illness all at once - they will only reduce the severity (which might cure the illness all at once if it's mild).
  • Being sick for a long time may cause vomiting, Con loss, Str loss, and occasionally hallucinations.
  • Sickness will eventually go away on its own if it's not bad. Maybe look to FIQHack zombification disease for specific mechanics for how this could work.
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, have a radius of 3 or 4, with a blinding gaze attack and no explosion attack (unless keeping the explosion attack is too thematic to the y class, in which case it should blind for a long time). 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.
  • Random fire or frost horn
  • Unicorn horn
  • Highly charged horn of plenty (but no food generates in the normal levels)
  • Zoo is now a throne room, so there is now a throne there
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.
  • Also could let identify show beatitude at Skilled and enchantment/charges at Expert.
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:
  • Falling rock traps on shallow levels come "pre-disarmed", which is to say that they have already been used up and so should consist of a pile of rocks on the ground underneath a falling rock trap with no rocks left in it.
  • Rolling boulder traps on shallow levels generate without boulders or with out-of-line boulders.
  • Traps with ammunition can have a few pieces of that ammunition lying on the appropriate space.
  • Dilapidated armories.
  • Monsters on these levels are likely to generate with zero-charge or low-charge wands or other items.
  • Fewer items lying around.
  • Randomly destroyed walls.
  • Fake bones piles (see below).
Chris, aosdict
Falling rock traps are flavored as unstable ceiling (so that the flavor doesn't get weird for situations like large open levels) and the message changed accordingly. 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
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
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":
  • Hardback book when unidentified, base price 300.
  • Nonmagical and always polypiles into a blank spellbook.
  • When read, it adds the appearance of some unknown magical items (1d4 if blessed, 1d3 if uncursed, 1 if cursed, plus 1 if you are an Archeologist) to your discovery list.
  • It doesn't disappear when read, but will set a flag that prevents its effects from happening again. This flag will be cleared when creating a bones file.
  • Archeologists start with a special blessed encyclopedia (using a different flag), which is their research (the starting one comes pre-read and isn't useful to this character): reading an unread archeologist encyclopedia gives the message "These seem to be an archeologist's notes. You pore over them intently.", and type-IDs two unknown scrolls, rings, amulets, and wands, and puts two blessed scrolls of magic mapping into your inventory.
  • The Archeologist home level contains another 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
Change up and add new failure effects of spellbook reading:
  • Any failure confuses you instead of paralyzing.
  • The level 5+ confusion effect seems quite tame in comparison to the other effects, so replace it with paralysis.
  • New effect: book tries to eat you
  • New effect: level drain
  • Spell enters your head automatically, but erases your knowledge of one/all of your other spells. (This could be quite annoying and may be better off as an EPI.)
  • New effect (possible in combination with other effects, and for any book): book curses

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:
  • Belts themselves could be armor or tools, but probably armor. They mainly serve to hold items for quick access. It's not defined whether they are intended to hold an indefinite number of items like any container, or a limited amount.
  • Items carried in a belt weigh nothing and are mostly or totally protected from destruction, and using them doesn't take the action it usually takes to get an item out of a bag.
  • Types of belts could be scroll-holding, potion-holding, wand-holding, ammo-holding (with a possible "endless quiver" item or artifact), gem-holding (to get partial resistances from certain gems) or no special powers but some moderate AC.
  • One randomized belt description could also provide protection against leprechaun theft.
  • Randomized descriptions could include: cloth, leather, worn, studded, buckled
ais523, mtf, aosdict
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
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:

  • Identify: 25% chance of probing
  • Light: +d6 to undead, light source
  • Enchant weapon: +d4 damage
  • Enchant armor: gives 3 points of AC when wielded
  • Remove curse: Protects fully from all curses when wielded
  • Confuse monster: 25% chance to confuse
  • Destroy armor: Ignores enemy armor when calculating to-hit
  • Fire: +d8 fire damage
  • Food detection: Enemies are much more likely to leave corpses
  • Gold detection: Enemies may drop small amounts of gold when killed
  • Magic mapping: 5% chance of activating clairvoyance on hit
  • Scare monster: 15% chance to scare on hit
  • Teleportation: 10% chance to randomly teleport on hit
  • Amnesia: Extra mindflayer tentacle attack, no effect when read
  • Create monster: 5% chance for create familiar effect on hit
  • Earth: 5% chance to create boulder over enemy
  • Taming: 5% chance of charm monster effect on hit
  • Charging: Does 2x Pw damage and adds it to your own, 5% chance of cancellation
  • Genocide: Instakills as Tsurugi, +1 damage
  • Stinking cloud: Permanently poisoned
  • Punishment: Weighs 100, deals +d12 damage. Autocurses and triples alignment losses.
Luxidream, aosdict, FIQ, ais523
Luck ideas:
  • Luckstones don't remove luck timeout, they merely extend it.
  • Luck is much less controllable, impossible to get any clues about except through enlightenment, and various random events (like what?) can give or remove luck. A skilled player would know how to bias the odds towards luck-increasing events. Controllable sources of gaining luck like sacrifice and throwing gems at unicorns are removed. It no longer times out.
  • The luck timeout rate is less predictable, and a luckstone will help but it might still time out quickly if the RNG hates you.
  • The base number that luck times out to is equal to the total number of luckstones in your inventory (so carrying 2 noncursed luckstones means luck times out to +2). Luckstones' weight is increased.
  • Remove luckstones in favor of an amulet of luck. Luck timeout can no longer be slotless.
  • Luck times out at a rate of 1 point per (600*(number of luckitems + 1)) turns.
  • Do away with luck timeout entirely in order to make it impossible to micromanage luck. Luck is now conferred entirely by luckitems. The problem with this approach is that NetHack has about two ways to gain timing-out luck and many, many ways to lose it.
  • Luck can be gained by enchanting luckstones.
  • Different types of luckitems which stack with other luckitems but not with each other, like a four-leaf clover you can get from leprechauns.
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
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:
  • "life protection" (bad name, life saving is very similar)
  • "unliving" (makes you not count as living and life saving won't work)
  • "undeath" (actively makes you count as undead, you are vulnerable to turn undead effects and lawful gods may be annoyed at you)
  • "versus death magic"
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
Higher pickaxe skill increases digging speed. bouquet, K2, jonadab
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):
  • Throwing a diamond (or a diamond ring) at an opposite-sex foocubus will tame it.
  • Rubbing an amber stone generates electricity, perhaps giving you a static charge that will add a bit of damage to your next melee attack.
  • Hitting a demon with obsidian traps it as if it were a bear trap: it can't move or teleport, though it can still attack. This also destroys the obsidian.
  • Moonstone allows you to control lycanthropic shapeshifting. (Moonstone exists only as a ring in vanilla, not as a real gemstone.)
  • Rubies and sapphires provide some very marginal protection against cold and fire respectively.
firemonkey, aosdict, elenmirie, jonadab
Differentiate between poison, which comes solely from ingesting it, and venom, which comes from getting toxins in your bloodstream from a bite, claw, or sting. Monsters like spiders can be both poisonous to eat and venomous when attacking. Menche, jonadab
Scale the spell of charm monster by skill as follows: unskilled attempts to pacify one adjacent monster, basic attempts to pacify all adjacent monsters, skilled attempts to tame one adjacent, and expert attempts to tame all adjacent, all subject to monster magic resistance. jonadab
The cursed potion of see invisible removes any see invisible intrinsic that the player has. NCommander
Implicitly #untrap a chest when opening it (check it once for traps, not enough to guarantee there are no traps, but if one is found, prompt to attempt removing it.) nht
Change the confused effects of the scroll of punishment: blessed mollifies your god if angry, uncursed increases anger by 1, cursed increases anger by 1 and your god smites you. jonadab, aosdict, FIQ, splatpope
Add hallucination effects to (many, perhaps all) scrolls:
  • Scroll of punishment: changes your Luck based on scroll beatitude
jonadab, FIQ
Demon lords that accept a bribe don't actually go anywhere. They get out of the way if they were previously in the way, but otherwise they have their movement points set to 0 for as long as they are peaceful, and don't warp to you. aosdict, Demo
Change the definition of polyselfless conduct to "You have never intentionally changed form." If you step on a hitherto unknown polymorph trap and have an uncontrolled polymorph, the conduct is not broken. greqrg, aosdict
Set the minimum dungeon level for polymorph traps to a deeper level, to perhaps 12 or 15. Polymorph traps now polymorph you in spite of magic resistance, but you can acquire some property (not as strong as polymorph control) that makes it much more likely or guaranteed that you will polymorph into a form that will preserve your armor and your hands. FIQ, aosdict
Make monster sleep work more like player sleep, where being attacked / taking damage is quite likely to end the sleep. Then sleep is not basically a duplicate of paralysis. mtf, FIQ
Ritual spells: they consume valuable components, take at least several dozen (uninterrupted) turns to cast, and have powerful effects.
  • Ball spells which consume a gem as focus and create a ball of elemental power that hits surrounding squares but not you. (Long casting times would probably make rituals infeasible for combat.)
  • Temporarily increase your carry cap by a great amount.
  • Resurrect a corpse as a tame monster (necromancy).
  • Grant temporary intrinsic life saving.
  • Single controlled polymorph with a greatly increased duration.
  • Summon a demon, demon lord, or demon prince.
mtf, aosdict, FIQ, Demo
Change the color of the player's @ when their HP gets low or decreases sharply. ais523
Ammunition that is +X will break if and only if it scores a hit on a monster above a certain difficulty. The formula suggested was that it can only break when 5X+3 < difficulty, but this is just a wild guess at the numbers and isn't balanced. ais523
Add a monster species flag for "zombifiable", and track zombification or mummification as flags on an individual monster, removing the need for Z or M to be separate classes. aosdict, jonadab
Buff zombies, to make them more of a threat. Import FIQHack zombification (a zombie bite will place you 90-100 turns away from turning into a zombie, each additional bite decreases the timer by around 10 turns, but it will go away by itself if the timer doesn't dip below 40); boost their difficulty, but keep their HD low; allow them to revive themselves less frequently than trolls, but also revive themselves whenever another zombie steps over their corpse. aosdict, jonadab
Mummies have a curse item attack that would probably make them not fun to have in their current quantities. So mummies are not randomly generated; they appear in graveyards and some special levels like the Catacombs and the Archeologist quest, but otherwise do not appear. jonadab, aosdict
You can attack yourself by using the F command and selecting . for yourself. APic, ais523
You can use whole object classes when using the numeric prefix with the D command, e.g. D 1 ? will drop 1 of each scroll you are carrying. rumflump
Rust traps' item rusting is delayed. You can use a towel to prevent a wetted item from rusting. Deuce-Zen
Special room that is lined (not filled) with statues of you, and contains no monsters, items, traps, or anything else interesting. All doors in contain traps that will make them lock behind you. Intended only to make the game more creepy. aosdict, ais523
You occasionally get an alignment bonus if your alignment record is negative and you are Weak, because you are doing hunger penance. (Possibly only works for lawfuls, since chaotic gods are unlikely to approve of weakness.) aosdict, Deuce-Zen
Challenge rooms that occasionally get embedded into Gehennom levels. They are sealed off somehow, perhaps with solid stone you need to dig through to enter. They are not intended to be required, and contain some sort of reward. Rooms might include:
  • Demon den: one or more demons guarding some gold and gems. (In a cavernous Gehennom, we can expect that most of the mineral wealth has already been mined out by millennia of demon activity.)
  • Seminary of Moloch: contains an altar to Moloch, one peaceful priest of Moloch, and multiple hostile priests of Moloch.
  • Fake wizard towers: the standard 7x7 footprint consisting of moat and tower, with an amulet in the center of the tower (possibly EPI: this could be a fake Amulet of Yendor), and a few monsters inside the tower. The flavor basis for these is that they are the Wizard's earlier settlements.
  • Hostage room: contains a lot of monsters guarding a prisoner or player monster hostage. The reward here might be that the monster auto-tames when freed.
jonadab, aosdict, mtf
Every spellcaster should have its own list of spells it can cast. (Archons and possibly nalfeshnees should be casting clerically aligned spells rather than mage spells.) jonadab, aosdict
Summoning spells examine how many summoned monsters are currently on the level, and cap it at some point so the level can't fill up with more and more summonstormed monsters. jonadab
Reflavoring of Heaven or Hell mode: everything explodes when it gets hit by anything. aosdict, jonadab, Demo
Very powerful artifact armor that cannot be removed without dying. If you take it off, polymorph out of it, or have it removed by a monster, you die. Demo
The Oracle centaur statues may contain sizeable piles of ranged ammunition, particularly arrows and crossbow bolts. aosdict, FIQ
Resolve the problem of having to double-enchant launchers and ammo and get double bonuses in one of two ways:
  1. Make the double bonuses at higher cost a feature of ammo-based fighting. You can now enchant rocks and flint stones, though all randomly generated ones must be +0.
  2. Make ammunition unenchantable (but still fooproofable), and the launcher enchantment affects to-hit and damage bonuses like normal. This is good because it means that ammo stack management is less annoying.
aosdict, mtf, luxidream
Random chance to get lead poisoning while quaffing from a sink. This abuses Int and Con. wheals, jonadab
Intelligence can be abused and exercised, but unlike other stats, exercise will never bring it above its base value (or the value you have raised it to through gain ability). Sources of abuse: mind flayer brain eating, zombie attacks. Sources of exercise: reading spellbooks, writing spellbooks, writing scrolls. aosdict, jonadab
You can engrave on walls or doors. Elbereth doesn't work unless you're standing on it. You can read it by standing on the nearest space. Random graffiti, if it generates on a floor square next to a wall or door, may say "Something is written on the wall here." instead of the floor. Graffiti could render as ~ or something similar. aosdict, mtf
Greased gloves grant extrinsic slippery fingers. FIQ
If a scurrier selects , or . when asked what to eat, they attempt to chew through the floor. Fourk aosdict
Black pudding globs convey only one of the three intrinsics they currently convey (maybe shock resistance), and brown pudding globs convey another (maybe cold resistance). aosdict, firemonkey
Kicking down doors exercises Str and not Dex. aosdict, firemonkey
In shops, picking up an item spawns a peaceful monster that vanishes once you pay for the item properly. If you make any attempt to steal, it turns hostile. (The general principle: the more you want to steal, the harder it is to do so.) ais523
Erosionproof items should be immune to disintegration as well. jonadab
Restructure Gehennom as follows: the main trunk consists of the Valley, then 5-7 filler cavern/lava levels interspersed with two bribable demon lairs, then the Vibrating Square level (also cavern/lava), then the Sanctum. The Vibrating Square level contains six revealed portals, one of which leads to the Wizard's Tower, one of which leads to Vlad's Tower, and the others all lead to demon lairs in which you can't leave the level until the demon is defeated. aosdict, FIQ
Merge dart and arrow traps into "missile" traps, that fire a random sort of missile. Also, make such traps store their ammo in the trap to be fired one by one or released when #untrapped, not to be created one by one when triggering. FIQ
Dart and arrow traps are much more likely to generate if the trap is next to a wall. Alternatively, when generating a dart or arrow trap, look for a wall tile in line within 3 squares that contains the launching mechanism; if no such tile exists, the trap cannot generate. The player must then untrap the wall square, or dig it out, to remove the trap. aosdict, Tarmunora
Your quest leader can heal you if you come to them injured or sick. bug_sniper
Entering the Valley and entering the second level of Gehennom (as well as possibly entering other branches) give the hero an automatic level up. ais523
Occasionally and temporarily (perhaps as a form of harassment), the Amulet becomes massively heavy. ais523
Cave-like or cavernous levels, like the Mines and the Caveman home level, spawn bats fairly often. aosdict, FIQ
Strictly separate the AD_SITM and AD_SEDU stealing attacks (hostile theft vs. charming to hand over an item), and remove the is_animal checks from the stealing code. FIQ
Rename AD_SEDU to AD_CHRM because it's not really seduction. jonadab, aosdict
Nazgul cannot be killed "incorrectly" (unclear on what this needs to be, perhaps stabbing them with a barrow-wight's knife, or being female). If you happen to kill one incorrectly, it will be killed without giving experience and its inventory will be deleted (minus unique items). The Nazgul born counter then ticks down by one, so it can be spawned again elsewhere by the normal mechanism. Deuce-Zen, Wooble, aosdict
The number of levels a trap door will take you down is deterministic for every trap door. Possibly also extend the trapdoor and migration code to allow deterministically placing coordinates of things that fall through a trap door as well. aosdict, StatueSurfer
Ignore missing "of", "the", and the like in wishes. rumflump
Saltwater, intended as a nerf for "just dilute most potions":
  • Potions of saltwater behave exactly like potions of water, except that they cannot be used to bless or curse things. Holy (and unholy) water must be pure.
  • All in-game sources of water except for magic fountains are saltwater. Diluting potions in them will yield only potions of saltwater.
  • Can also get pure water if a unicorn horn dip would already result in water.
  • Not specified what cancelling potions should do.
aosdict, Luxidream, FIQ, ais523
Modify Sokoban maps so that a monster can never get stuck in an awkward place except by the player doing something foolish. Possibly make the corridors leading to the goal double-sized or have alcoves off to one side where a monster can move. ais523, FIQ, aosdict
Monsters in groups should always spawn with the same affiliation (tame/peaceful/hostile). FIQ
"Coffin" boxes should use corpsenm instead of spe to represent whether they contain a vampire. Useful because it could be used for other creatures (including Schroedinger's Cat). dNetHack aosdict
In Orcish Town, there should be peaceful orcish racial shopkeepers with actual shops (who will happily sell you the human shopkeeper corpse on their floor.) SporkHack Luxidream
When you attempt to interact with (or possibly explicitly search) a door or container, you get "There [are no traps / is a trap] on this [door / container]." aosdict, FIQ
Change Vorpal Blade to do very high damage (on the order of x3 or x4) when it critical hits, in order to remove YAAD potential in monster hands. Replace the decapitation message with "Your Vorpal Blade goes snicker-snack!" Find some other message to replace this existing message (when you are neutral crowned but already holding Vorpal Blade). FIQ, aosdict
Hallucination should cause statues to be seen as monsters that don't move and perform nonsense actions. jonadab
When wearing gauntlets of power, thrown javelins (or other spear-likes) continue flying after hitting monsters, and may damage monsters standing further back. rumflump
Flesh-eating scarab beetles: they may reproduce every time they bite you. jonadab
In order to make extrinsic regeneration scale better, it acts as a multiplier to your natural regeneration rate. x2 is an option but may be too high; x1.5 might work better.

Another idea is to make it so that regeneration gets better the closer you are to dying of HP loss, formally: if current HP = X * maxHP, regeneration will heal you at a rate of (2 - x) times its normal rate.

aosdict, FIQ
Reach gloves: let you pick up items from adjacent squares and grapple monsters. Luxidream
The ability to chat with intelligent pets and give them basic strategy directives, such as what type of attack they should be favoring. Luxidream
If the player sits on a throne after being crowned, even in non-royal polyforms, they get the royalty message. Deuce-Zen
A Minetown (or some other town) minigame based around classic survival/area defense games:
  • Takes place in a smaller-than-Minetown square walled area in a large open part of the mines.
  • Orcs, with a very high spawn rate and an increasing difficulty modifier, appear around the edges of the map.
  • The walls will block the weakest and the unequipped from entering the town proper, but it won't be good once orcs start showing up with pickaxes and ladders.
  • To prevent the orcs from building up a horde, there are some weaker points in the walls, maybe a gate they can try to bash down or an unrepaired breach. These must be defended with manpower and all the traps you can think to lay.
  • Orcs grudge everything inside the town, and vice versa; meanwhile, nothing in the town is hostile to you.
  • Shopkeepers sell you items from their limited inventory at very cheap prices.
  • There are watchmen who can hold back an incursion, but they'll eventually fail if the player isn't able to get there in time.
aosdict, Deuce-Zen
More variety in ranged unreflectable elemental attacks, as a sort-of-nerf to reflection (all ranged elemental attacks currently in the game are reflectable). For instance, have enemies shooting fire arrows at you. ais523
Make more potions effective for throwing at monsters, first by making the vapor effects hit more than just whoever they were thrown at (i.e. splash effects), and then by making more potions have a vapor effect that affects monsters. FIQ
Diluting full healing potions turns them into undiluted extra healing; diluting extra healing turns them into undiluted healing. FIQ
A demon lord who lives in Gehennom who you can sell your soul to in order to gain levels. This will have drastic effects on your score (or something) at the end of the game. dNetHack aosdict
Monster flag M3_TELWITHU. Monsters with this flag (examples: quantum mechanics, some devils) will follow you when you teleport horizontally. aosdict
Use 3.6.0's randline function to trace a path between the upstairs and downstairs of each level. Along this path, remove or relocate any traps, and (in early levels, perhaps up until the Oracle) convert any secret doors or passages along the path into regular ones. aosdict, jonadab
Fountains, sinks, and other dungeon features can generate inside shops. Using them in any way incurs a usage fee. Destroying them incurs a larger charge to be paid immediately, or the shopkeeper will get mad. AmyBSOD
Polymorph potions affect all monsters adjacent to where they shatter. bouquet
Remove the scroll of genocide, or else institute some awful (divine?) punishment for genociding monsters, because it is a heinous act. (This would help with symmetry for monsters using genocide.) aosdict, FIQ
Thrones have an affiliation with a monster. Only the affiliated monster can sit on it and use it. It starts out as the king monster generated on the throne. If the monster dies, its killer becomes the new affiliated monster. This would need some flavor for why the king doesn't just sit on it and use it until it vanishes; there are a few possible ways to handle that. One is that though the throne effects are good, the king is flavored as not wanting to lose the throne. Another is that throne rooms will start empty except for the king and maybe a couple guards, and the king does in fact use the throne's powers against you (without risk of it vanishing since he is the original owner, or something). FIQ, jonadab
Define boulder weight so that giants can't carry an infinite amount of them. GruntHack K2, jonadab, aosdict
When a boulder drops on a tile containing another boulder, it tries to roll to an adjacent tile. If it can't (because all adjacent tiles have boulders or can't have boulders), it drops as a second boulder like normal. jonadab
New object property "identification". Generates on containers, and type-identifies any item put into it. jonadab
You can light a greased sword on fire. Attacks with it will deal fire damage for a few turns until it burns out. jonadab
Bishop monster, who moves diagonally very fast. neonKow
If you press Escape while being grabbed by a monster, at a time when you could normally enter input (so not in the middle of messages), you get the message that says "You cannot escape from the <monster>!" ChrisE
Escape as its own key should be used as an actual escape command, so you can do things like try to get out of pits and engulfers with it. ais523
Random engraving: "This ASCII tile was donated by <user>.", where user is either a name of someone that has contributed to nethack in real life, or just pulled from the high score list. vnroguelike, bhaak
Scale monsters' hit dice bonuses based on their size. In order to reduce the high amount of variance monster HP currently has, monster HP is now computed by this formula: (HD)d4 + HD*2*(size), where size is 0 for MZ_TINY, 1 for MZ_SMALL, and so on. aosdict, Chris_ANG, FIQ, jonadab
You have access to the full total allotment of skill points from the beginning of the game (effectively making it so that gaining more levels isn't required to unlock skill slots). To compensate, you can only train skills by fighting at-difficulty monsters or higher, so you can't train everything by farming weak monsters. aosdict, jonadab
The game makes fully clear to the player, in-game, how the skill system works and what the consequences of investing points in a skill means. jonadab
Merge the damage versus small and damage versus large stats of weapons, since they don't really matter that much and add mostly pointless complexity. Damage should be more dependent on skill than on the size of the target monster. The only problem is how to stop the highest-damage weapons from becoming used by everyone because they're so optimal; perhaps skill should do something drastic like add an extra die with every skill level, allowing you to have weapons that are decent at low skill (by having multiple small base dice) but poorer at high skill (because adding more small dice doesn't work as well). Chris_ANG, aosdict, jonadab
Make potions of oil more common, so that the player has more area-of-effect combat options (for throwing firebomb potions of oil). Possibly allow hardware stores to stock them. jonadab
Gnomes spawned with a sufficiently high starting level, or else just a fixed percentage of gnome lords and a different fixed percentage of gnome kings, generate with a touchstone. Chris_ANG, aosdict, jonadab
Long worms should be much faster than they currently are, and they get a damage bonus for each tail segment that is lined up behind their head. Chris_ANG
An artifact boomerang which is a guaranteed first sacrifice gift for Archeologists. deadnoob
New artifact spellbook Akashic Records:
  • Read for enlightenment
  • Can be applied like a stethoscope to probe adjacent enemies, doesn't cost a turn
  • When carried, gives extrinsic monster detection. Farlooking reveals enemy HP.
  • Invoke for precognition: for the next 100 turns, your attacks never miss, and enemies roll twice against you and use the lower result.
  • If you would be killed from HP damage from an attack during precognition, you will dodge the killing blow and all subsequent attacks on that round. Immediately ends the effect.
Luxidream
Scroll of healeportation: performs both a heal and a teleport at once. AmyBSOD
Vampires can't step onto sinks, because they "can't cross running water". aosdict, deadnoob
Invoking Mjollnir allows you to cast a bolt of lightning as if from a lightning wand. Vuks
Augment the stealth system by adding a monster AI attribute representing "hasn't sensed you yet, or has lost sense of you". Also allow players to take a deliberate action to conceal themselves. This would allow for players to hide in (or flee into) a corner or closet and allow a monster to pass them by, then get the jump on them afterward (perhaps in the form of a bonus for attacking an unsuspecting monster). Some monsters should ideally be able to conceal themselves as well, perhaps even by casting illusions that make a door appear as a wall or something to the hero, until discovered. jonadab, aosdict
You can put rocks into a sack, oilskin sack, or bag of holding and then wield it and swing it at enemies. (This uses flail skill.) Damage depends on the total weight of the rocks. elenmirie, jonadab
Clerical spell that gives you a certain duration of a property that steals enemies' maxHP and heals you when you hit things in melee. jonadab
In variants where object materials is implemented: carrying gold items openly causes leprechauns, dragons, and Croesus to be automatically aggravated. K2, hothraxxa
Undead can't step onto sinks, because they "can't cross running water". deadnoob, aosdict
In variants with felt markers, allow them to write spellbooks and scrolls of mail - the other scrolls are the only thing they can't write. jonadab, aosdict
The hero can either not write unknown scrolls and spellbooks at all (writing by appearance is still fine as long as the appearance is known), or else the chance of writing one increases with every scroll and spellbook the hero identifies. aosdict, jonadab
Leprechauns (or anything with AD_SGLD) should steal items made of gold out of the hero's inventory. K2
The Candelabrum refuses to light if it has fewer than 7 candles. StatueSurfer, aosdict
Add a summoned bitfield to struct monst. Should be a bitfield rather than a flag so that it can track different details of how it was summoned (from trap/wand/etc, by player or by something else) Crawldragon
Unicorn corpses are never tainted from age, though they do eventually rot away. rikersan
The chance of failing to polymorph into a target monster (whether chosen randomly or intentionally) depends on the base level of that polyform relative to your own level. jonadab
Kicking a sink may produce an air elemental. nyingen
You can trigger land mines from a safe distance by hitting the square with a polearm. stenno
When a gremlin steals an intrinsic from you, you can recover the intrinsic by killing it or eating its corpse. FIQHack aosdict
If you have teleport control, quantum mechanics' attacks toggle your speed instead of giving you a free controlled teleport. Deuce-Zen
Merge the rings of sustain ability and slow digestion into a "ring of stasis". Double-edged effects: slows down digestion like normal, but also slows down healing, energy regeneration, timer effects like confusion and sickness, any timing-out intrinsics, prevents exercise from happening, blocks or reduces to 1 effects that directly change attributes. aosdict, rikersan
In variants with object materials: replace the shield of reflection with a "polished shield", which is nonmagical. It can come in any material, but only brass, copper, silver, and gold are shiny enough to make it also confer reflection. (That is, you can have a polished wooden shield or a polished iron shield, but the material just isn't lustrous enough.) aosdict, rikersan
Hands holding a quarterstaff or wands don't count as being occupied for the purposes of calculating spellcasting penalty. (Perhaps generalize wands to any other non-weapon.) Chris_ANG
Player monsters can randomly be named Dudley. If Dudley ever comes across a scroll of genocide, he will immediately genocide newts. FIQHack aosdict
When zapping a wand of wishing at Unskilled, you get a random wish. FIQHack AmyBSOD
Magicbane should block random item cursing from a fountain. rikersan
Metal wands and rings never explode due to shock damage, as does the ring of shock resistance regardless of its material. aosdict, jonadab
Shop type "psychedelicatessen": contains some normal delicatessen food, but also hallucinogens and lots of drugs. Slash'EM Extended aosdict
Disenchanters can eat magical items for food. (Goes for pets and players polymorphed into them. Not specified whether this should give the player intrinsics.) rikersan
Tile that indicates, somehow, that it is suspicious-looking - it might conceal a secret door or something else discoverable, or it might be nothing, but it's a clearer hint to the player than usual. This would work well in a tiles windowport, but it's not clear how it could be done in ASCII. FIQ
Instead of a mslow flag in the monst struct, use a signed char called "speedbon" which represents the amount of speed offset that the monster should have from its normal speed. This allows for more nuanced speed mechanics, like zapping a wand of speed monster or slow monster multiple times and having the effects stack. aosdict, FIQ
Random earthquakes. Same effects as drums of earthquake, except not triggered by anything and not necessarily centered on the hero or anything special. Earthquakes (from any source) now can collapse diggable walls (turning them into floor spaces without pits) and drop rocks and boulders out of the ceiling. No effect in any Plane except Earth. Possibly, to limit this, a finite number of earthquakes can happen on any given level (after which it either collapses entirely, or just fails to produce more free rocks and boulders.) aosdict, Pawkisinov
Healing potions don't give you different HP maximum increases depending on their beatitude any more. Instead, if they would have taken you above your maximum, your HP maximum is increased by that amount, to a maximum of +1 (healing) / +2 (extra healing) / +4 (full healing). aosdict, rikersan
Non-intrusive ways to tell new players important parts of the game, like how to use #enhance. For instance, "You feel more confident in your skills. (Use #enhance to advance this skill.)" aosdict, scorchgeek, zwihander
Cannibalism angers your god instead of removing telepathy. aosdict, scorchgeek
Special message for a M1_CONCEAL pet reluctantly hiding under a cursed item. jonadab
New conduct for not hitting things with thrown items, and another conduct for not casting offensive spells. aosdict, eraserhead
#offering the Amulet on the high altar now breaks atheist conduct. To circumvent this, you can give the Amulet to an intelligent coaligned pet and stand adjacent to it as it offers the Amulet. Wooble
Having both the hunger and slow digestion properties turns off all hunger-related messages and prevents hunger status from being displayed. Deuce-Zen
The hunger property, instead of doubling hunger rate, halves any nutrition you get from any source, making it marginally more useful for eating large corpses. aosdict, zid, scorchgeek
Sell price depends on Charisma, whereas buy price does not. (Slightly more flavorful.) aosdict, eraserhead
Wearing an opera cloak allows you to sing like a musical instrument (e.g. the passtune). eraserhead
Portals on the Planes come pre-mapped, so you don't need to bring 4 scrolls of gold detection. scorchgeek
Give a Luck penalty for destroying a Sokoban boulder by polymorph shudder. AmyBSOD
There is some sort of ritual you can do to store a soul (ghost, or monster's or pet's soul from its corpse before it rots) in an item, and later release it into a freshly killed corpse to make the soul inhabit that body. aosdict, Chris_ANG
Torches, which can be created by dipping a club into a potion of oil. Torches are their own item, not just a "lit club" (though possibly the lamplit flag could be used for this), and have a light radius of 3. Deals additional fire damage to monsters it hits, but may go out. May light the hero on fire if they fall down the stairs with a lit torch in inventory. Chris_ANG, aosdict
If you consort with a foocubus while Lawful, "You feel unclean." aosdict, FIQ
Add a "fruit" database entry: "They say this is edible. Some adventurers have strange tastes." and tweak the database code to recognize a typed-in fruit name in the game as this entry. jonadab
Some weapons' unidentified appearances are shared with other weapons, so characters who start the game without knowledge of many weapons have to play a bit of an ID game with them. For instance, scimitar and katana could just be changed to "curved sword". This has problems, though: it doesn't translate very well to tiles, and it's vulnerable to weight-ID if two weapons with different weights share the same description. jonadab
Ring of carrying: new chargeable ring that multiplies the weight of the player's inventory by (1 - (0.05 * enchantment)) when worn. Stacks with a second ring. Initial charge and beatitude is set the same as any other charged ring. jonadab, riker, aosdict, greqrg, kritixilithos, FIQ, AmyBSOD
Change rne() so that it doesn't depend on the player's experience level: instead it depends on the current level depth. Specifically, change its theoretical maximum from max(XL/3, 5) to max(depth/5, 5). aosdict, greqrg
Meleeing monsters while you are afflicted with a zombification disease will start zombifying them. FIQHack jonadab
Smoke cloud monster (v): has a mild fire damage attack and a suffocating smoke attack. Generates in fiery areas. riker, aosdict
Add a "magivore" monster flag, or else hardcode this for disenchanters: they can feed on magical items like incantifiers do (though without the Pw gain, just for nutrition). riker
Ring of fast living: gives an experience multiplier and increases hunger rate drastically, multiplies your damage but also multiplies damage you take. zid, ChrisE
Sokoban will either contain a prize of three amulets (one reflection, one versus poison, one other), or three bags (one holding, one oilskin, one other). jonadab
Frost lamp, a tool which gives out a radius 3 cold aura. Water and lava within the radius freeze and then revert once out of the radius. Fiery monsters take damage from being in the radius. Eventually runs out and has to be recharged. riker, Demo, aosdict
Condensing all of NetHack's poison mechanics into one unified mechanic:
  • Dexterity and Constitution poisons are removed. Quasits (the only AD_DRDX attack) might still directly harm Dex, but it's no longer flavored as poison. Rabid rats (the only AD_DRCO attack) don't cause poison, they cause disease, which hits Constitution. Poison will now only affect Strength.
  • Poison is now implemented as a timing-out trinsic. The amount of Str loss is a direct function of how much timeout is left, so Str will gradually recover as the poison goes away.
  • Passing Con saving throws could give small bonuses to decreasing the timeout faster than normal.
  • While poisoned, HP regeneration is either impeded or stopped entirely, or else the player's HP is damaged every turn, or every several turns.
  • It could also heavily abuse Str while it lasted instead of being directly tied to Str.
jonadab, aosdict, greqrg
Frost Brand is made of platinum and deals triple damage to monsters that are fire resistant but NOT cold resistant. Fire Brand is made of gold and deals triple damage to monsters that are cold resistant but NOT fire resistant. NeroOneTrueKing
TDTTOE: Skeletons use gendered pronouns if and only if the player is an Archeologist (and therefore used to analyzing bones). aosdict, Chris_ANG
Small spellbooks. Take extra time to read if the player's size is not MZ_SMALL or smaller. Any spellbooks a gnomish character starts with and any spellbooks generated in Minetown shops are small. A spellbook generated otherwise has some fixed chance to be generated small. NeroOneTrueKing
Gnomish characters read spellbooks faster than other races. NeroOneTrueKing
Nurse healing should cure other ailments like sliming and possibly stoning. AmyBSOD
All sinks spawn with a ring buried beneath them. If you kick the sink and get the "Flupp! Muddy water" message, the sink will spit out one of the rings buried under it. This removes the need for the S_LRING flag, and also allows players a non-destructive way to retrieve rings they dropped down the sink. jonadab
Kicking a sink can also dislodge a small swarm of sewer rats, or snakes. Unlike puddings which are one per sink, these don't stop coming until they're extinct. jonadab
Add a defence/evasion skill, which is practiced by having monsters miss the player (while not wearing torso armor?) and grants an AC bonus when enhanced. kritixilithos
Jumping outside the jumping range ("Too far!") should not cost a turn, and the interface should make the jumping range clear, perhaps by highlighting all the squares you can jump to. Or else if you try to jump to some square outside the jumping range, you'll jump as far as possible in that direction within the jumping range. aosdict, kritixilithos
#stomp command that lets you stomp on a grounded creature that is X sizes smaller than you. A hit will instakill it. kritixilithos
Merge the rings of slow digestion and hunger into a single chargeable ring of digestion. Negative values increase hunger faster, positive values slow it down. Duplicating the effect of a vanilla ring of slow digestion would require getting a +10 ring or stacking up to 10 with two rings. (Possibly the negative/positive values should be switched, but that would complicate the generation code.) jonadab
Artifact whose invoke power creates attack wands. ais523
Track "did not enhance any skills" as a conduct. jonadab
Iron chains are given either whip or flail skill. aosdict, Chris_ANG, ais523
Skeletons, or any other monster with MS_BONES, don't paralyze you by rattling their bones if you're hallucinating; instead you get a message about it playing the xylophone. aosdict, Webmant
Provide an option to label branches with the branch name instead of using "Dlvl:" all the time. Also allow it to be shortened to "DL", with no colon, for those who want extra space in the status bar. JarrodB, jonadab, aosdict
Raise the XL threshold of dipping Excalibur for non-Knight roles to around 9-12. Knights can still dip at level 5. aosdict, riker
Engraving does not make you helpless. Instead, it should be an occupation. aosdict, FIQ, vevais
Attacking in melee with an unsuitable weapon like a launcher should negate the player's Str bonus or monster's weapon attack bonus. aosdict, xyzyxx
Holy water fountains in temples (would require balancing though). ChrisE
Use timing-out intrinsics to invert the hunger clock: use the limit on how fast you can hunger as a restriction on how many intrinsics you are keeping up. jonadab
Make identify scrolls generate blessed more often (perhaps 1/3 of them blessed, 1/3 uncursed and 1/3 cursed, or 1/2 1/3 1/6, or something) to remove the incentive for players to hoard everything until they can get holy water. jonadab
Make blessed identify give no more type-identification than uncursed identify, but it will identify the beatitude and spe of all its items. Uncursed identify will identify the beatitude and spe of some, but not all, items. Chris_ANG
Gold objects deal extra blessed damage and extra cursed damage (i.e. extra damage from wielding a blessed weapon versus undead will be enhanced if the weapon is gold). Chris_ANG
Barracks chests should contain gold, the soldiers' payroll. Chris_ANG
Spiked pits and a lower percentage of pits generate with an item or two buried. When you fall into one, any buried items are automatically exposed. The most commonly generated items here are a few gold or an eroded weapon. Chris_ANG
Cancelling a unicorn horn makes it non-magical and removes its curative properties. jonadab
Reduce the odds that a nonmagical potion polypiles into a magical potion, to disincentivize mass-blanking potions and polypiling them. aosdict, riker
Covetous monsters can warp to the up stairs only if they know where the up stairs are. Demon lords would know this in their own lairs, but not otherwise, and monsters randomly spawned on a level may or may not. jonadab
If you have divine protection and become near death from a timed instadeath or low HP, some or all of your protection may automatically convert itself into a cure: "You suddenly feel the power of [deity] surround you! You feel limber/cured/much better/etc." This should probably work for a narrow range of symptoms (probably not HP loss, possibly any major trouble). riker
Make death messages more diverse and flavorful. Base it on the attack type of the monster and possibly the weapon used, so that "killed by a jackal" becomes "clawed/mauled/shredded by a jackal", "killed by a gnome" becomes "bludgeoned to death by a gnome" if it was wielding an aklys, "stabbed to death by a gnome" if it was wielding a dagger, etc. nyingen, ais523
Wraith corpses cannot give food poisoning, though they can still rot away. mtf
Intrinsic see invisible now works only at a range of 2-3 squares. Extrinsic see invisible works at the current see invisible range (unlimited as long as you can see the space normally). NeroOneTrueKing, Chris_ANG
Turn trying to open a door into an occupation: if you get attacked or otherwise distracted while trying to open the door, you will stop, but you don't have to constantly keep trying and failing to open it. jonadab
Dogs will eat candy bars off the floor, but will then get sick or nauseous from eating it. aosdict, jonadab, FIQ
You can take over an abandoned shop, stock it with items, and settle down as a new shopkeeper, ending the game. This creates a bones file with you replaced by a shopkeeper bearing your name. bhaak, aosdict
When you have displacement, you displace your pets appropriately even when stunned, confused, or hallucinating. AmyBSOD, jonadab
Intentionally destroying an artifact reduces the artifacts generated counter, so you can wish up new ones. CursedFlames
Change the "killed by the wrath of <god>" death to "annihilated". nyingen
A Gehennom Gnome Fortress, like a demon lair except with gnomes. The gnomes are physically weak but have strong crossbow attacks (and clockwork minions). Tarmunora, riker
Status effect that temporarily lowers all attributes to 3. Demo
Implement farming, in certain special rooms called greenhouses. Allows you to grow fruits, carrots, garlic, trees, etc. kritixilithos
The monster spawn rate gradually decreases the longer you spend on a level. (May not apply if you have the demigod flag set or are carrying the Amulet.) AmyBSOD, aosdict
Statues can come in bronze or other types of material (perhaps with the addition of object materials). bhaak
Long worms and pythons can be saddled and ridden as steeds, but only if you are a small monster. jonadab
Remove the extra healing, cure blindness, and cure sickness books. The healing spell scales with skill level. At skilled it also cures blindness, and at expert it cures both blindness and sickness. riker
Gelatinous cubes specifically seek out scrolls labeled YUM YUM to eat. rumflump
Warn the player before they melee a monster with passive attacks. bug_sniper
You can make deals with demon lords (or maybe just one demon lord) for special abilities, but this has major drawbacks. FIQ
Debilitating wound system that expands on wounded legs. Includes wounded arms and various types of disease and poison, all of which provide various debuffs. Quaffing any healing potion cures all of these at once on top of its usual HP healing. Chris_ANG
Add restrictions on levelporting for various roles to help differentiate them. Chris_ANG
Rogues can build and set traps, more types of traps than just plain pits and land mines and bear traps. Traps may consume some types of items to be set, like a sleeping gas trap will consume potions of sleeping. This should probably not be totally reversible through #untrapping. Intended so the player can pick their battles and set up traps in an advantageous position. K2, stenno
Add two fields to struct trap: an object, which represents the "ammo" of the trap (darts, arrows, potions of oil), and a number to represent the "level" of the trap (which can affect a lot of things, such as a to-hit bonus the trap gets, how hard it is to untrap, or what the skill was of the player when they set the trap). Chris_ANG, aosdict
For TDTTOE, writing "Elbereth" in the prompt for writing a scroll should translate to "scare monster". dizzylizzy, aosdict
Merge crossbow and bow skills so that gnomish rangers don't get hurt by the lack of ammunition. neonKow
Type of arrow that is made out of enchanted worm teeth. Gives the racial arrow bonus to anyone using it. CctheOwl
Dipping eucalyptus leaves in water gives you a potion of tea. neonKow
Hallucination should prevent against all death magic, including death rays. Not just the touch of death. Muad, aosdict
You can cast spells from HP when you have insufficient Pw. Each point of HP is worth 2 points of effective Pw. Doing this a lot or in large quantities may drain your HP max. mtf, aosdict
More angelic maledictions:
  • "Weep, for [your god] has abandoned you!"
  • "Your unholy soul shall be [cleansed/purged]!" (cleansed if coaligned, purged otherwise)
  • "[Tremble/Cower], mortal!"
  • "Kneel, or thou shalt be knelt."
  • "Bow before me!"
  • "You viper!"
  • "Repent, sinner!"
Chris_ANG, aosdict
Move angelic and demonic maledictions out of quest.txt; they have nothing to do with the quest. They should probably still live somewhere in the dat folder. jonadab, Chris_ANG, aosdict
Blessed figurines always make the monster turn out tame. Uncursed ones make a tame monster 80% of the time and peaceful 20% of the time. Cursed ones make a tame monster 20% of the time and a hostile monster 80% of the time. Chris_ANG
Figurine monsters generate with an inflated monster generation difficulty. aosdict, Chris_ANG
Shimmering dragon scale mail grants see invisible. NeroOneTrueKing
Blessed scrolls of identify, if the player selects a container, will bring up a second menu that allows items in the container to be identified. jonadab
The confused scroll of identify, if non-cursed, identifies a random unknown object class and adds it to your discoveries list, even if you've never seen any of that object. aosdict, ais523, jonadab, FIQ
Elves and possibly Rangers get an alignment penalty for cutting down trees. Dwarves get an alignment bonus. aosdict, jonadab
Make fireballs like old-school D&D: the explosion isn't a certain radius; instead it has a defined volume, and will expand out from its origin point via random breadth-first search. This makes it dangerous to use in confined areas. ais523
Temporary hit points and Pw: your maximum goes above its normal bounds for some time, before returning to normal. If your normal maximum changes for some reason, the temporary maximum changes by the same amount. There are two proposals for how the effect should end:
  • The entire effect is timed, and once it ends the temporary buffer vanishes. If your HP would go below 1 as a result of this, you could either die or have it set to 1.
  • The temporary buffer drains away at the rate of 1 point per turn, and the effect naturally ends once it's gone.
aosdict, Pavel
Spell that grants temporary hit points. Pavel
Lure, which attracts monsters to you. Could be a magical non-consumable item, or a charged item that amounts to spraying yourself with scents. The Amulet of Yendor should also have this effect, at its maximum level at all times. Pavel, aosdict
Ideas for making grass terrain (. or ,) be an interesting piece of terrain:
  • Dies and turns to normal floor if hit by fire or have a death ray zapped over it
  • Turns into fire terrain if hit by fire and can spread to nearby grass
  • You can plant trees on them, whereas you cannot do this on normal floor.
aosdict, Chris_ANG
Scroll that tells you the dungeon overview for the next 5 levels of the dungeon. If blessed, shows more levels; if cursed, shows fewer levels or omits details. Pavel
Dungeon branch or level filled with toxic contact gas (breathless doesn't help, or only helps a little) so that you constantly take damage and must bring a lot of healing with you. The deeper you go, the worse the gas becomes, but the loot gets better. Pavel
Incorporeal monsters should be immune to mind flaying (and probably most physical) attacks. Mandevil
Casting a forgotten spell to confuse yourself consumes some Pw, perhaps one point per spell level, or just a random amount. jonadab, K2
The potion of booze gives a temporary damage bonus and temporary HP, and a temporary accuracy penalty. These effects go away once the confusion does. Dwarves get an extra boost. K2, aosdict
Engraving successive digits of pi on squares in a line gives you a cream pie for each new square. kritixilithos
Ring or amulet that causes your spellcasting to draw on HP instead of Pw. Each point of HP is worth 2 Pw points. If cursed, doubles spell Pw costs. If blessed, energy regeneration will regenerate HP until full before regenerating Pw. Pavel, elenmirie
Scroll that restores you to full health but decreases your maximum health. Pavel
If you can make deals with demon lords: one such deal is to boost a stat of your choice in exchange for permanent reductions in other random stats. Pavel
Make the amount of bonus movement points from temporary speed directly dependent on its remaining duration. Also provide diminishing returns where giving yourself more speed boosts on top of already having temporary speed gives you less extra duration than it otherwise would, until eventually you can't get any more duration than 1 per turn. These bonus movement points should also stack directly with all other speed sources, and be visible to the user in the status bar. jonadab, aosdict
Elves can engrave Elbereth and use it on the player, scaring them. FIQ
When the player is afraid of a monster, to-hit is reduced and they may not be able to attack that specific monster at all. FIQ, Elronnd, aosdict, jonadab
The Orb of Detection can detect the presence (but not location) of artifacts on the level. Possibly this is an Archeologist-only power. FIQ
A wand that, when it hits a creature, saves that creature's position and forces it to teleport back to that position after a few turns. Pavel
Ensure that roles that start with spellbooks always have enough Pw for one castable spell. raisse
Deployable barricade on a tile. Blocks movement; must be attacked or kicked several times to be destroyed. Presumably lightweight to actually carry around. Pavel
Very rarely, when eaten, candy bars have a Golden Ticket inside, which does something good like grant a wish. (Requires some method of not being farmable; possibly, polypiled candy bars have obroken set, and obroken candy bars never have a ticket in them.) Chris_ANG, aosdict, jonadab
Reduce the impact of a single master mind flayer attack, so that they don't just spawn out of nowhere (e.g. via harassment) and one- or two-hit kill a character with low Intelligence. FIQ
Wizard-harassment summon nasties should produce a "Monsters appear from nowhere!" message, and this message should force a --More--. jonadab, FIQ, AmyBSOD
If the hero's HP would be reduced below 1, set it to 1 instead (dependent on Luck? Or Dexterity?). bhaak, FIQ
Chatting to trolls while hallucinating makes them appear to say troll-bait sentences. FIQ
If you polymorph, and are not helpless, all of your torso armor that has a delay of 1 or less and isn't stuck under slower armor is automatically removed. This includes all cloaks and shirts. aosdict, Wooble
More harassment effects: the chance of respawning the Wizard is a fixed 1/7 and the rest of the effects are equal probability. Multiple non-duplicate effects may happen at the same time.
  • Unchanged: curse items, summon nasties, vaguely nervous, aggravate monsters
  • Darken much of the level, and extinguish or destroy light sources.
  • Drop boulders around the upstairs, or iron bars.
  • Make the Amulet and any fake Amulets much heavier until the next intervention.
  • Spawn pools centered on the player, with sea monsters in them.
  • Spawn lava around the level, not under the player.
  • Create a hole or pit under the player.
  • Create a stinking cloud centered on the player.
ozy
Change the message "This food tastes okay." for "palatable" food to "This food tastes gamey." nyingen, zid
Slaughterhouses as a Gehennom special room, filled with corpses, leashes, and knives. nyingen
A race where you start polyinited to a low level monster and with every level you gain, you can polymorph into a stronger monster. nyingen