First of all, I want to say that I greatly enjoyed the tournament, enjoyed the comaraderie with my clan (we hung out in a clan-specific channel all month, which was a blast), and in general I enjoyed doing the unique deaths. It was cathartic, to approach a game that has killed me so many times from the perspective of pursuing death on purpose, and yet there was also some challenge involved in finding ways to avoid getting the same few deaths all the time and consisently find new and interesting ones.

It was also interesting to find new and interesting deaths in the variants, up to a point. Finding out that in dnethack I could be disintegrated by absorbing too much energy, for example (due to the addition of a new player race that eats magical energy instead of food) was a particular favorite. It is the variety of genuinely different possibilities in the game that make a unique deaths contest interesting.

With that said, I feel that the tournament's consolidation rules (for what is considered not sufficiently unique) could be improved. They appear to be focused primarily on vanilla, and more attention should be paid to the variants; but also, some of the rules could be improved even for vanilla. Here, then, are my thoughts on what improvements might look like.

• In general, deaths that are genuinely different in some fundamental way should be considered different, and deaths that are in principle essentially the same should usually be consolidated, particularly if there are very large numbers of quite minor variations.
• I think that killed by an, killed by a, and killed by could be stripped from the beginning of deaths without losing anything really unique.
• I can tell you that I got rather tired, by the end of the month, of checking similar-looking unpronounceable shopkeeper names against the list, to verify whether we had yet died to that particular shopkeeper and his wand of striking and his wand of magic missile. Then we realized that in fact some of the shopkeepers can occur as either gender. We never found a reliable way (in the absense of probing) to distinguish said gender before dying. If you run statistics on that list, you will discover that more than 20% of all the unique deaths obtained by all the clans involved shopkeepers in some way¹. This is boring. In future years, I would like to see the names of most of the shopkeepers (possibly excepting Izchak) stripped out in much the same way that player gender is (caught eirself in eir own whatever), because I feel that the name of the shopkeeper does not contribute anything really significant to the uniqueness of the death.
• Player ghost names probably ought to be consolidated in some fashion. Notably, some variants allow the character name to be changed in the options (between games). By playing with a new character name every game, a group of clan members working on the same server might frequently encounter unique ghost names. We never got around to exploiting this, partly due to lack of server stability (we were originally planning to do it mainly in NH4 on the last weekend...), and partly because of a conversation I had with a member of another clan who was also doing unique deaths. Nonetheless, such a strategy, if successful, would rack up numbers of deaths without really involving anything unique, which is the point. My proposal for ghost names, if it is technically feasible, is as follows:
  1. If the ghost name is the same as the player character name, change the ghost of [player name] to eir own ghost.
  2. Otherwise, if the ghost name is the same as a server account belonging to a member of the same clan as the player, change it to the ghost of a fellow clan member.
  3. Otherwise, if the ghost name is the same as any server account registered for the tournament, change it to the ghost of a rival clan member (or possibly the ghost of a rival player if the account has no clan affiliation).
  4. Someone else has proposed that if the ghost name is one of the ones hardcoded into the game, then it should be left intact. I am not opposed to this, because it's a reasonably short list.
  5. Otherwise, just change it to a ghost.
• There were also eighty essentially identical deaths resulting from letting various kinds of corpses rot and then eating them for fatal illness², around six and a half percent of all the deaths in the tournament. These should be consolidated. I recommend simplifying them all to poisoned by a rotted corpse, leaving out the exact type of monster. Food poisoning is food poisoning, regardless of exactly what kind of corpse you let rot for 300 turns.
• Divine minion³ deaths probably also ought to be consolidated. Between the various clans we managed 76 of these (a little over 6% of all deaths), mostly by doing #pray every turn starting on turn 1 until death, over and over and over again. If this were automated with a bot, or maybe even with copy and paste, the number of such deaths could be much larger. There are two obvious ways to consolidate these: either the type of minion could be simplified, so that the death reads divine minion of The Lady, or else the name of the diety could be simplified, so that the death reads couatl of a diety. The former method would cut the list to around 40 (we got 37 distinct dieties in 2014) and would mean that you could stop after getting minions from all the dieties; in practice most clans would stop after getting all the ones corresponding to starting role/alignment combinations. The latter consolidation would make for about a dozen (couatl, four kinds of elementals, and we managed half a dozen kinds of & in 2014). I think either of these approaches would be reasonable. Even combining them (minion of a diety) would not be entirely unreasonable.
• I also feel that sometimes status effects, which were stripped out, are more interesting than the proximate cause of death. For example, killed by a hallucinogen-distorted wererat, while sleeping off a magical draught, under the 2014 rules, becomes simply killed by a wererat, which is boring. To avoid a combinatorial explosion, I feel that the correct approach, when there are status effects, is to consolidate the monster's name, so that this death instead becomes hallucinogen-distorted monster, while sleeping off a magical draught. This is more interesting than the wererat. Similarly, while frozen by a monster's gaze is more interesting than the jackal or whatever that got in the final hit.
• One very notable case where a variant's detail needs to be consolidated in a manner that would have been taken for granted if it were possible in vanilla is GruntHack's killed by a falling [anything]. This was not significantly exploited in 2014 (partly due to a mutual agreement between the two most prolific death obtainers, from rival clans), but it could have been, quite trivially, by setting fruitname and start-scumming for custom fruit with any role that gets a lot of food (e.g., Tourist). Even regular objects, thrown up and allowed to fall on one's head, contribute no meaningful uniqueness and should be stripped out for junethack purposes. killed by a falling spellbook of identify, killed by a falling slice of pizza, killed by a falling wand of nothing, killed by a falling scroll of amnesia, and killed by a falling blood pressure caused by gout should all simply become falling object. We might consider entertaining the notion of making a small number of exceptions to this policy for things that would be particularly dangerous if they fall on your head, like projectiles (arrows, darts, etc.) boulders and iceboxes and heavy iron balls, but the list should be kept relatively short. Rocks, of course, should definitely be an exception, since they can happen as a result of a trap. The drawbridge, likewise, is special, because you clearly didn't just throw it upward on turns one through six.
• While we're stripping detail from Grunthack's death messages, I lean toward consolidating things like killed by a kobold watch captain's magic missile to simply monster's magic missile, monster's bolt of cold, and so on. I like that Grunt adds the detail, because for normal everyday purposes it's nice to have that (especially since the wand is often zapped from out of the player's view in the dark); but for tournament uniqueness I do not consider the exact kind of monster that zapped the wand to be important. (I don't feel this way about breath attacks; those are specific properties of particular monsters, so the kind of monster matters more there. Also, there are way fewer monsters with breath attacks than there are monsters who will zap a wand, and they generally have only one kind of breath attack each, so there's no combinatorial explosion.)

1. There were 104 deaths to various shopkeepers in melee, killed by Mr. or Ms. so-and-so, the shopkeeper, virtually all of which had to be obtained using the wizard role, for the cloak of magic resistance, because otherwise you get killed by a wand or maybe killed by a magic missile in vanilla. Most of the rest were obtained in GruntHack, where the monster who zapped the wand is mentioned, leading to 93 instances of killed by Mr. or Ms. so-and-so the shopkeeper's wand [of striking and 59 instances of killed by Mr. or Ms. so-and-so, the shopkeeper's magic missile. The other 9 were miscellaneous things like e.g. Mr. so-and-so the shopkeeper's bolt of cold. For the record, I like Grunthack's more descriptive death messages, for purposes of normal play; but I feel that if they were in vanilla, they would be consolidated in some manner for tournament unique-deaths-contest purposes, and I feel that GruntHack's deaths should be consolidated using principles similar to those applied to vanilla. Altogether this makes 265 shopkeeper-related deaths, out of the 1222 achieved in the tournament.
2. Of the rotted corpse deaths, 74 were in modern variants, and 6 were achieved in oldhack, which uses different nomenclature. More oldhack dead monster deaths would have been possible, if someone had had the patience for them.
3. Note that priests and priestesses of the various dieties are fundamentally different from minions, since they tend to result from finding a temple, usually in Minetown, rather than from prayer. In 2014 we did not do most of the priests and priestesses, because Minetown tends to also be rich in shopkeepers. With shopkeeper names consolidated, the priests and priestesses might be a larger factor. Whether and exactly how to consolidate things like killed by a priestess of Thoth and killed by a priest of Lugh is an open question.