The main reason polymorph was disabled is that it was a money abuse.
You get a pile of junk and polymorph it into something else that was worth
more money. Various changes were put in place, so cursed items remained cursed,
etc. But then it became that polymorph became pretty useless because you'd just
get complete crap.
Now, given past discussions about money and wealth, perhaps there isn't much a
reason to be concerned about that items become marginally more valuable.
As far as monsters - because there is no global list of monsters by level, it
would just find all the monsters and choose one randomly. I think there was
also the problem, at least related to monsters, that you'd zap that tough
monster that is suppose to protect that super good treasure into some wimp you
easily kill.
If polymorph is redone, I'd suggest these changes:
1) Make up treasure lists (at least for monsters) in what things turn into.
Thus, you could have a polymorph_monster_low (level 1-5), medium (5-10), etc.
In that way, you'd get something different, but it wouldn't be really easy.
As an aside, polymorph never worked with multipart monsters (either to/from) -
would probably make sense to fix that.
However, some flag would need to be added to say this monster can't be
polymorphed, so you can't polymorph the super tough custom monsters into
something else (maybe check the level of the wand/rod, and it can only polymorph
things of lower level?)
2) For players, I don't think we can/should mess with the skills, as it gets
tricky to set those back properly. It'd be fairly annoying to get a skill
scroll of sorcery, but already having the skill, you toss it. But then you get
polymorphed, and lose that skill, since it was a starting skill? Better to say
that mentally, you have/know all the same stuff.
I think you could change the race of a character - you could look at the
archetype and stat bonuses and give the player new stat bonuses.
3) For objects, the old code would transform a weapon to a weapon, shield to
shield, etc. The problem again was that there was no list, so it would just
find all the armors in the archetypes and choose one randomly (thus, artifact
weapons were much more likely to show up than you'd see in a map).
What I'd suggest is use the treasurelist for the general store when
transforming these objects. So that food may turn into a sword - it is
polymorph after all. Have some objects just go away (evaporate). Some chance
of a monster being created.
Sure, the person may make some money off the deal, but this would probably be
one of the less abusive ways. Perhaps limit the number of objects the wand will
do on any space, so you can't pile 400 things on one space hoping for that one
object - if it only did say 5 objects/space, given the value of the wand itself,
might not be a money maker. Rods of polymorph should probably be strictly
prohibited.
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