Potions are a good point, too. For example, currently you can greatly boost the speed of your companion by throwing a potion of boost speed, but it will make it hostile. IIRC the same goes for potions of healing and so on. It would be good if it were possible somehow to use beneficial potions to aid your companions without angering them.

You can throw healing (all kinds) potions alright, but any other boosting potion will make it hostile. I think there was an RFE about that too.

EDIT: My bad, indeed there was an RFE, but it's already implemented! http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=1365

Still, 'g'iving them the potion to drink would also be awesome.

This RFE being implemented would be like a dream coming true.

IMHO, this should be restricted to items that the companion could actually use. Otherwise players could just give their entire inventory (more or less) to a pet to prevent inventory damage.

Me neither. I've seen monsters drink potions of invisibility only twice, ever ("The -foo- empties the mercury potion. Suddenly it is gone!". It might depend on intelligence and/or monster type as well as the potion itself.

Maybe also have it so that if you give them equipment of a type they already have equipped, they remove(if they can) and drop it before equipping the new item. Don't monsters do this already? Can't recall whether they drop the old item.

This would be great, as long as JellySlayer's nitpick is taken into account, as otherwise it could be exploitable.

I kinda disagree about exploitability of giving everything.

1) Your companion may panic and run away with all your stuff.
2) Your companion may die mid-combat leaving all your precious stuff on the floor for everyone to pick up/destroy using breath attacks etc.
3) Your companion will definitely die in any halfway dangerous location unless it's pretty powerful, which will make it kinda problematic to kill it for the stuff later.
4) Simply going around with a companion, having dumped all your stuff on it and then killing it is not everyone's usual play style. I personally don't mind doing that, though :D
5) Finally, just what equipment are you going to give to your companion which cannot be simply stashed somewhere?

Please, provide a realistic scenario where you efficiently and reliably exploit a companion to carry valuable stuff and I'll try to incorporate necessary modifications to the RFE if I'm missing something.

Sorry, _Ln_ this comment is not in response to your post.

What happens with unpaid items, can they also be 'g'iven to a companion and it becomes the thief then?

You can carry your critical gear up the ToEF without worry about it burning if you happen to be lacking a blanket or RoI.
You can put all of your gear on a pet and jump down the Rift without breaking any items.
You can put all of your gear on a pet and circumvent the inventory penalty for the quickling tree
You can transport highly corrupting items (chaos trinity) without penalties.
You can carry heavy items well beyond your carrying capacity (a bunch of logs for bridge building, ores for smithing, etc.)
You can transport valuable corpses indefinitely without having to worry about them rotting.
If you pet can swim, you can use your pet to transport gear across rivers (I'm not sure if there are any low level swimming pets though).

Want me to keep going?

"Don't give away things that are not your own" :)

1) Then you kill your companion in the ToEF and your most valuable item burns on the turn you move on to the tile with it. Worse, your companion gets damaged by heat and runs away, dies away and all your items burn.
2) Ok, Rift one is good, with bonus points that the companion may die from the fall.
3) What then, you kill it and claim everything back? How are you going to leave the place? Taking items one by one?
4) Monsters don't pick up artifacts anymore.
5) If you are doing such things, carrying capacity will not stop you :D
6) Good, I suppose (unless it dies somewhere and everything rots away).
7) Not sure about that one.

I'm not convinced ;)

It is illogical for companions to enter some of the locations mentioned, I feel like making a RFE, but have created a discussion thread in ADOM General Discussions subforum before proceeding.

1) Let a monster kill the pet. Then you can walk onto the items and autopickup them without anything burning.
3) Use another pet to haul your gear back out. Think: Necromancer. In fact, for this whole thing, think Necromancer: You have an essentially unlimited supply of pets on demand.
4) What does that have to do with giving them gifts?
6) Still much more efficient than carrying especially if you don't have food pres/cooking.

Alright, final question - will you frequently employ any of mentioned tactics if this gets implemented?

4)

Let Jelly's nitpick be in, but otherwise, I enjoy this concept. -hits the yes on feature implementation question thing-

AFAIK, giving them corpses doesn't work. I don't know how many times I've seen the message: "You hit the kobold and transform him into a mangled heap! [+7xp] You notice a large bat corpse rotting away."

Rift, ToEF, and transporting Chaos Trinity are ones I'd certainly use whenever went there.

If I were playing a Necro, I'd probably have most of my inventory in a slave pretty much all the time.

Yes, it's as if the rotting 'counter' still ticks away, but the physical rotting away doesn't occur while in the monster's inventory. As soon as it is removed from that 'place' the check is run.

The same happens with corpses on the banshee level, you can pick-up the corpses there, but as soon as you leave the level they all immediately rot away.

Your basic rats and Large Bats are immune to water.

For me, I kinda like this idea. I haven't put a vote on it yet simply because I'm trying to weigh out in my mind whether it's *too* exploitable, or whether it adds enough of an interesting bonus.

My biggest worry about giving your companions armor here is: have they fixed the rollovre issue? So if you find a heavy piece of armor and let your friend equip it, will they turn into powerhouses because of rollover speed/dexterity?