My roguelike of choice is Brogue (https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/). Whereas Nethack was made to satisfy the creators' interest in complexity and simulation, Brogue satisfies the creator's interest in design and elegance. Brogue simplifies a lot of the redundancies in Nethack and condenses it down into the core elements of dungeon crawling. While it's a much less complex game, it doesn't sacrifice much in depth. You still get loads of interesting emergent stories.

Brogue is probably the most accessible amongst the text-based roguelikes - it's interface is excellent, it manages to be very visually appealing without straying from the ascii aesthetic, and the design of it is streamlined and elegant.

Thanks for the link. I like that game.

As Roguelikes go, DCSS is far, far away from NetHack in terms of design. NetHack aims to be a simulation/puzzle/environment focused game whereas DCSS is a combat and character building exercise. While they're both good games they scratch completely different itches for me.

Calling what DCSS changes from NetHack 'problems' is pretty disingenuous; the games are not trying to do the same thing.

I have very little experience with NetHack. I'm basing my comment off of the DCSS FAQ. I probably have misrepresented it.

>The history of Crawl is somewhat convoluted: Crawl was created in 1995 by Linley Henzell. Linley based Crawl loosely on Angband and NetHack, but avoided several annoying aspects of these games, and added a lot of original ideas of his own.

For NetHack, these "several annoying aspects" are probably the essence of what makes it different than most 'roguelikes' and makes it good as a separate direction/niche of gameplay.

What I am graciously anticipating is the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup analogue of Dwarf Fortress.

I lost so much time to that game. I would probably recommend it.