Why I am not an Angband player.

It seems to me that many of the difficulties with Angband stem from
the fact that the game is so long that you absolutely cannot take
chances; sooner or later, a 1% failure on your big healing spell will
kill you. In a successful game of NH, one can say 'ah, fuck it, I'll
get away with this' once or twice; for instance, my winning samurai
went a few rounds with the quest nemesis wielding the Tsurugi of
Muramasa, which will bisect you 5% of the time. (Mind you, that said,
the previous game he cut me in half, so that was that). This, the
non-persistent levels, and the ready availability of escape items and
spells combines so that you almost never have to deal with a sticky
situation; whereas in NH if you use up a charge on the wand of
teleportation or digging, it's gone - and the nasties are still
waiting for you; you can come back better prepared, but you'll have to
deal with it some day.

Also, the proportion of time spent in sticky situations versus just whacking
things and taking their stuff is greatly reduced - an awful lot of a game
of Angband is 'kill 10,000 assorted trolls. Get 1,000 items. Destroy 985
of them (thank God for auto_squelch). WOR back up. Sell fifteen items.
Repeat until finally you sell fourteen and make one tiny improvement in
your equipment. Descend one level and start again.'

This is produced partly by the absolute demand for certain resistances
below certain depths (and, again, if you chance it, it _will_ kill you),
and partly because there is no penalty for doing so. In NetHack, you find
equipment most rapidly by exploring new levels, but monster difficulty is
proportional to the average of XP level and depth; so simply sitting on
one level and killing stuff will produce something you're not equipped to
deal with. As a result, the current project in NetHack is nearly always
one of motion through the dungeon - perhaps upwards ("I am going back up
to my blank scroll cache in Sokoban"), but always motion - whereas in
Angband it's typically one of repeatedly ransacking a certain depth.

ADOM apparently puts a clock on the game by some mechanism; I tend to feel
this is necessary for any roguelike to prevent indefinite character
optimisation (indeed, NetHack loses in this respect in that the clock is
only effective in the early game.)

[The sole exception I can think of is chain-sacrificing for bonuses at
altars.]

A secondary objection is the lack of complexity. Monsters in Angband do
one thing - they try to kill you - and you can respond in one way. Objects
nearly all have one purpose (what it says on the tin), and hence you can't
produce nearly so many ingenious responses to trouble.

You're always doing the same thing in Angband; killing things and taking
their stuff. Sometimes in NH you're trying to map levels and dig paths, or
solve Sokoban, or simply escape as fast as possible, or identify objects,
or whatever; and the levels aren't all fundamentally the same - the
various branches have distinctive flavours.

The town also appears to add to the game, while actually subtracting
from it. Unless you are extremely short of money, it eliminates any
need to conserve your resources, since whatever you need - food,
scrolls of recall, healing potions - can be replaced indefinitely.
NetHack offers the opposite trap of dying because you were too
stingy and never expended your resources at all.

I think it says something that the Angband Borg can win the game not
through being a good Angband player but by having an immense capacity for
boredom.

[That said, I _do_ like Angband's equipment optimisation game; it's much
better than NetHack's.]

Some Angband variants seem also to have fallen into the trap of having
a 'countryside' through which one can travel to reach a number of
dungeons that are fundamentally the same.