[pmoriarty]

"Agreed about all of these except for gods. In NetHack you can't easily choose your god during the game (though you can sometimes not-easily choose your god during the game) and the difference in behavior from one god to the next is minimal. In Crawl, you can usually choose your god and thereby get different abilities, status effects, and effectively mini-conduct challenges based on what each god disapproves of. I think that's more interesting than the NetHack religion stuff, although it's true that NetHack has a slightly more complex model of gods' feelings toward you."

In Nethack you can do a ton of different things at altars. In Crawl altars are useless except for converting to that god's religion. After your conversion you can pretty much safely ignore altars in Crawl unless you want to change your religion. The options are much greater in Nethack.

[schoen]

Good point, I wasn't thinking about altars. They absolutely have the character that you mention.

Conversely, in NetHack you can pretty much ignore which specific god you worship over the course of the game, which is less true for Crawl.

[antepodius]

I don't know, cannibalism for chaotics is pretty good. But so is having peaceful angels on the astral pland as lawful. Neutrals get shafted, as ever.