[johnswamps]

I would try playing Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup instead. It's another roguelike that is heavily inspired by nethack but is more modern and more beginner friendly. I love nethack (I've ascended twice) but it's definitely showing it's age (not to mention that the game is pretty broken in some regards). Crawl has a better interface and tries to remove all the tedious parts of roguelikes, though there's still a learning curve.

[pavel_lishin]

What's broken in it?

[johnswamps]

A lot. Much of it isn't really relevant to beginners, but here's a quick list off the top of my head. Maybe broken wasn't the right word, these are just general problems with the game

1. The endgame is too easy and boring.

2. Elbereth and #pray make it too easy to get out of tough spots

3. Most classes end up playing similarly after the midgame (either wizard or melee typically)

4. Wands of wishing, magic markers, and polypiling are too powerful

5. The game is nearly unbeatable without spoilers

6. Sokoban is boring after you've played through it a few times

7. There's a bunch of cheap tactics like pudding farming

8. It's too generic and boring to put together an ascension kit. There are very few trade-offs you need to make in choosing what armor and weapons to use

9. The religion aspect is too simplistic

10. Combat gets tedious in the endgame. Most of the time you're just plowing through monsters. This results in tons of "battle spam" with you getting several messages like "You hit the minotaur!" every turn, forcing you to not read them and possibly miss important information

11. The game requires several patches to be playable (menucolors, sortloot, hpmon, etc.)

12. The default options are pretty bad

13. Traveling and exploring can be boring

Wow, that was a lot longer than I thought it would be. But I only write so much because I care :) I had a lot of fun beating nethack and and it's one of my favorite games of all time. I'm possibly prouder of beating nethack than of my MS degree :)

[gnosis]

This is all true. However.. how many years of gameplay did you have to put in to learn it?

Speaking for myself, I've been playing nethack since the 80's. How many other games can you name that will keep an audience interested for 20 or 30 years?

I'd count that as a fantastic success in game design.

Despite that, I do agree that the game has its weaknesses and could stand to be improved quite a bit. One of its greatest weaknesses is its glacial pace of development. The last release was in 2003.

[eropple]

Eh--I had my first ascension (Val) about four months after I started. I've done so another three times since. (Wiz, Arc, Rgr).

I think that there's a possibility that it's not as difficult, in relative terms, for people around my age who grew up with similar games, and fairly hard ones at that.

[eru]

If you want to stay with Nethack, but want those flaws addressed: Try Sporkhack, a fork of Nethack. The author tries to make the game harder in the endgame, but not harder and possibly easier for beginners.

[thricedotted]

Not sure if this is what johnswamps was referring to, but the two big things that come to mind are the Sokoban levels (there are only two fixed variants which can only guarantee you one of two things, and a lot of the time if people don't get the thing they want (usually the bag of holding), they end up restarting since the odds of getting it anywhere else in the game are pretty low after that) and the fact that you can do things like pudding farming to obtain items/corpses easily. A lot of actions in Nethack are formulaic and based on tricks, whereas DC:SS encourages things like unknown item use more. In the end, I love Nethack and it was my first roguelike, but DC:SS is just a lot more fun.

Also, here's a post comparing Dungeon Crawl and Nethack that I just remembered: http://nethack.wikia.com/wiki/Linleys_Dungeon_Crawl

[eru]

I actually prefer getting the amulet of reflection from Sokoban, and bags of holding get randomly generated relatively often. But start scumming is damnable anyway.