[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.