dcss_tourney VS crawl

It's not a complete list, as there's a whole day to tweak the rules still :). You can see all the changes on GitHub: the 0.30-tourney branch.

If you're planning on playing seriously, it's not a bad idea to sign up on all available servers so you can "reserve" your username so someone else can't inadvertently use the same one and pollute online statistics aggregators like crawl.akrasiac.org or dcss-stats.vercel.app

I'm in http://crawl.akrasiac.org/ . You might be right about trunk. I'm not sure because I usually don't look at the versions of the other active players.

This isn't directly a Crawl question, but I can't find a better place to ask: Why doesn't crawl.akrasiac.org support https?

'Trunk' is the currently developed branch. In this case trunk is what will become 0.27, but because it is being actively developed it is changing daily. I don't know where to download it for offline play but I personally play online at http://crawl.akrasiac.org/

The code is public but no guarantees that it's easy to run: https://github.com/crawl/dcss_tourney

So it looks like banishment is fine https://github.com/crawl/dcss_tourney/blob/e595ab84245eef2907f70614362298a80ba37272/query.py#L1417

It's probably not as rigorous as what you're thinking of but the devs of DCSS have cited online win rates of certain combinations as the impetus for balance changes before.

https://crawl.develz.org

In a similar vein, see Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a free and open-source roguelike that's been continuously developed by volunteers for 20 years: http://crawl.develz.org/

They are entirely too humanoid. I mean, look at these splash screens: Kiku, Ignis, Chei. While those images shouldn't be taken as canonical, they at least demonstrate the general inhumanity of the Crawl pantheon.

Since you like turn-based games too, try some old-school roguelikes. Many are open-source freeware so you have nothing to lose but time. I've been playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for almost 10 years.

Since Brogue's already been mentioned, I'd add Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Tales of Maj Eyal as pretty beginner friendly games.

For people who don't follow trunk, Okawru's gifting has been changed (and arguably* nerfed):

My personal first timer recommendation? Maybe Nethack or Dungeon crawl?

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - Free traditional roguelike with fair mechanics and a lot of variety between species/skill/god choices (~25 gods and maybe with the exception of sif/veh and oka/trog, they are very distinct). The tiles are great. There's many developers and they are very welcoming of code or vault contributions. Reducing incentives to play tediously is one of the goals. Easily hundreds of hours of gameplay for free. Playable online (connecting to a server through your browser/terminal) or offline (terminal or tiles version). There have been win streaks of 50+ games with a variety of species/background combos so you know it's mostly fair(it IS possible for rng to give you an unwinnable game), but it's very difficult if your goal is to win every game.