Okay, I'm writing a full post on this, but I'm probably going to put it in GDD and it will probably be a few days.
To me, this topic is fundamental to why Stone Soup is a bad game, and I'd prefer that the thread about it be one of good faith participation.
Here's an attempt at a working definition from my last draft:
(For the non-native english speakers here, what I mean by "incentive structures" is "the aspects of the game's ruleset which, when taken together, create incentives that shape player behavior".)
One summary might be that Crawl's incentive structures are ass-backwards, negatively impacting gameflow in such a jarring fashion that it's hard to play the game anymore, once you've seen it. There really is a lot to write about this; examples where individual rules and rule interactions create perverse incentives are
so numerous in Crawl that it becomes work to individually cite them. It's a systemic issue with the game -- to me, it seems this was completely overlooked by Linley, and later the early DCSS team. Anyway, real post later.
edit: A lot of these problems are not new topics of discussion for the Tavern, and much of it is not worth rehashing. My perspective here, in treating this general class of issue as player behavioral incentivization problems, stems from my opinion that a lot of these issues with the game's usability tend to reduce down to Crawl's original game designer(s) obviously having had a massive blind spot for how players might actually interact with the game.
Obviously, some of that is always going to be subjective, but, y'know. You read stories of oldschool devs trying to appease Miyamoto to get their work onto the Famicom: Linley's Crawl would never have made that cut. Ever. It's just not
playable enough.
P.S.: Slay The Spire is actually kind of a neat game. Thanks for the recommendation!