Aule wrote: That is, are you one who wishes to play what you want and to try to get there, or are you one who has no wishes and plays with what you're given to the end of simply winning?
Yes, that's an important difference, and as someone in the latter group I'd elaborate that, personally, while I most enjoy Crawl when I am playing to win, that doesn't mean my enjoyment from Crawl comes from winning. Rather, I find the game play most compelling when my goal is to survive, and it is the game play that I enjoy. "Winning" as such in Crawl is (maybe) a high score and (always) a slightly different flavor message for the game over screen. It is like a classic arcade game in that sense. There aren't characters you are invested in, there isn't a story that gets tied up (satisfactorily or not), and there isn't some separate loot or crafting mini-game. (There are options for extending game play and for a bit of big loot hunting (Ziggurats), but these are not the focus of the game and this is intentional in its design approach.)
If I had to analyze Crawl's most basic elements, I'd say it is part survival game with emphasis on threat assessment and risk management, part board game with an emphasis on positioning and LOS management, with rpg-like character building. Some people derive more enjoyment from certain of those elements over others. Though I do like seeing my @ grow stronger over time and get new toys, I personally don't get so much out of the RPG-like stuff.
I find it more interesting when I am reassessing my options and asking, "What can I do to keep surviving, based on what's available?" rather than saying, "What do I have available that helps a mage/fighter/etc.?" To me, the latter question puts the cart before the horse. If you had chosen only to develop magic abilities and some basic defenses while worshiping Vehumet, and that's it at the time of death/ascension, then you had a mage. Depending on the context, that may or may not have been a good idea in terms of maximizing your chances for survival, but it wasn't the case that your character "was a mage," but rather that you
made your character a "mage," and then continually chose to keep it a mage.
To my thinking, "Shooting fireballs at something then whacking it with a weapon" is a specific
tactic, which may or may not make sense depending on the situation. It is not a template for character development, as such. Characters capable of using that tactic (or a tactic
very similar in terms of actual game play) include characters that found the spell fireball and put in the training to make it helpful, characters that found certain evocable items and put in the experience to make them helpful, characters that worship certain gods and got the piety and invocations training to make the divine abilities helpful, and so on. There tends to be a not-very-clarifying conflation of flavor and game play in trying to find the line between "fighter" and "mage," with the exception of (most) characters in the very early game, and also characters being intentionally built according to an
a priori archetype.