
screen scrolling: Your player character is always centered on screen. Crawl even has a single-key "auto-attack" command, which will make your character attempt to attack the nearest enemy (moving toward them if necessary). It's especially good when playing in a terminal over SSH, or on a mobile device, where moving about can be slow or fiddly. auto-explore: A single key-command will cause your character to explore the dungeon by themselves until they encounter something interesting or dangerous, rather than making the player trawl every inch of the dungeon manually. This adds a third dimension of religion to the race/class combination.
religion: Crawl has an entire pantheon of gods for players to follow, which grant special powers and abilities while adding restrictions to what you can do in game (followers of good gods, for example, cannot use evil weapons or dark magic).
In keeping with the emphasis on simplicity, customizing your skills is entirely optional - the game will actually manage this for you by default (by keeping track of whatever it is you do the most, and assigning your earned skill points to those skills). For example, it's possible to start as a Squishy Wizard and put all your skill points into Fighting, eventually turning them into a Magic Knight.
skill customization: At any time, players can choose which skills they would like to favor over others, which means that every player is effectively multi-classing. The game will tell you the probability of success on almost all actions that involve random chance, and the player can examine any enemy to see what they can do in a fight and take appropriate precautions. In theory, a player who knows the game inside and out should still have no significant advantage over a new player - success should instead rely entirely on tactical skill. anti-spoilers: Crawl tries to give players as much information as they need to be able to make tactical decisions, to reduce any reliance on secrets or spoilers. Weapons and armor are indestructible and cannot be taken from you (although they can be temporarily degraded). A basic threat-level system will warn you when you're facing a dangerous enemy, so you can generally always see the danger coming, and there are many different ways to escape a dangerous encounter. Being killed without warning is almost unheard of - the game will always warn you if you're about to do something that may have adverse consequences. anti-frustration: Crawl tries to make cheap shots as rare as possible.
(There's still a lot of dungeon, so you'll never be lacking in places to get experience - the question is whether you'll survive the attempt.) Skill grinding is also impossible for the same reason, as your skill points come directly from your experience - you can't improve your skills without challenging and defeating monsters. anti-grinding: The only way to gain experience in Crawl is to defeat enemies, and there is only a limited number of enemies per dungeon floor.This is a reversal of the class-based gameplay in most other roguelikes. Race, on the other hand, makes a huge difference in what a player can do: a vampire plays very differently to a minotaur, for example. It's possible for a player to change their character's role entirely over the course of a game. emphasis on race over class: character classes in Crawl are little more than a starting package of skills and equipment.emphasis on playstyle: The game tries to accommodate many different styles of play, which is one reason why the game has such a huge roster of races, classes, and gods - and also why this roster changes with each new version, as the dev team tries out new ideas and discards flawed ones.