I've been playing DCSS for a few years and the furthest I've ever gone was collecting one rune (Snake Pits).

I like that it's permadeath, the dungeons are procedurally generated, and that releases with new mechanics come out regularly so it doesn't get stale. Over my short tenure, I've seen a few races, classes, equipment types, and mechanics (food was a mechanic awhile ago) come and go. With that said there are many backgrounds, classes, equipment, and dieties so actual play can have quite a lot of variability.

I usually play on crawl.dcss.io via ssh, you can find my player characters in the morgue by looking for player "kaleh"

Go get killed in D:3 by a pack of gnolls, I highly recommend :)