> I learned the hard way that a huge part of the fun of roguelikes is the “lottery effect”. Every time you kill a monster there should be a small chance of getting something really amazing.
That's one way to handle item drops, but it's not the only way, even considering only Angband variants. The other popular loot system has you making your own stuff -- instead of "dragons always drop dragon scale mail" (boring?), you'd have something like "dragons always drop scales, and you can use them to forge dragon scale mail".
I do have crafting too, but I don't want to lean too heavily on it. I don't think it's that fun to spend a lot of time outside of the dungeon just slapping items together.
That's one way to handle item drops, but it's not the only way, even considering only Angband variants. The other popular loot system has you making your own stuff -- instead of "dragons always drop dragon scale mail" (boring?), you'd have something like "dragons always drop scales, and you can use them to forge dragon scale mail".