Not remotely recently, but my friends and I played a lot of NetHack back in the 90s. I Ascended once or twice with no cheating (and with low-to-no use of Elbereth), and had a couple of good runs that could plausibly have worked out but didn't due to either bad fortune or (in one memorable case) very poor life choices involving a Ring of Conflict.

IIRC, we didn't even really read up on anything spoilery until we were getting down to the castle occasionally. Learning to survive the early-game was a journey both fun and frustrating.