Any recommended variants that are fairly noob-friendly?

[tynan]

The beauty of all Roguelikes lies in the fact that they are turn-based. That means that you can spend as much time as you possibly need, every turn, to figure out what to do next. It's like Chess with only one piece, and a really REALLY big board...
Play the Vanilla version a bit. Heck, most of the game can be tweaked and edited with WordPad in the simple text files, located in the lib/edit/ directory. Play around with it and experiment. Just be sure and make backups of every file in that directory you modify...