What are you playing right now?

[Kato]

The one thing that I insist on - in hopes of retaining at least some of the term's usefulness - is that, in a roguelike, death means you start at the beginning. If the game has a meta progression system - say, because you retain currency that you can use to upgrade your player character in future runs - it doesn't have true permadeath, and thus it's not a roguelike.

Again, the people behind Badass Hero know this, and therefore they call it a "rogue-lite". That's a good thing - at this point "rogue-lite" is far more useful as a term than "roguelike" is, because it describes a narrower set of expected features. Please don't undercut their efforts.

Hm.. not to delve too deep into it but to me a rogue-like is mostly determined by the permadeath aspect, little more. I guess you could include the "no upgrades" to differentiate it from rogue-lites, a term I frankly haven't noticed often enough yet to include in my regular vocabulary, but to me it feels more like a sub genre, than a different one.
I mean, depending on how strict you are, is a rogue-like allowed to have anything that carries over? i.e. can I have unlockables or does that invalidate it, too? Because then I'd be hard pressed to name a true rogue-like, although I will admit I only played a handful.
Sure, if you just want the randomness and some penalty for dying there's a loads of games that one could include and I will disagree falls into the genre, but some unlockables don't seem a problem to me. (Not that I really want to make a huge point out of what is(n't) a rogue, I'm just curious.