What is a basic overview of the game? Is there an example of play somewhere?
Sorry for the slow response—thanksgiving travel plus enworld being down yesterday meant I just haven't had time to post. Anyway: Dungeon World.
Dungeon World takes all kinds of great tools from modern game design and applies them to a classic fantasy adventure style that Adam (the other author) and I love.
Some of the key things:
Rules trigger from the fictional world. Instead of, say, a rule for making an attack, we have a rule that triggers when you "attack an enemy in melee." That means that when you play you can really focus on what your characters (and the NPCs and monsters) are doing and deal with that, as your character might, instead of thinking about the rules directly. The rules step in as needed.
When a rule triggers something always happens. There's no "you don't do it" result. Instead, every dice roll falls into three ranges: you get what you want, you get mostly what you want but with complications, or something bad happens. Each rule tells you how what happens in the best too cases, with plenty of room for interpretation.
In that last case, where something bad happens, that's the GM's job. And the GM is given tools to do it. The GM has a set of general counteractions that help them look at the precise situation in question and find the badness that occurs.
Putting that all together, you get situations like this:
The orb of Ur-Um-Ra sits on a pedestal on the other side of a deep pit bridged by a narrow stone crossing. Goblin archers are aiming at the bridge from the gallery above. Adam, playing Omar the thief, says "I dash across the bridge, weaving to avoid the arrows." That triggers a rule called defy danger, so he makes a roll and fails it. As the GM I have to say what happens, so I look at my tools for inspiration on what could happen in this situation. One of the inspirations is "use up their resources" and Omar is carrying a lot of stuff, so I say, "as you duck and weave an arrow narrowly misses you and rips your backpack apart. All your stuff—including the gold from the king's tomb—starts spilling out. What do you do?"
Those are three of the coolest bits, I think, but there are a lot more! Anything in particular I can ramble about?
