DW operated on highlighted stats in the first iteration. It wont break anything. Good discussion on it here, with a link to even more discussion:
 http://anarchangel23.livejournal.com/437462.html

XP on a miss is definitely a thing.  It somehow fell into an editing void in the pre-release but has been re-added!

It seems to have fallen back into that void, because there's nothing mentioned about marking XP on a miss in the current text from the latest download.

I am possessed of a terrible desire, a burning relentless brain-fever which drives me to reskin the glorious simplicity of World of Dungeons as a wacky sci-fantasy thing - DungeonVerse, a game about plucky space-men and space-women delving into the trap-laden, monster-infested relics and derelicts of a lost age of Grand Technology, now just a bitter memory of the lost ages before the Machine Revolt, before the invasion of the Cephalonoids, before the Downfall of Man.

So, anyway, I know John Harper et. al. wanted to keep World of Dungeons as a backer-only thing for now - but the only cure for my fever is to start hacking this thing - which would include posting ideas about classes/skills/etc. to various forums. Would this be acceptable, since it would likely be showing off misbegotten descendants of the original World of Dungeons?