Okay, this is something that's come up for me with both Red Box DW and with World of Dungeons:

Combat seems brutally hard. Here's why: in D&D (or most RPGs), during combat you roll to hit (and hit or miss) and then the monster rolls to hit (and hits or misses). In DW, you roll to hit and if you miss the monster capitalizes on your mistake and gains some advantage over you (which is often loss of HP). It also happens to a lesser extent on 7-9. In Apocalypse World, this isn't such a big deal to work around since combat is generally dynamic and often only lasts a gunshot or two, but in a trad dungeon setting where there's hacking back and forth, having it so that you not only miss but take damage/trip/drop your weapon/etc. increases the overall lethality of the situation substantially. I ran the Purple Worm Graveyard and got a TPK in the beetle room (a.k.a Room #1). And that was AFTER I reduced the number of beetles in the room and nerfed their damage.

Is there a way to mitigate the inherent lethality of combat? Am I GMing it wrong?

So, here's my problem. I'm working on a hack which will end up extending the length of a standard AW campaign by a factor of three (or so). One of the ways I want to balance the game (since you'll theoretically get three times the advances) is by not starting anyone with the full complement of Basic Moves. (This also works in-game because the characters start as villagers and wouldn't likely have an idea of how to do the things most post-apocalyptic badasses would. A milk-maid, for instance, wouldn't likely know how to Read a Sitch.)

The question is what that does to gameplay. If someone doesn't have Read a Sitch/Person, what happens if their Sharp gets highlighted? Is that even an option? Do they have to unlock the relevant basic move before they can highlight the stat? If not, everyone will be necessarily obsessed with rolling the couple of stats they have open and it will create a situation where everyone is just focused single-mindedly on doing these one or two things to the exclusion of all else. I know people do that in-game anyway, but there's at least the option to tick other boxes when there's six options.

In addition, what happens if the spazzy farmhand stands in front of a knight and says, "Stop, or I'll stab you in your face." He's obviously Going Aggro, but what if that move's not unlocked for him yet? How would that work?

Any ideas?