Your Paladin was bitten to death by the swarm of flying skull minions, Sage. The exploding fireballs killed Paul's wizard. That was session two. :) Good times.

This is the best:

PCs dying doesn't mean anybody did anything wrong, its a part of play.

At the first session, I like to say, "Everyone make your first character." In super-lethal games, you don't get to make a character right out of the gate that you know for sure you will be playing over and over again. You make a first character, then play to find out how long they survive. It's not until you have a level 3, or maybe level 5 character that you can start to think about them as an ongoing protagonist.

If you want to skip over the "character death funnel" of early levels, Chris, just start out at higher level. Easy-peasy.

Adam's "yep!" is a little ambiguous. He means, "yep, you do have to cast them." :)

PCs don't have attack moves (ie cloudy cues) like the monsters do when they H&S. They just have their damage die. The game just let us down at this point, saying "it's up to you to make it real, pal!"

This isn't strictly true. PCs have several "cloudy cues" (man, that's a weird phrase) when it comes to their attacks.

First and foremost, is Class. The Thief attacks differently than the Fighter who attacks differently than the Ranger, etc. etc.

Second, the weapon. We bother to detail the weapons the PCs are wielding, even though they don't affect the damage much, and this is why. The weapon you wield establishes the fictional details of your attack.

Combine Class + Weapon, and you have the "attack moves" of the PCs.

Finally, beware of the tendency to treat Hack & Slash as the catch-all fighting move of the game. (As iserith said) it isn't! It has a very specific fictional trigger. It's the move you make when you are trading blows in a melee. If you want to knock down, disarm, or overpower the enemy, you aren't making this move. If you want to position yourself, you aren't making this move.

I sometimes see people treating H&S like DW's "standard attack roll" and that's a mistake. if you do that, then yeah, you probably will want to modify it to do other stuff and have a broader range of outcomes. But my advice is to leave it alone and don't treat it like a default fighting move at all.

Yeah, I'm with Adam. I think what you mean is "you haven't triggered the move yet," not "your roll didn't do anything."

Stras: Kick-ass post, man. Awesome.

Cool custom move!

Also, the numbers maybe need to be tweaked in the actual game.

Yes, that's an excellent summary of the method.

Well, this is still a good question. There are a few ways to handle it, depending on the effect you want.

Grundloch's shield could be a pool of extra HP you have to bash through to get to him. Or it could count as Armor. Or it could block certain types of attacks completely.

The swordmaster's parry could be Armor.

In any case, stick with the fiction first. If the ninja can vanish to avoid an attack, don't let the player roll a hit and then say the ninja vanishes. Either the ninja vanishes as soon as the player describes what they do, or they vanish when the player rolls a miss.