Dungeon World (First play)

I played Dungeon World for the first time today with some coworkers, and it was distinctive and interesting, but not as fun as I'd hoped. I will try to play it again, hopefully with another class and at second level.

The game attempts to bridge the gap between D&D on one side, as a tactical dungeon crawling type of game, and Dogs in the Vineyard (or Apocalypse World) on the other side, a very fluid, story-heavy game. I admit to being very curious how they would straddle this large philosophical boundary, and that awkwardness showed in our game.

To be fair, it was the GM's first time running the system, and all three of us players had never played before. So we used the starter module, which was someone constrained plot-wise, and had vanilla characters (Fighter, Wizard, Cleric).

Character creation includes some awesome elements, like defining your deity/religion and what it rewards, or creating Bonds with other characters to create instant backstory.

I also loved the results of observation/lore skills, where players did actual world-building as they succeeded on checks.

My main issues with the game were around combat, which seemed both swingy and monotonous. It was swingy in that a single bad hit could kill a 1st level character. Because the action possibilities are few, especially if you only have a couple good stats, your general options each round involve only one or two good choices. So we ended up doing a lot of the same thing: Fighter => Hack and Slash, Cleric => Bless, Wizard => Magic MIssile. Repeat.