Your first guess is right: go with the fiction.
First, a dozen hirelings without food for some days will get angry and non-compliant. They will probably run off or even turn against their employers. How should they believe that they will get their agreed-upon payment, if not even food is provided by the PCs?
Second, the PCs will get hungry, weak and eventually sick. Add in the corresponding debilities to show them the effects. Without rations they cannot Make Camp or Undertake A Perilous Journey. Travelling will be cumbersome and inconvenient.
If there's really no way for them to find food (it is hard to imagine that in most common environments there is absolutely nothing edible to be found), Show Them Signs Of An Approaching Threat: the few hirelings that are still with them start to turn mad with hunger. How long will it take until they start killing and eating each other?
However, with a good Spout Lore or Discern Realities, the PCs might be able to find something edible in the area. There's always some worms under a rock, some strange berries that the local animals avoid, the random vicious beast in its lair that no one dares to hunt...
Mind Your Follow-Through
Note that Defy Danger starts out with:
When you act despite an imminent threat or suffer a calamity
Getting rushed by screaming kobold fanatics who've set themselves on lightning* is pretty calamitous, and if you hit on a 10+, that's great! But what it means is that the threat doesn't come to bear right now, not that it vanishes forever - "defy" doesn't mean "eliminate".
Yes, you are encouraged to start setting up the scene with softer moves, but all of these moves are things that are actually happening in the fiction. The players aren't trying to, like, counter and eliminate your moves or anything, they're also taking actions in the fiction and accomplishing their own things. They can manage to be both momentarily safe and still very much in danger.
So, you hit on a 10+. The screaming kobold fanatics haven't gone away. It's just that when the first one rushes into the innocuous-looking jar/carefully positioned Leyden mine and they both go up in a cloud of electroclasm and smoke, you're not right there with them.
Awful lot of jars in here, aren't there?
* no one ever said the path of the blue dragon fanatic would be easy
Mind Your Setup
Tell them the requirements or consequences and then ask is often underestimated, but it's an excellent way to extend the results of moves without having to write entirely new ones.
So if, for example, Stringfellow surveys the upcoming holosparkst, decides it's time for the better part of valor, and says he's diving out the nearest doorway, that does sound like Defy Danger too, doesn't it? But you can always say:
Sure, but things in here are ramping up rapidly. If you make it out, getting back in to help everyone else won't be nearly as easy.
Or:
Sure, but whatever that just kicked off is already cascading around the exits. You'll be taking 1d6 damage through armor just to try.
Or even:
Sure, but, gosh, there's all this smoke in here and your ears are still ringing from the blast. You can get out somewhere safely, but it's not entirely clear to you where that's going to be.
And then end with:
Is that alright?
And if it's not, then Stringfellow isn't going to dive out the door in the first place. His turn in the spotlight will be spent doing something else. And if it is, then even a 10+ on a Defy Danger will still leave Stringfellow in a bad position. It doesn't violate the spirit of the move to do this - accepting those known bad outcomes is just the cost of making the move in the first place.
Mind Your Prep
And, of course, if you knew all along that there'd be kobolds in these ruins and they laid traps like the dickens, you can sit down and craft custom moves to deal with this and take Defy Danger off the table as an initial reaction. Something like:
When Lightning's Claw springs their ambush on you, say who was the most cautious among you and have them roll +WIS. On a 10+, they pick 1. On a 7-9, the GM also picks 1. On a 6-, all 3:
- You're right where they want you. Everyone takes -1 ongoing to all rolls to dodge or escape, until you're out.
- You didn't see this coming. Pick someone else in the party to take the brunt of the first attack; the GM will make a move against them.
- They timed this one perfectly. All their damage is best of 2 rolls, and when they gang up it adds +2 damage instead of +1.
But you don't need to haul something like that out all the time, just for when you want it to be a sufficiently big deal that a regular Defy Danger doesn't seem like it should be able to resolve things satisfyingly on its own.
Best Answer
And Now The Rest Of The Quotation
"worse outcome, hard bargain, or ugly choice" is language quoted from Dungeon World's parent game, Apocalypse World. Specifically from the downside to the move Do Something Under Fire, or Act Under Fire depending on whether you're looking at first or second edition.
Dungeon World tends to fall a little short in the area of worked examples, so I'll put up what you might consider canonical examples of each of the three, from pp.136-138 of AW second edition, and explain how they differ.
Keep in mind that, whatever the 7-9 is offering you, it's a qualified success. It's not the worst thing that could happen.
The Worse Outcome: Almost Got 'Im
There isn't any choice to the worse outcome. It's the "any color car as long as it's black" sort of offer. I mean, what, you're going to just stick around and let everyone catch up? No.
It's often used in situations where you've got a bright clear picture of one single thing that could go wrong and the best thing the PCs can hope for is not to have anything go wrong.
The Hard Bargain: Something To Lose
The hard bargain is giving up something to get something else. It is a choice - do you want to give up your stealth to get to Dremmer, right now?
Left unspoken here is what happens if you don't take it, but it's clear enough that, well, you're in a position to take it. You know how to get to Dremmer. You know you're hidden and going this way is going to take you out of cover. Okay fine, you don't go that way, so what are you doing?
(What you're doing probably involves somebody making a move and making a roll and perhaps a snake-eyes happens and you break stealth anyway, but it's still yours to risk.)
The Ugly Choice: Nothing To Gain
The ugly choice is the hard bargain's meaner brother. You can't turn it down and leave yourself in a neutral position. The hammer's going to fall. You just get to pick which sacrifice you can best deal with.
Aren't you the fortunate one?
And Now You Know The Rest Of The Story
So, let's circle back to your example, which, having seen the difference, we can classify as an ugly choice. ...probably.
I mean, the worst thing that could happen was that the PC ate a bunch of damage and let go of the rope, right? So "take a bunch of damage" and "let go of the rope" are both things the PC doesn't want to happen, there isn't a single worse-but-not-worst outcome, so instead of both happening, they get to pick one.
Or it's possible that this was a hard bargain and the rope represented some kind of advantage in progress. Like the PC was trying to lasso an electric owlbear or whatever and you're like "it shocks you and you drop the rope" and they're like "what no I'm a lasso that owlbear right now", in which case the bargain is, they can give up some hit points to get the rope around the owlbear.
It... might potentially even have been a worse outcome? Hard to think how. I am assuming in this case that the rope had been, like, tied to something important with time and care, and wasn't just "okay, I spend an adventuring gear and now I have some rope." "You lose hold of the rope." "Okay, I spend another adventuring gear and now I have some more rope." In that case losing one use of adventuring gear is probably strictly superior to losing some hit points, but that's just a probably. When it comes down to it, they're really not the same thing on the same scale.
Whatever the circumstances, the objecting PC felt that there were multiple possible vectors of badness they might have been able to choose from, and you made that choice for them. You told them the bad thing that happened. That's not really any kind of a success, and they were right to object.
But Which, And When?
Well, first off, you're the GM, alright? You control the universe. You can pick whichever one of these speaks to you the most at the time, and make the call, and that's what happens.
If things don't seem to you that there really was a choice in the matter, if it wasn't really possible to hold onto the rope when the electric owlbear shocked you because it's just that potent, then the next best thing to a clear success is dropping the rope and not getting hurt, and you're not obliged to offer a choice. (It is, however, proper sportsmanship to listen seriously to player objections and explain yourself. Who knows? Maybe you'll find yourself coming around to a second Defy Danger to grit your teeth and hold onto the rope, with damage guaranteed and risking a debility, because if that's what an electric owlbear can do then they really want to lasso it now.)
If you some more guidance than just that, well, Defy Danger is kind of a catch-all move, right? The book actively steers you away from penalizing the roll if the PCs are in more dire straits. There is a danger, you wish to defy it, so roll. But the circumstances are still what they are.
A hard bargain best suits a controlled position. The PCs have prepared for this and they're facing it head on, and you're offering them a way to escalate things but on their terms.
A worse outcome best suits a risky position. Things have started to jump the rails a bit but not beyond the usual ability of the PCs to deal with it. They can't dodge everything but they take less damage. They can't avoid all the attention but they do avoid most of it. They don't lose everything but they do take their pick of what to keep.
An ugly choice best suits a desperate position. Oh God, oh God, please let this work, oh God, please please please let this work, oh God. Unless by some miracle you get away clean, the best you can hope for is to choose what takes the consequences.
(The astute observer will have noticed what else I'm cribbing this from, and infer that in advanced cases the GM may offer the PCs some benefit to drop down to "worse outcome" or "ugly choice" from a better position than would warrant it. They are both astute and correct.)