We got to play Freebooting Venus last Saturday. We had fun and some questions, so I'll go with those:
Hiring people on the first session:
The characters wanted to hire a guide during the first mission but we had no idea how to pay people with unexamined treasure.
How we solve it: the characters paid the guide after examining the treasure at the end of the session.
After we wrapped up I revised the character creation chapter. There is an option to start with treasure. Maybe one of the players should have chosen it during character creation if they wanted to purchase stuff or services during the first session.
Capturing/Incapacitating/Judo-Chopping Creatures
The meat of the session was about capturing a creature and returning it alive to a museum. There's no "knock out" option among the NPC bad experiences.
How we solved it: a character sneaked in and attacked [the creature] helpless with a rope, 0 harm, "it cannot escape" as a bad consequence. We started a group fight and chose the "It's wounded and flees" experience, since we established that the creature couldn't escape, it was wounded and tied down.
One of the players was disappointed he didn't had a streamlined way for nonlethal combat/capture someone. Should I improvise an special bad experience next time? Or the differentiated list have a design agenda I'm missing?
I have a really positive view of the game. There's a lot of rules that break expectation or, dunno, change some paradigms common to the medium in a really interesting direction. I want to see more of that.
I really missed a "Read a Situation" kind of move during play.
Also: rolling for NPCs in a PbtA game feels weeeeeeeeeeird!