So no one starts out with any Social Action cards unless they pay for them?

What if we have a social encounter? Do I just let them roll a social skill even if they don't have a card? I'm a little confused why there isn't a basic social card in case we want to do Social Conflict in Encounter Mode.

Your basic social actions can go under the RAW, just like your basic climbing a wall action, or your basic understand a riddle action or your basic bake a pie action. You don't need a special card to make it happen. Just have a basic success (one success) advance the track, use boons and banes for Stress, or other side effect appropriate to the situation. If you get a comet, then have the player get some sort of insight into the NPC, or perhaps impress him with a certain aspect of his charatcer. And if you get a Chaos Star have the NPC take offence at something he's said or similar. Just go with it.

Might be interesting to make a few basic "social attacks" and defences which kinda just crystallize some of the common actions in a social encounter and put the rules for them on the card - like a charm/lie/intimidate as basic "attacks". I dunno how it would work exactly but it might be interesting - of course there would always be perform a stunt and players can always use a skill without a card.

Skills can be used. For any basic Social Actions, use the Perform a Stunt card.

RPG social mechanics tend to suffer from trying to please multiple masters in a way that combat mechanics don't have to. If v3 included Basic social actions, then you'd have people complaining that the system was cramping their style. The current system seems like a compromise between satisfying people who want mechanical support for social characters, and those who prefer to just roleplay it.

dvang said:

I dont think you use Perform a Stunt for every basic social actions any more than you use it for every physical action - it's there for out of the box type stuff. If my player wants to lie to a guard im not going to use Perform a Stunt - I'd just make them make a guile check. I was talking about taking those basic lie/charm/intimidate and putting the rules for the check on a card for my players - it would also be interesting to come up with an "Active Defence" that you could use to counter with socially but that would be a whole new social combat system that might get in the way of rp-ing.