Resolving the social part of the adventure with a simple dice roll is limiting and a little boring. A good GM can make a story mode encounter come to life, but we are not all that talented. This new systems allows us an opportunity to step beyond the old standards. The new social encounters can be more. They can have suspense, timing , and tempo without being a master story teller. The tracks, actions, and other adventure specific effects can expand an encounter into more then just a few die rolls.

Here is one example.

In my effort to explore the possibilities of the new system, I have been experimenting with what information is required to expand a social encounter beyond a simple dice roll. Using the adventure in the box set, I believe I have come up with categories of information necessary for expansion. For given social encounter, you need to know who is there for the PCs to enter act with during the encounter. You need to know what the NPCs know or what they could share with the PCs that is relevant to the adventure that you are running. You must decide what kind of actions or skill tests that the NPCs will respond to which will produce the relevant information. You can also have a category for special rules related to this location that make it different. Then you need to have a influence track with the location of the starting token for the NPCs and PCs.

In the linked example social encounter above, you have the following information:

Who: Herbort Klemper (obnoxious merchant) and 3 other commoners

What they know: Coming and going for the night before of some of the passengers and Crew

What they respond to: Friendly gestures (Charm Tests), Conversations about the local area or the weather (Folklore or Nature lore Tests), and Direct questions (Charm or Interrogate Test depending on the tone)

Special Rules: For this example there were no special rules, but you could have added a bonus [W] for Social Actions for PCs that are trained Folklore or Nature lore.

Influence Track:

[The progress tracker for this table has 4 space, an event, 4 space, and then another event. There is another progress tracker for the length of the dinner and for other tables. Chaos Stack moves the tracker 2 spaces, 2 banes for the player or 2 boons for the NPC move the tracker 1 space. The players start on the first space of the track and the NPC token starts on the second space.]

With a few sentences you have a expanded social encounter.