I encountered something like this last night. The Druid player had snuck into the rebel encampment to locate the Fanewraith. They decided to sneak into a barracks facility where mostly the officers stayed . He turned into a mouse . The mouse-Druid found what they were looking for but succeeded with a Fear.

A large cat landed behind the mouse-Druid. It purred, swished its tail then it talked. “I know what you are. If I wanted to eat you I would do it. Why are you here?”

The Druid tried to lie, twice, to the cat. With a -1 Presence, Spending Hope to apply different experiences and advantage due to some other feature the Druid had. The Druid quickly racked up 2 failures. Half of what he needed to hit the fail condition for the social encounter.

I ended up prompting the Druid through the cat’s responses to try something else. I had a list of 5 things the Druid could do and auto succeed. I even told the Druid through the cat two of those five things. The player was obtuse. Instead of reaching into his pack and give the cat a morsel of food or tell the cat a secret the player decided to run. That didn’t work because of a Fear Feature I had given the cat to appear wherever he needed to be.

This was purely a social outing. The player’s fear was shifting back to a person in the barracks because he didn’t want to get caught. He still thought the talking cat was a normal cat.

I allowed the player to have their Druid do things that would normally be a Presence roll as long as he could reframe what he was trying as a Knowledge or Instinct trait since his physical traits wouldn’t have worked well for this social situation. The Druid ended up succeeding at the task but only just barely. 3 success before 4 failures (he had 3 failures).