[quote=Little The]Social actions are very inefficient, though. They require an action both from you and your partner, and often have an additional cost on top of that. Plus, they increase the recipient’s menace as well. If you just wait for your wounds to hit 8, you can play chess with the boatman and get rid of over 5 change points an action, I believe, and New Newgate can theoretically be escaped in two actions. Flipping cards can be problematic and is up to the whims of chance, yes, but if you stack your deck you can get pretty good odds.
This only leaves Nightmares, and there are a number of ways to deal with that, even as a PoSI. Investigate Dr Schlomo, take a ride in the Clay Sedan Chair, work with God’s Editor’s…etc. And laudanum can still be used.
edited by Little The on 2/11/2012[/quote]
Actually, I took into account the fact that it requires an action from both you and your partner, and the increase to menace from the recipient. The person asking loses 5 CP, the person receiving gains 1 CP. If both players give each other one (trading menaces), they will have lost 4 CP of menace for 2 actions. Also, reducing nightmares is the ONLY social action for menaces that has an additional cost, requiring a sudden insight (It seems to be a running theme that nightmares is the most difficult menace to get rid of).
Wounds is indeed easier to reduce by simply dying and playing chess with the boatman, but this is easier said than done. For starters, your watchfullness needs to be in the right range, since soon after it starts getting easy, it jumps up to the next tier. Also, assuming you didn’t manage to get the difficulty to “straightforward”, there’s still a chance of failure. Now, assuming you can get your watchfullness one below where it jumps to another tier, then perfect: feel free to use that. Otherwise, the social action can come in handy.
In either case, while there may be other ways to reduce nightmares such as the ones you mentioned, I still believe that spending a sudden insight for every 4 points of nightmares lost is a better deal than spending a whole echo, some wounds, and a laudunum habit that I’m guessing reduces it’s effectiveness after repeated uses.