One problem:  Your Catch appears to be of a higher + value than the negatives of your supernatural toughness.  I was under the impression that your Catch could not bring the refresh cost of an ability below 1.

I agree that it would often make sense for a character who has been bested socially to turn the conflict into a physical one.  However, while that makes sense, at the same time it arguably robs the meaning of the victory of the social conflict in the first place.  One of my players, who designed his character to be good at social things rather than physical, asked me "If winning a social conflict can just turn into a fistfight, then what is the point of my character?"  I'm still trying to answer that question.

Ran my first game of the DFRPG tonight.  All in all, it went fairly well--the story went nicely, people figured out the fudge dice system decently.  Combat was a bit strange to them, mostly the stress system, but I think the players will get used to it.  The sticking point was Social Conflict.

One of my players found herself without Presence, Report, Intimidation, or Empathy.  Perhaps I should have made it more clear that these skills would have been important during character creation.  Regardless, we got to a social conflict--three guys who suspected their friend had gotten into some dark magic were being questioned by this player and one other (one with a few social skills) and didn't want to tell them.  This player was left with the sense that she literally could not do anything in this conflict.

Now, I realize that the idea of social skills is that they represent the social capabilities of the character, which are different from those of the player.  However, it still seems strange to them (and me, at times) that their character needs a  skill to use simple logic to convince people of things.  Perhaps I was misreading the situation and it did not actually need to become a conflict.

In all, I think the situation reflects a general mistrust of any roleplaying game attempting to apply mechanics to the roleplaying aspect itself.  While it might be considerably easier to remove the rules for social conflicts, I think the game would lose something for it--and perhaps more importantly, doing so would largely invalidate the character that one of my players created, a socially oriented face.  I am considering allowing my players to rearrange some skills, now that they have seen how the game actually works.  Does anyone else have more advice on how to make them warm up towards the social conflict system?

I love this system for making it possible to use furniture as thrown weapons.  As well as making it technically possible to use people as thrown weapons.

I was under the impression that a character can make a Concession at any point in a conflict so long as they have not been taken out--at the very beginning, after they are attacked and have taken consequences, or even if they are only one stress point from being taken out.  I saw nothing to suggest that consequences could prevent a Concession, other than the fact that you need to be able to take a consequence normally as part of the Concession.

Of course, you can only offer a concession at any time.  The opponent does not have to accept.

I am running into the same sort of issue here.  I was planning on making up a new sponsored magic, "Autumn Magic" with a refresh cost of -4.  Autumn magic would satisfy the Catch of any Spring fae, if you have them, or if they don't exist perhaps you could choose either Summer or Winter beforehand and be effective against one of them.  The specialties would probably be more entropic, as Autumn is a time of harvest and dying.  Perhaps it would be a combination of Summer and Winter--entropy, but with a focus on fire and perhaps a bit of wind?  Summer allows for biomancy thaumaturgy spells to be cast with speed of evocation, and Winter does the same with entropomancy (or whatever the term is.)  I'm not sure what the appropriate equivalent for Autumn would be--perhaps terromancy, relating to the Earth?  I don't know.

New question on the same topic--as sponsored magic functions like Evocation and Thaumaturgy, does it come complete with the focus item slots?