What if there was a social resource, and every dialog choice cost a certain amount of social units?
Every step through dialog would suddenly mean more.
If a player ran out of social units, they could no longer communicate with anyone until they acquired more social units.
It sounds like a bit of an extreme system. Maybe there would be a way to still talk to people in a pinch even when social units were down to zero. Similar to how I’m currently handling energy and health, maybe exhausting social units would result in conversations consuming player heath instead, at a high rate.