Perhaps I should have given this a more universal title when writing Round 1 because it was fairly inevitable that it would escalate beyond simple social interaction.
After all, the same logic by which we may couple social interaction with combat encounters and use those to determine the outcome of the interaction attempts (“you defeated me – me and my troops are yours to command”) can be applied to pretty much any other field of interest.
If you wish to summon a demon, you have to literally wrestle control from it.
If you wish to sneak into the palace, you will have to overcome that one guard with the really sharp ears.
If you wish to repair a car, you first need to deal with the burglars in the garage.
Consequently applied to all areas, this obviously has an effect on the structure of the adventures/stories presented (that was, after all, where we were coming from in Round 1). Perhaps not so much that the story is reduced to nothing more than a series of battles, but rather that the repeated battles become the pace setter, the linchpin, the turning point of the story.
The idea here is not to devalue decisions outside of combat, by forcing an unchangeable series of predetermined combat upon the characters, but to make these decisions what calls up specific combats and determines their circumstances in the first place.
If you decide to storm the palace, then you first have to fight the ogre gatekeeper and then hordes of palace guards.
If you decide to sneak into the palace, then you have to fight that single sharp eared guard and, if you are not quick enough about it, also the hordes of palace guards.
If you decide to masquerade as the ambassador of a far away land to get into the palace, then you have to fight the real amabassador to get his clothes (or, alternatively, once in the palace you have to fight that courtier who still has unfinished business with the real ambassador).