> As such, the battle of spells, trust, and other such interactions becomes a game. How well have the players prepared for the social encounter? Are they trying to use spells to "cheat"? How are the king's guards, Wizards, and Clerics trying to prevent the cheating?

> Players _WILL_ attempt to cheat (aka: use a spell to "solve") social encounters. This is just part of the game, and part of the fun. Are you, the dungeon master, ready to offer them a proper game of wits and preparation?

> This is far more tactical, and even story-driven, than rolling a d6 and saying "my dice was higher than yours therefore I win".

Yes and no. You can offer the players a tactical game of spells, but to the extent that you folow the standard rules this is inherently an abstract puzzle, not really any more attached to the story than rolling a die. Some players enjoy puzzling out a magic system, but many do not. And to the extent that you make it depend on story-relevant artifacts, the rules framework isn't really helping you set things up.

How do the players "win" or "solve" the puzzle? Either they make the sensible, competent, mainstream move - which is fine, but not really narratively relevant and not worth spending a lot of time on - or they find a loophole in your magic system (or in the border between your magic system and common sense), which will almost certainly be against narrative and genre, and you'll have to either allow it or disallow it and either one is pretty unsatisfying - or they notice specifics of the story you've been foreshadowing - something you can do just as well without a standard mechanical magic system. (Yes, if you're very skilled then maybe you can work with the logic-puzzle approach and create an artifact which interacts in a novel way with some standard spell, and the player spots a way to use that that you intended. But more likely they spot a different, more powerful interaction than the one you meant for them to, and then we're back to finding a loophole in the magic system).

> With skill, you can setup good stories more easily through these interactions.

Maybe. In my experience even in genre fiction the best stories aren't, and shouldn't, really be about the magic or the tactics - they're about the deep human themes, trust, betrayal, arrogance and all that Shakespearean stuff. Gandalf fighting the Balrog isn't about him realising that Moria stone was carved by the dwarves and would be vulnerable to magic, it's about him realising that this enemy is undefeatable and sacrificing himself for the sake of his fellows.

The best and most satisfying way for a player to "win" or "solve" a scenario, IME, is a) for them to notice setting or character details that they can exploit (maybe the younger prince is jealous of the elder? Maybe the chancellor is obeying the tenets of a less-popular faith that a party member has ties to?) or b) them to come up with something creative that I hadn't thought of but that is still genre-appropriate and sufficiently "realistic". And I don't think a detailed mechanics system helps a lot with either of those, because at the end of the day either the detailed mechanics system gives you an answer that lines up with common sense or it gives you one that doesn't, and either way it's not helping much.