I think
The Council has a pretty decent system:
- The checks are only gated by you having the skill or not rather than its level.
- The difficulty of the checks instead determines how much effort (the game's main resource) you have to spend on the check. Granted, if you don't have enough effort, you can't succeed. But also if you have enough effort, you have to consider whether it's wise to spend it on this particular check or save for a more important one. Higher skill levels decrease the amount of effort you have to spend on a check.
- In connection with the previous points, lots of check-gated options are essentially traps that don't provide you with anything useful and are only there to make you waste effort.
- NPCs can be vulnerable or immune to certain skills. Using a skill against a vulnerable NPC restores some effort, using a skill against an immune NPC gives you a bad status effect. Immunities and vulnerabilities can be learned both through trial and error and through investigating the NPC.
- Important dialogs (called confrontations) progress through several stages. It is not completely necessary to pick the winning option at every stage, but the number of "blunders" you are allowed is limited (usually 1-3). If you reach the last stage of the confrontation with unused blunders a pick a wrong option, you are allowed to repeat the stage while you still have blunders left.
The only thing that kinda ruins this system in the game is the abundance of effort-restoring consumables.