Dolmenwood, Where Negotiations Run Wild and I Need Help

There has not been much violence in my Dolmenwood sessions. For context, most of the sessions have been about meeting factions for the first time in their territory, when they have cards in their hand but don't have a reason to antagonize the party. Players have said the stakes felt high, so it's not been boring (I hope), but still it's odd and beckons for further examination. 

My diagnosis of the situation is that I haven't been playing to the procedures well. I have been using the context and my best guess to see how strangers and vested interests would interact with the party, but because dungeon crawling isn't a focus of the campaign I realize I've been handicapping myself by not applying the tried and true Reaction Roll outside the danger zones. 

My hesitation in applying a reaction role so far has been that it just feels like I know how the NPCs would respond given the situation, or I follow what I think would be most interesting for the player to have to handle. I haven't relied on procedures to push interesting play. 

However, I see a serious lack of variation in my imagination. My own non-confrontational nature makes it hard to imagine people just stepping over boundaries with the party. My solution then is to reinterpret the reaction role as a (Hidden) Disposition Roll:

2: Antagonistic, intolerant to negotiations

3-5: Conflicting, disagreeable to negotiations

6-8: Neutral, heedless or spineless

9-11: Compatible, agreeable to negotiations

12: Aligned, keen to negotiations 

Obviously I am not revolutionizing the mechanic, but for my purposes in sandboxing social situations I need something where combat is not the default context. Reframing the reaction roll entirely as a tool for setting internal intent approaching social encounters should be a big help with my Dolmenwood campaign, where the highest stake in each session seems to be a negotiation of a sort.