WHAT IS DIPLOMACY? - Part 4: Philosophies of Play

In Diplomacy, you - the player - are in control of your own units and, ultimately, you can do with them what you like.  Nobody can tell you how to play the game, assuming that you're playing within the rules.  This means that the different approaches to the game that players show can't be outlawed.

In this post I am going to discuss three philosophies behind the way people play Diplomacy.

I think that if everyone followed the same philosophy I do, they'd enjoy the game just as much as playing to their own philosophy.  Actually, I think those who play a certain way would enjoy it more.  But I would, wouldn't I?  If I didn't like the way I play, I'd be particularly stupid to keep playing that way!

There is only one principle that everyone should be following: have fun.  Diplomacy, no matter how competitive, is a game and games are meant to be fun.  If you're not having fun, then you need to change your approach or change the game you're playing.

My assumption, rightly or wrongly, is that everyone is having fun when they're playing Dip.  Well, maybe not if you're investigating the game for the first time and you're finding it's not for you; but if you've played it and you decide to continue to play it, you're having fun, right?

This isn't the way I approach Diplomacy but it kind of fits in with the quote the game has:

It shouldn't do this but for the game it's a great idea.  This is how Diplomacy should be played - it's a game of controlled betrayal, of selective loyalty.  It's a combination of honesty and lies.  That's how it was designed.

Calhamerism

Allan B Calhamer created Diplomacy.  His ideas about how it should be played take precedence for me.  And there is enough material out there that tells us his thoughts on this that we shouldn't be in any doubt about it.

Firstly, Dip has a clear objective: gain control of 18 SCs to win the game.  That's it.

However, with seven competing players, all trying to achieve the same outcome, achieving a solo is going to be difficult.  So the other way to end a game is to agree to a draw.

In the published rules this is linked with running out of time to finish the game.  If this happens players can agree, unanimously, to end the game there.  In this situation, the all surviving players share in the draw equally.  There is no distinction made between them.

In his article Objectives other than Winning Calhamer calls this a secondary objective.  This tells us that players should be entering a game of Dip aiming to win but prepared to settle for a draw, a lesser result but an acceptable one.

Calherians, players who follow this philosophy, will therefore do what they can, or what they need to do, to win the game.  If that looks unlikely, they'll play to survive and to prevent another player from winning.

If one player wins the game outright, Calhamer states, then everyone else has lost.  As simple as that.  It doesn't matter if you finished the game on the second highest number of SCs behind the winner, you lost.

Calhamerism, then, dictates that the number of SCs a player finishes the game on doesn't matter a jot unless you control 18 of them.  You've either won or you've lost; if it's a draw, you've drawn the game regardless of how many SCs you have.

Play the game to win.  If you can't win, play to survive... and stop someone else from winning.  This is the essence of Calherism.

Soloism
An off-shoot of Calhamerism is Soloism.  This is a more extreme philosophy that states that only a solo is a result that matters.

There's nothing wrong with this per se but, when you're playing a Soloist you need to be aware that you could be playing someone who's prepared to throw the game away rather than draw the game.

The reason for this is that a Soloist doesn't think a draw is worth anything. This means that, when a win is unlikely, a Soloist might decide that's enough and stop playing with any real intent. Not good at all, frankly.

Still, Soloists make for interesting opponents because they will look to do what they can to win while there's a chance of it... and even beyond. 

Drawmongery

This philosophy is one that takes a very different view to Diplomacy to Calhamerism.  Whereas as the latter is about playing to win but accepting the draw as a secondary objective, Drawmongery places playing to achieve a draw as a equivalent objective to winning.

When you play Dip enough, you realise that achieving a solo victory should be difficult.  In a normal analysis it should be a highly improbable result.  Maybe, then, playing to draw a game is more realistic.

It probably is.  But that isn't the point.  A solo may be improbable but it certainly isn't impossible.  The problem is that Drawmongers (or Carebears) will aim to draw because they see a draw as a good result.  They're not trying to win so the draw is an objective achieved.

I've seen people celebrate a draw as a win.  There are some situations where a draw may feel as good as a win but it isn't a win.  To win you have to gain control of 18 supply centres; that's all a win is. If you end the game on less than 18 SCs, you haven't won.

The problem is that this approach to the game leads to creating game-long alliances, and that is not what Calhamer had in mind.  Read this article by him and you'll see what I mean: Calhamer's idea was that the game should feature alliances that served the purpose of getting a player closer to winning.

It makes sense to me to establish a strong alliance with another player and to keep it as long as you can.  This way you can both make progress towards the ultimate goal while minimising the chances of opponents.

With a Carebear, however, the idea of the alliance is that it should remain in place and see the game out in a draw.  There is often no attempt to stab your ally because the alliance is all important.

The aim is still to get the best result possible, however, and that is often achieving a 2-way draw.  And this brings another aspect into the equation.

2-way draws shouldn't be happening in a game of Diplomacy because it means that neither player has made an attempt to win the game.  Frankly it is only if a DINS (draws including nominated survivors) system is in use.  This is when the game can end with players allowed to exclude some survivors from the draw.

Under a DIAS (draws include all survivors) a 2-way draw means that the ends with both players on 17 SCs each.  This is incredibly hard to achieve if one player is trying to win the game, as should be the case.  Frankly, a 2-way DIAS draw is a perversion of Diplomacy.

Challenge a committed Carebear, however, and you get one of two responses: either that she plays that way because it's fun/challenging or simply you can't tell me how to play.

There's no doubt it's a difficult thing to keep going, a game-long alliance.  Opponents will try to break it up, although for the committed Carebear that's likely to matter not at all.  They don't stab unless they really feel a stab is coming. 

More of a challenge is fighting their own paranoia about the alliance.  It takes a lot of trust to keep going when your mind's shouting at you that it's going to fail. 

But it's certainly no more of a challenge than keeping an alliance going deep into a game and then stabbing for success.  So the argument that maintaining an alliance is all the way to a draw is more of a challenge and therefore presumably more satisfying is questionable.

The other comeback - that I can't tell you how to play - is also true.  It's your power and your units are your's to control; you can use them, or not, however you want.

The frustrating thing about this, though, is that there seems to be an implied assumption that, because you can do what you like with your power, this justifies playing anyway you want. 

What you'll often find is that this is a smokescreen, aimed at obscuring the fact that the Carebear really doesn't have an answer.

Ordinalism

This has become somewhat mainstream because it has been around for a long time and is reinforced by tournament scoring systems.  An Ordinalist believes that it is important where you finish in a game of Dip.

This may seem silly, and it is.  Calhamer certainly thought so and I'll refer you to his article Objectives other than Winning again.

The main reason for writing the article was to argue against Ordinalism, which Calhamer calls "the 'Strong Second' school".  He describes it as being:

... an argument over what the player’s objectives should be in cases in which he has little or no hope of winning, or in which he is playing to win but wishes to keep a second objective in reserve. ... the 'Strong Second' believes in rating performances other than wins and draws.

What does this mean?  Calhamer is thinking of two scenarios.  In one, the player has given up on winning the game and must decide what he wants to do.  An Ordinalist would play to finish second, if she could, behind the eventual victor.  In other words, she would try to win as many SCs as she could with the aim of being placed as highly as she could based on SC count.

In Calhamer's second scenario, a player has entered the game to win, is playing to win, but wants to have a secondary objective if she doesn't win.  Again, if she is an Ordinalist, she will play to win as many SCs as possible.

A Calhamerian would follow Calhamer's thinking on this: It's pointless.  It doesn't matter what position you finish in, or how many SCs you control at the end of the game, if another player has won: you've lost.

Following the assumption that a power holding 18 units can sweep the board, it then appears that no power has survived the game unless he has achieved either a win or a draw. The reward for a draw, then, is the reward for survival in a dangerous world.

Tournament scoring systems often Ordinalism.  This isn't particularly surprising: in a short series of games, if a draw-based system of scoring is used such as Calhamer's own system of awarding 1 point for a win and 1/n points for a draw, where n = the number of players in a draw, players are likely to finish on the same number of points, which is unsatisfactory.

So many tournament scoring systems score points based on SC-count at the end of the game.  This leads to a third scenario: playing to control as many SCs as possible by the end of the game.  Yes, she may play to win, but the players assumes everyone will play to prevent another from winning and therefore SC-count, or position, becomes important.

Ordinalism is, again, a perversion of Diplomacy but, unlike Drawmongery, you're unlikely to come across it in normal play; it is much more specific to tournaments.

WHAT IS DIPLOMACY? series:

1. A Brief Intro to Diplomacy
2. Formats
3. Tournaments
4. Philosophies of Play
5. Variants