The Embassy

Tournaments have come to be a big part of Diplomacy, whether face-to-face or online.  If you're running a tournament you need to be able to find a winner, and so a scoring system has to be introduced.  In this series of posts I'm going to look at different types of scoring systems and discuss the pros and cons of each one.  And I'll end the series by discussing my own, as yet, prototype system. The first thing to be aware of is that a scoring system will change the way people play the game.  It has to do.  If you're playing and you need to do well then you need to play to the system.  This means that the way the system affects the way Diplomacy is played. Tournament games are already a variant of Dip.  Ideally, they wouldn't be.  Players would be able to play x  number of games and play them as they would any other game.  In FTF play, you'd expect the game to run until they're finished or time runs out.  Online, there should ...

Lying and betrayal play an integral part in Diplomacy.  How, then, can there be any ethical or moral concept to the game?  Isn't this a game without ethics? It's certainly true that a game of Diplomacy will feature lies, half-lies, omissions and betrayal.  It's difficult to imagine a game that wouldn't involve these.  When the box the game came in used to feature the slogan " Destroying friendships since 1959" nobody should be surprised by this! But, in reality, experienced players understand that you get more success in Diplomacy by being honest most of the time.  It's a game about building trust.  There is always going to be a point where that trust is going to be broken if you are to win games, but dishonesty isn't going to be rewarded. There are some aspects of the game that do require a certain degree of morality and ethical appreciation, therefore.  There are players who will tell you that if you can get away with something, then it'...

Eventually, I was able to move into the modern world.  I got a PC.  Yep, a real computer.  And I got t'internet. Even more eventually I wondered: What will I find if I search for Diplomacy on the web?  So I searched and the first return of note was Play Diplomacy Online . So, I wasn't impressed with the map used back when I joined.  But, you know what, it was only the map.  The game system worked.  The game was easy to access.  It didn't have a long, long wait for things to happen.  And I could play live games against people. I think PlayDip was about a year old back then.  Not everything ran smoothly.  But it improved - massively.  The map is now pretty looking, there are interesting variants available on the main site, the ranking system is much better than the old one, games are interesting and varied. For me, though, it's always been the Forum that has interested me as much as playing Dip.  The discussion ab...