So, I’m kind of the gamer in my group of friends. I love all types of games: video games, roleplaying games, trivia games, card games, party games, murder mystery games…you name it. My weakness is strategy games. Not a fan of Risk, Civilization or Axis and Allies, and you won’t find me playing chess unless you somehow incorporate Knightmare Chess into the game.
I have a buddy in another time zone who is trying to convince me to join a “play by e-mail” game of Diplomacy. Now…right away, alarms and buzzers go off. I’m just not interested…turn-based strategy is right up there with brussels sprouts and liver. “But,” he says, “it’s also a lot about roleplaying. As the country you’re playing, you have to decide who you want to support in attacks and who you don’t want to, and other things like that.”
I’ve tried to explain to him that this is not roleplaying, and if he wants me to unearth my old d20 and blow the dust off some D&D adventures, I’d be happy to school him. “Unless I can choose to not attack the other countries and instead divert the funds to honoring the Year of the Poet in my nation, with a series of parades and all-you-can-eat buffets, it ain’t roleplaying,” I believe was my response. And yet, he continues to insist it is largely roleplaying…I’d still have to “play by the rules, obviously.”
How would you explain the difference? Or how would you explain to me that I’m actually wrong…?
It’s not a demarcation but a continuum. That said, I’d say that Diplomacy is nearly entirely a pure strategy game: there is some roleplaying in that there is some verbal give and take that can occur when you want to convince your opponents that you are their friends, and you might even throw in historical references or roleplaying in there a bit.
But in the end the point is to win and if you can do it without roleplaying so much the better.
Of course, to a certain degree you are “roleplaying” the controller of a major power, but you are doing that in any strategy game anyway, just with a little bit less talking/writing than in Diplomacy.
Probably the best way to look at it would be like playing Survivor. Is the way you win through playing a persona? Or is it through having a strategy to win?
Well, in truth it’s probably both. You do have a strategy, but the strategy is what persona you want to play at what time.
So it just depends on how much you want to:
Roleplay
But only if you think that the character you are roleplaying is strategically feasible.
Genuine role playing games (when properly mastered) are cooperative storytelling efforts, not competitive games, and the goal isn’t to defeat the GM or other team members (with a couple notable exceptions) but to have a good time creating and playing out an interesting scenerio. That most devolved into a competition to collect as much goodies as possible is just an indicator of how hard it really is to construct a collaborative story. The West End Games Paranoia, on the other hand, is all about competing with your fellow troubleshooters and trying to blow away everything in sight (will avoiding accusations of treason and responsibility for testing and using HPD & Mind Control equipment), but then, it’s not really a role-playing game but rather a parody of role-playing games.
Strategy games are directly competitive. Both can be fun, but they’re very different experiences.
Calling Diplomacy “turn-based” is a bit of misnomer. People don’t take turns making moves, they’re written down and completed all at one time. It’s as “real-time” as a board game can be.
It can be described as “role-playing” because you play the role of a nation’s leader and interact with other people doing the same. It’s more role-playing than most so-called RPG’s.
Sorry…the “turn-based” moniker I gave it was misleading. What I meant was that action happens in distinct rounds (everybody submits their moves and they are all executed at the same time…repeat), rather than everyone just scrambling at once (like, say, World of Warcraft).
I disagree with the “roleplaying” explanation above…I don’t think that’s in the spirit of roleplaying (denotation vs. connotation, if you will). Technically, Stratego is roleplaying, then, because I play the role of the commander of one side of a battle…and I highly doubt it’s more roleplaying than most (tabletop) RPG’s.
would you call Baldur’s Gate roleplaying? you certainly can’t choose to drop your weapons, take up a trade and set up shop. you’ll still have to largely follow the storyline and play by the rules.
i don’t know what is the game Diplomacy about, but if it puts you into a role where you have to decide who to attack and whom to befriend, while sending your emails in character, how is it not roleplaying?
It’s not “role-playing” because you’re not playing a role. You’re still yourself using your skills to play a game. You are not an early twentieth century European nation.
And what’s stopping you from beating your swords into plowshares and setting up shop in Baldur’s Gate? Other than the fact that your GM will probably beat you with a hockey stick for doing it.
Of course you’re talking about the computer game rather than the actual role-playing game like the rest of the thread is, but computer games will always be limited in scope to what the designers have the time and ability to model. You’re wandering into some pretty diluted concepts of “role-playing”, though when you cite “playing a role” in a computer game as the only defining feature of it. When you break it down that far everything you play is “role-playing” and the term loses any meaning.
The game Diplomacy was a fore-runner to role-playing, it existed before D&D. The amount of role-playing in the game depends on the players you’ve got. Frankly, the said can be said for D&D, too; I’ve seen D&D games where the “role-playing” was pretty much negligible. And I was in Diplomacy games (back in the 1960s) where each person did, indeed, act like a diplomat from that country, with accents and all. Added a lot to the fun and made it more than mere strategy.
If you want to be technical, I suppose, you can only role-play a person, you can’t role-play a country. But I think that’s a silly distinction. But I agree with Ludovic that role-playing is a continuum… and depends not only on the game, but on the players.
Diplomacy sets up a board, each country has strengths and weaknesses, armies and navies (no vorpal swords, but lots of ships and troops), geography and control centers. You form alliances, make agreements which you can keep or break, and the goal is for you (and your allies) to take over Europe. Yes, there is a military (“I’m Napoleon and I’m going to win!”) aspect that’s different from the typical D&D co-operative (“Let’s get together and destroy that dragon!”) but with Diplomacy, IIRC usually it is a team or alliance of nations that wins, rather than just one. And BTW I’ve been in straight role-playing games where different players team up or act against each other (ever played an HP Lovecraft game?).
Frankly, I was involved with a group of people who used the Diplomacy Game concept and set up a complex play-by-mail game (this was back in around 1960) that lasted almost 25 years. Some people played it as pure strategy (like chess or Risk) and others (c’est moi) played it as historical role-playing.
I’ve played Diplomacy both table-top and by email. They’re both a lot of fun and there are plenty of opportunities to role-play. I’m not a strategy person at all, but I love a good game of Diplomacy. My favorite games were the ones where people were sending emails to each other completely in character as the leaders or envoys for their countries.
Give it a whirl. You may find you like it. I hate playing Risk (why don’t we just sit and roll dice at each other for a couple hours), so I was hesitant about Diplomacy. They’re very different. It’s a real hoot!
No, but it refers to a specific genre. When you define that genre as just “playing a role” then every game out there short of abstract puzzle games (and quite often not even those) becomes a “role-playing game” and the genre loses its identity.
I had been a fan of Risk (although we had a house rule that made it much more strategic) and Axis and Allies, and my father introduced me to large scale strategy with the old Avalon Hill game “Russian Front”.
A few years back I tried to get into an e-mail game of Diplomacy here on the board, and failed to follow up on it. Later, a friend drug me along and I played table top. A few games later, and I’m HOOKED.
I’m currently waiting for the latest game of e-mail diplomacy to start here… I can’t wait!
I also played Role Playing games for years, and while they are certiainly two different animlas, if you play with folks that are into it, you can have a great deal of fun Role Playing the role of the leader of your nation… it’s a lot of fun, and adds to the overall flavor.
summary: All roleplaying games have aspects of Diplomacy, but not all Diplomacy games are roleplaying.