Two Fallacies

On the Playdiplomacy forum there are a number of topics about how Diplomacy should be played. There is often no agreement, and neither should there be. Diplomacy is played by people with different takes. Providing the rules of the game are followed, everything's good.

Well, to some extent.

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Personally, I think some of the philosophies behind how players act in a game are flawed. There is enough guidance out there, from the rules of the Diplomacy to articles by the game's creator Allan B Calhamer, to show how the game ought to be played.

The Rules

"Object of the Game

As soon as one Great Power controls 18 supply centers, it is considered to have gained control of Europe. The player representing that Great Power is the winner.

However, players can end the game by agreement before a winner is determined. In this case, all players who still have pieces on the board share equally in a draw."

[p1, Avalon Hill; The Rules of Diplomacy, 4th Edition, Wizards of the Coast (2000).]

There are three outcomes when playing a game of Diplomacy, then: win, draw, or lose. You win if you achieve the game's objective. You draw if surviving players agree to end the game before someone wins. You lose if you don't achieve either of these results. Simple, surely.

No.

The Strong Second fallacy

One idea is that players should receive some recognition on doing well but losing. If someone wins the game (achieves a 'solo'), and you finish second with more SCs than anybody else, you have played a better game than the rest of the losers.

This idea is known as the 'Strong Second'. Calhamer had something to say about this in his article Objectives Other Than Winning. You would need to read the whole of the article to get a proper sense of what he's saying, but here is the essence.

The idea was that games were being scored using the Strong Second ideal. If someone won the game, the rest of the players were ranked based on the number of SCs they held at the end of the game.

Calhamer gives a number of reasons why this is ridiculous:

1. If you lose to a solo, you've lost. There's nothing in the rules about getting anything if you lost.
2. If you have more SCs than anyone else except for the winner, you have possibly a greater responsibility for not preventing the win than anyone else.
3. The rules do provide an alternative to winning, based on the game ending before the victory. This is, as you can see above, based on all survivors agreeing to it. If other players can play to prevent a leader winning (known as the 'Stop the Leader' alliance), then they can force a draw.

According to Calhamer, then, players should play to prevent someone else from winning alongside playing to win themselves. He suggests that, after the solo, the draw is "an adequate secondary objective." 

So, what does it matter if you do well, in regards to the number of SCs you own, and lose? Absolutely nothing. You lost. The end.

And yet, this fallacy still has it's place. Why? Because scoring systems in tournaments support it, to one extent or another.

Tournaments

Now, I get it: tournaments need to end at some point. Playing games to the end is impossible. Tournaments need to be over before everyone has to go home.

Tournament games, then, tend to end before they're finished. They are played over a set period of time or, more often, until the end of a certain game year. This means that games are very likely to end in a draw.

With lots of games ending this way, points awarded on game outcome - won or drawn, and the number of people in the draw - is going to produce a lot of tied results. And, philosophically, if the game ends without the players agreeing to the draw, then is it really drawn?

So games need to be scored in a way that doesn't produce such a result. And the simplest way to do this is to use SC-count. There are many different systems used, but most feature a scoring system which relates to the number of SCs powers hold at the end of the game.

The problem is, this changes the way Diplomacy is played. Instead of being a game of Diplomacy it becomes a game where the scramble for SCs is all that matters. You don't need to win, you just need to grab SCs.

I'm not taking a swipe at these systems, per se: when you enter a tournament you should expect to play to the tournament rules. You'd be stupid to do anything else, if you want to do well.

The problem is that this produces an attitude related to the Strong Second fallacy.

The Top of the Board fallacy

The idea here is that, if I end the game on more SCs than you, I have done better than you.

In only one situation is this true: when a player solos. This player owns more SCs than anyone else.

In any other situation the number of SCs a player holds at the end of the game is meaningless. If the game ends in a draw, it doesn't matter if I have 17 SCs or 1; all that matters is that I earned a place in the draw.

It may well be that, if I end the game on 1 SC while you achieve 17, you've played a better game than me. Not an altruism, it has to be said, but a decent general guide. Fair enough.

But, you didn't win; I didn't win; we ended the game in a draw, and the rules state pretty damn clearly that: "All players who still have pieces on the board share equally in a draw." You drew with me... and everyone else who survived, for that matter.

From an alternative point of view, you achieved ownership of 17 SCs and failed to win. I scrabbled around to survive on 1 SC, helping to prevent you from winning.

And we all failed to win!

However, there is a tradition in Diplomacy of celebrating the player who 'topped the board'. This is a Stalinist idea - the first among equals. It's meaningless.

The Result of the Game

The only outcome that matters in a game of Diplomacy is how the game ends. It either ended with a solo winner, or in a draw.

It isn't, of course, the only thing that matters in the game. It's a game; it should be fun. 

But in terms of how the game ends, and how players finish in the game, for a player there are three possible outcomes: win, lose or draw. Only if you win does the number of SCs held at the end of the game make any difference at all. If you draw, you draw. If you are eliminated, you lose.

There are other problems with the way games of Dip are played, but those are for other posts.

Heathley Baines (Nibbler)

Editor