The Forge Archives

While puttering around on BOUNCED something struck me, a chord that seemed to connect to some of Jared's theories.

I've always referred to Diplomacy as the roleplayer's wargame. There aren't many wargames where one's skill as negotiator is more important than one's ability to understand the tactics. And a lot of people adopt strong personas, even roles, while playing Diplomacy.

Jared, have you ever played Diplomacy? There's a definite goal (control a certain amount of the map), no GM, and a lot of potential for roleplay. It might be that Diplomacy, with some Memento-Mori massaging to make it more narrativist than gamist, adding a layer that rewards more than just sheer negotiation and treachery, could make for a very different mode of GMless play than what's been proposed so far, and it even fits your definition of "game" and "play". Hell, a Diplomacy-like game, properly frames, might be a good start for a "Narrativist Wargame" or an "iSystem Wargame"...

What do people, and particularly Jared, think? I mean, one might argue that this belongs on one of the different forums, but since my thoughts fused with so much of Jared's theory and avowed preferences, I kinda wanted to start here. At the very least, Jared can tell me I'm totally off-base and I can run off to another forum with a big L branded to by forehead...

Narrative wargaming... reminds me of a way I used to pass the time in French class. Basically passed notes back and forth with a buddy describing the various actions taken in the never-ending war between our two factions. (Gnomes for me, Orcs and then Smurfs for him.) It was fun at first for the goofy writing and the crazy strategerizing, and for the way it crazily shifted between individual hand-to-hand battles, huge-scale space opera, hard sci-fi, faux-medieval steampunk, cthonic gods, and various other weirdness. Got boring after the other guy reverted to repeated "your last move didn't really happen" type explanations.

Gah. Ran off on a tangent at the very beginning of a thread. Sorry. Anyway, this looks like a very cool idea, but make sure you don't confine it to a map and set nations and territories, and disallow narrative move-cancellation. It's deprotagonizing :o)