Diplomacy Resignations From: bret@HQ.Ileaf.COM (Bret Pettichord) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 1991 14:08:47 +0000 I am wondering what the official rules are handling premature resignations in Monopoly, Risk, and other mult-player games. In Diplomacy, resigning when you have a lost position seems to be severely frowned upon, because it affects which of the other players might win. This is very different from many two-player games where it can even be considered rude not to resign from a lost position. But obviously the dynamics are different. I suppose that if anyone resigns in Monopoly, their property is auctioned and their money goes to the bank. Resigning probably doesn't change the distribution of wealth much. I would think that it would be better if Diplomacy could handle resignations with more valour. It's probably not much of a problem, since when played by mail you can always get replacements (although this slows down the game). This works ok for casual games. But I've been thinking that it would be nice to have a pbm tournament or ranking system, so that there would be some way of determining who the better players were. There are many sticking points to this, but the biggest is how to handle resignations. You have to decide both what to do about the resigning player (does he lose points towards his rating or what?) and about how to continue the game. Obviously, you can't have a replacement player in a formal game. From the perspective of simulation, you could interpret a resignation as a fall of government and put the country in permanent CD. This is kinda what happened after the bolshevik revolution in Russia. You could also interpret it as a capitulation to a greater power and allow the country to be controlled by another player. This is kinda what happened when the Vichy French government was formed. Perhaps the last act a resigning player would make would be to decide who to cede the control of their troops to. This option would probably be restricted to governments that had less than three supply centers. I think this would make playing a dying power a little more interesting, since they have more chip to play: "If you aren't just a little bit nice to me, i'll turn my troops over to your enemy." It might even make it interesting enough to discourage resigning. I am also interested in pointers to discussions of Diplomacy strategy. I have the Gamers Guide. I suppose there's been discussions in the General? ... Referenced By Up