April 2, 2025: Diplomacy And "Rules Elide"

I've been playing Diplomacy, finally, although I've wanted to play it for a while. I'm France, and to secure my Northern border I've worked with Germany and Austria to betray Italy, but in doing so I've left myself open to a British counterattack, and as we speak la perfide Albion has landed on the shores of Brest and has mounted a desperate assault on Brittany.

It's a fantastic game, and also a stressful one, as I'm sure players of Diplomacy can attest.

It has gotten me thinking a lot about "Rules Elide," a claim made by some members of the OSR (Old School Renaissance) movement about the nature of how TTRPGs work. Their argument is that rules serve to abstract the parts of the game we're not interested in so we can focus on the parts we care about. An example given is that we don't care about precisely modeling the trajectory of an arrow, so we use a dice roll to see where the arrow lands. But we care very deeply about social interaction, so in their games they don't enjoy rules that abstract social interaction. Sam Sorenson's New Simulationist Manifesto is a call to action regarding this exact topic, and it's something I come back to a lot.

Ultimately my conclusion is that elision is one of the functions of rules, but not the only one. That said, is there a better example of how rules can be used to elide than Diplomacy? It's a game with (simple, but consistent) rules governing the movements of troops and positioning of resources. But let's be honest, that's not what Diplomacy is about. In Diplomacy, the actual compelling part of the game comes from conversing with your fellow players, making alliances, backstabbing them, and sending press out to various parts of the world. It's a conversation first, and a board game second. In that way, despite being very different from a TTRPG, Diplomacy has a lot of philosophical overlap with TTRPGs.

I don't know if my poor heart can take that many more games of Diplomacy. But it's been a fantastic game to learn a lot more about elements of game design and game philosophy that can be overlooked in more complex games. By boiling it down to the fundamentals, it exposes the core of what it means to play a game.

-- Jay Dragon