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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6466646" data-attributes="member: 42582">In real life, a big part of wilderness exploration is foraging, hunting, finding water and making maps/charts. There are no rules for any of these things (other than the combat rules once you actually encounter game) in either OD&D or AD&D (before the WSG).That is not a criticism of those games. It is simply to make the point that the sort of "wilderness exploration" that they focus on is (as I said upthread) very particular.I am familiar with Diplomacy. Many of the people I have played RPGs with, including two members of my current group, are skilled Diplomacy players.But playing D&D (including in its original version) is not much like playing Diplomacy, unless you confine yourself to player-to-player interaction. When PCs are negotiating with NPCs, the dynamics do not resemble Dipomacy at all - for instance, the GM has no position to defend, no <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />-for-tat style incentives to hold his/her NPCs to agreements, etc.The reference to Diplomacy does, however, reinforce my point about the significance of alignment rules in D&D play. Once the game starts to be built around an assumption of Good PCs engaged in heroic play - which begins some time in the early-to-mid-80s - then play is not going to resemble the amoral, realpolitik world of Dipomacy. The orcs aren't another sovereign nation to be bargained with; they have been reframed as a threat to life and to morality, who have to be defeated, or at the least held off.Basing your whole social system on the Diplomacy model has other (not dissimilar) consequences too. For instance, it is going to support only a very narrow form of social roleplaying. Just to give one example - it makes the play of romantic love (whether between PC and NPC, or between two PCs whose players are not in love in real life) virtually impossible. If you want to play a game of essentially amoral self-aggrandising soverign entities (the individual correlates of the Westphalian/Clausewitzian nations one plays in a game of Diplomacy) then a Diplomacy-style approach will give you that. For good measure, make character advancement contingent on taking loot out of the dungeon!But if you want other sorts of characters and other sorts of play, you need different social rules from that. Early D&D itself recognises this by way of its henchman loyalty rules - henchmen aren't free to stab at wil like a Diplomacy player, but can be bound to loyalty by non-self-interested factors manifested through a loyalty mechanic. But as I've noted upthread that mechanic is incomplete (eg how long does a successful loyalty check last?) and there is no robust framework for extending this to other contexts, nor to PCs (except via enchantment magic).</blockquote>

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