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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9788233" data-attributes="member: 6690965">Hold up, that seems like a substitution. The engine that makes Diplomacy work is a combination of negotiation and defection; you offer up a series of agreements and then either hold up your end or don't, with the precise timing and iterated playing out of each new position playing out the end game.I don't think "roleplaying" and "negotiation" are meaningfully the same thing. Would you equally say roleplaying is necessary to win Chinatown or Sidereal Confluence? You need to exchange positions and resources with the other players to meaningfully interact in those games at all, and in SC in particular, your faction's starting position and unique abilities will determine how you approach those interactions...but is that roleplaying? I don't think one needs to embrace the KT’ZR’KT’RTL's unusual relationship to technology to realize their ability to more cheaply colonize planets makes offering those planets as bargaining chips effective.That, and negotiation isn't even a universal constant in no-randomness, high-player-interaction games. The whole Splotter catalogue purposefully eschews them both, with players reacting to the situations created by the actions of everyone else around the table, but rarely able to meaningfully make agreements with them that can be leveraged for victory. You win those games not by making agreements to do specific things with the other players, but by predicting their actions (and also, importantly how those actions will change in response to your actions).I wasn't especially effusive earlier, but I put forward that roleplaying lives at the level of determining the goals/stakes of the game. I think you can choose it as the basis for strategic play (usually to your own detriment), but I don't think it's necessary, and I think it can't be necessary for the thing you're doing to be a board game and not a roleplaying game. As soon as the conditions that end the game and evaluate victory are specified entirely by the game itself and not by the players, I think roleplaying is no longer a required part of the activity.You can't play D&D without setting a goal, either inherited from the adventure, based on character choices you've already made or some other thing that sits above the mechanical interaction level. If it was a board game, it would be one missing the "End Game" and "Victory" sections of the rulebook, just leaving all the rules for moving pieces around. Roleplaying is necessary to set those terms of engagement, while in a board game it's never required for them, because the game must tell you how it ends and how to evaluate success/failure for it to be playable at all.</blockquote>

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