Diplomacy

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Diplomacy

The Diplomacy game board. The bottom half represents the player. The top half represents the opponent. To the right is the Dialogue Point Marker, and to the left is the Statement play area. In the center are the available Expression points.Diplomacy is a concept unique to, or at least first introduced by, Vanguard. It is at heart a card game inspired by collectable card games. Diplomats can enable certain city wide "civic" buffs and gain certain special items needed for endgame content such as Guild Houses, the Griffon Mount, and other important endgame quests.

A diplomatic encounter, called a parley, consists of two opponents and their currently selected cards, the deck. Both start with a certain amount of dialogue points, where the initial number depends upon the difficulty and the diplomatic level of the opponents. The two opponents move in turn, by either playing a card, or listening. The goal of the game is to move the parley marker into the own area, and keep it there. This decreases the own dialogue points every time one of the opponents does a move. The game is won when the own dialogue points reach zero. Cards have various properties, such as moving the parley marker by a certain amount, having a cost in expression points, giving, or taking expression points from the player or its opponent, and a time restriction before the card can be played again. Additional text is displayed during a parley in a separate window, but plays no relevance in the game itself.

Aside from some special procs such as initially moving the marker or letting the player start with some initial expression, diplomatic clothing has very little effect on the encounter itself, though it has a huge impact on the ability to start parleys and to decide the strengths of the effects of a successful parley. Both gear and cards can be gained from diplomatic quests, parleys and parley rewards, but some can be crafted and there are also some adventuring drops, especially for many of the cards. Infamous is for example the smelly cat in Ahgram, Qalia, which is level 40 and attacks everyone carrying a fish in the inventory and drops diplomatic gear upon death; this mob has killed countless newbies who didnt knew about the danger of having a fish in the inventory while being in Ahgram.

The Diplomacy Sphere was an ambitious attempt to create something entirely new in the gaming world but its actual implementation has fallen short of the designers stated goals. Many other purposes for diplomacy where planned, but never implemented, such as an important role for player build cities[9]. As of this time, there is no PvP (Player versus player) element to Diplomacy, but it has been stated that the system was designed with the goal of players being able to 'duel' diplomatically in m