The Expectations of The GMFirst thing, first... I want to be clear that while I am hosting, I will do my best to be consistent and fair with each and every player.
**First main thing to be made clear, I don't plan to meddle much in anyone's personal business. Diplomacy games are full-on FFA without mercy, that is the nature of the game.
This means that if a player has betrayed you, that's up to him if he wants to do that. Ribbentrop-Molotov type of betrayals tends to happens when a player is unable to enfore the deal on the other player to uphold it. It's a part of the risks being made in the game of Diplomacy. If a player has made a deal with you and you agreed to it, but now you realize that he ripped you off, it's up to you to decide if you will uphold your end of the deal or turn against him, but I will not revert things in the game back to the moment before the deal was made.
Deal with the possibility of betrayal, gentlemen. Do so as you please, but with a balance between wisdom and boldness. Have fun, but remember that things will happen.
**Secondly, I expect that in a normal game, each person thinks independently for himself. I don't really tolerate Big Brother, Little Brother gimmicks very well. If I see a England/France pairing up and is so secure in their buddy-buddy bromance they cannot be divided to the point where they don't need to bother with leaving a garrison on both sides of their shared border, I will directly get involved as a GM and force a break-up. This type of alliance allows two players to be more concentrated toward the push against the five across the whole map while their back and sides are freely left empty. The other players, while playing normally faces a disadvantage by not being able to fully abandon logic and leave a side open to their "allies". They won't be able to give the same concentration of forces as the pair of buddy-brothers. Because this is a gimmick meant to gain a cheap win and is also very much against the spirit of independent thinking in the individual player... I will not welcome these kind of alliances in this series of Diplomacy games.
Little Brother, it means nothing that you are second-place while you help your Big Brother win the first place and take it all home. It doesn't matter if you both share an equal tie. It robs everyone of a fair and fun competition, period.
If you want to form a game where pairs play as teams, feel free to request a special variant. That can be a fun game if it's agreed upon by all of the players involved. Other than that, an absolute no-no.
**Thirdly, I hope each player will be responsible for submitting his order on time to the GM. Punctuality helps keep the game running smoothly and interesting for every player at the table. I do understand that things do come up in RL. Here's my suggestion before someone comes to me about a missed deadline, come to me
BEFORE the absence and tell me. I am willing to ask the players to hold up the game a day or two if someone needs to be away briefly. I personally recommend that you find a substitute for yourself if you already knew that you would be gone on a vacation during a game.
An alternative way to avoid a missed deadline is to pre-submit a set of orders to the GM at the very beginning of a phase. It doesn't have to be locked in. It can serve as a simple placeholder in case of emergency. As a rule of thumb, I accept any update to your own orders before the deadline (but not an update to your enemy's orders
of course).
What if you did miss a deadline and you don't even have a single order to give to the GM yet? I am willing to be merciful and accept a set of orders that are a few hours past the deadline (think maybe 3 or 4 at most, we will see). BUT if this is continually abused and taken advantage of... I will put a NMR on the current phase for you when you miss a deadline. A NMR stand for "No Moves Received" and all of your units stands still during one phase and cannot support each other even if they're right next to each other. They could be dislodged by another player who's moving their pieces against yours.
Illegal moves will always be pointed out to the player.
**Fourthly, the mistakes made in your orders... if I noticed that your moves would fail because your enemy (or "ally"!) has a set of orders that out-maneuvered you, I will not infere with the game and inform you to make a better set of orders. This is a part of a normal game, being outwitted in a bad moment.
But what I mean as a true mistake is if you have a set of orders that would fail to achieve anything by itself based on its own conflicting orders, I will send back the messed-up set of order to you and help you write out a better one that still does what you were hoping to do (other than out-maneuvering the enemy's orders, of course).
Also if you have a clearly spelling error or a typo, I will remind you to fix those errors because badly written orders do make it impossible for your units to move. I don't want you to suffer a penalty just because you had made a typo.
Please understand that while I am hosting PreDip01, I am also playing in TW13 at the same time. Do NOT post your orders in a PM that doesn't follow proper format. I highly recommend that you mark each AND every set of orders with your country name, season and year. You don't have to use full names of provinces, the 3 letter abbreviations on the map will be fine. It's also best to keep your orders inside a message conversation completely separate from any other messages you have in your inbox. Use one main message conversation to submit all of your orders for the whole game, but if you join an another game, it's probably best to create a separate one for that game even if the first game is over.
For writing orders, please view the Diplomacy movements explanation for an example.
The basic format is:
Country Name Season (Spring or Fall, etc) Year Number
Then for each unit... A or F for army/fleet, be sure to list each one separately on a separate line, location of your unit, the action of the unit, the destination of action whether it be a place or a unit in a place.
If you left an unit out, I will assume it's to Hold in place. I will ask you if you wanted that or not. If you still didn't give an order for that unit, it will be interpreted as a Hold.
**Fifth, my main focus as a GM is not to moderate a Diplomacy game. It's actually collecting the orders and put them together, sort them out, and post the results publicly. I'm the human adjuncter, the processor of the orders sent from you and you, and you, and... you get the idea.
**Sixth, yes it's quite a long list, but I am trying to cover many situations that may or may not come up in the game. If any player (or even a non-player) is puzzled about anything, I will do my best to explain. If an explanation doesn't advertly change the flow of the game, I will be posting an explanation in private. But if it's something important that I forgot to clear up, I will need to make an public explanation available.
of course).
