Payola Diplomacy
Original Rules to Payola Classic
1. Basic Concept
1.1 Boring Stuff
- Mercenary Diplomacy is played on a normal Diplomacy board, with
seven relatively normal people (oh, wait, forget that part), taking
the parts of the normal Diplomacy powers, using the normal Diplomacy
rules (except as amended here), and with all sorts of other normal
things going on.
1.2 Exciting Stuff
- Each player maintains a treasury, and uses this treasury at each turn
to influence the movement order for any or every unit on the board.
Yeah, I thought you'd be excited, so let's get into this a little
more.
2. Money Changes Everything
2.1 Swiss Bank Accounts
- Before every Spring movement phase, each power on the board will
receive -- to be added to its treasury -- seven "Swiss mega-francs"
for every SC they own. (For the mathematically challenged, this
means that at the beginning of the game, every power starts off with
21 Swiss mega-francs, except Russia, who receives 28.) This money
will be disbursed to the players by the Swiss "banker to the world"
(also known as your friendly GameMaster).
2.2 No Swiss Army Knife Expeditions
- It is very important that (per Rule 1.1) Swiss neutrality is never
breached by any power. If Switzerland is ever successfully invaded,
by any player, the game is over (since Rule 1.1 was broken
big-time), and the Master is immediately declared the winner, and
He gets all the Hall of Fame points.
3. You Can't Take It With You
3.1 Soldiers of Fortune
- No self-respecting pack of soldiers or sailors are going to work
for free. What do you think this is? Fantasyland? Ha! You've
certainly got a lot to learn.
3.2 My Country, Right or Wrong
- But at least they're patriotic as all get-out, right? Don't be so
sure. I mean, if you were a French army commander, and the
President of France tells you that if you follow his orders you'll
get a salary of say, a single solitary Swiss mega-franc, which might
barely be enough to feed you and each of your starving men one
and only one of those little snails which you Frenchmen love so much
to eat, but then the German and English leaders both come to you and
say that they'll each give you four Swiss mega-francs (!) if you do
what they ask (and the prospect of getting your hands on eight Swiss
mega-francs simply fills your little French brain with a snailfest
that would boggle the senses!), what do you think you would do?
Don't answer that, because it doesn't matter what you would do.
In this game -- like in real-life -- the units go for the snails, every
last time.
3.3 Love It Or Leave It
- Yes, that's right. If your men don't get paid enough for them to do
what you want them to, they won't do it. In fact, I bet you'll be
surprised just what they will do for money!
4. Graft Is Such A Dirty Word For It
4.1 Is That Mega-Franc Yours? You Must Have Dropped It.
- Instead of submitting orders for each of their units (as happens in
standard Diplomacy), each players instead submits to the Master an
"offer sheet" for each movement phase.
4.2 How Cheap Do You Work?
- An "offer sheet" will contain (one guess...) a series of offers. An
offer consists of a unit (any unit, of any nationality, anywhere on
the board), followed by the order which the player wishes to bribe
that unit to follow, and the number of Swiss mega-francs (zero or
more) which the player agrees to "pay" if the unit does indeed follow
that order. As I said, a unit will always follow the order which
pays it the most, after all the offer sheets are submitted, and all
offers totalled. A player may not offer money to the same unit for
two different orders on the same phase. Choose one. Geez! If you
try this, both offers will be ignored, and the unit commander will
call you nasty names like "waffler" and "blockhead."
4.3 Moral Dilemmas
- So let's say France asks his soldiers in Paris to HOLD, and
all the cheapskate promises them for doing so is one measly mega-franc.
And let's say no other player on the board feels like ARMY PARIS
HOLD is worth any money to them, so the boys in Paris are looking
at spending the season on the Champs-Elysses, although their meager
one mega-franc salary really can't support such a lifestyle, but
heck, it's the best offer they got. Oh, but wait! Italy offers the
Parisiens one of his mega-francs if the boys will slide on down the
road to Picardy! What a problem! Two different orders, for which
the unit would receive the exact same amount of money. Oh dear,
what shall they do? Well, I'll tell you.
4.4 Here Are My References
- In addition to "offer sheets", the Swiss banker will also keep a
"reference list" for each player. A reference list must be
submitted to the Master with the first "offer sheet," and it can
then be updated at any time. A reference list is simply an ordered
list of every power in the game. If ever a player's unit would
receive the same amount of money for following any one of two or
more different orders, then the player's reference list is consulted
to decide which order it will follow. The power which is listed
highest (among all those powers which submitted offers for the
competing orders) on the piece's owner's reference list, will have
his offer accepted, and that order followed. Naturally, each
country will probably list itself first on its own reference list,
but there's no rule that says it must do so. If there were, I'd have
told you about it.
4.7 Buddy, Can You Spare A Dime?
- Sure, you can give your money to another player. Just send the
banker a "check" and he'll make the transaction and inform the
lucky recipient of your gift. Why you'd want to do this instead
of just use the money yourself to do whatever it is he plans to
do with it, I don't know, but hey, I'm your banker, not your
mother. But if you send a check to someone, that person can not
send you a check until the next movement phase. I don't want
two or more players just having a ball sending checks back and
forth all the time, ten times a phase or more, just to annoy me.
Checks are really stupid, and I don't see why you'd want to use
them, but it's too late -- I already said you could.
4.6 Will You Cosign A Loan For Me?
- Let's say you have 50 Swiss mega-francs to your name. Does this
mean that the total of all the offers on your offer sheet cannot
be more than fifty mega-francs? Certainly not. Offer whatever
you want! Offer them the moon if you like! But...! What happens
to you if more of your offers are accepted than you can afford?
Well, in keeping with the idea of these rules, I'll tell you.
Here's what happens. Every single one of your bids -- yes, every
single one -- gets lowered by one Swiss mega-franc, and then all
the units on the board decide all over again from scratch which
orders they will follow. If the same situation occurs again,
then another mega-franc comes off of each and every offer made
by that player, and the units all re-decide again. Eventually,
unless the laws of nature have changed since I last looked, the
units will decide what they're doing, and every player will still
be either in the black or, at worst, flat broke.
4.7 Don't Insult Me
- Unit commanders are notoriously arrogant, and if you try to get
smart with them and hand them an offer of, say, 4-and-a-half
mega-francs, they will assume you mean five mega-francs (with a
kickback of a half-mega-franc to the commander personally). So
don't use anything but whole mega-francs in your offers. Bankers
do not appreciate cheapskates. Fractional offers will be rounded
up.
4.8 It's Just A Slow Leak. I Can Drive On It.
- When a unit decides which order it will follow, the money offered
for that order is subtracted from the treasuries of those players
who offered money for that order. Money offered for orders which
are not followed will stay in the player's treasury.
4.9 Rolling Around In The Vault
- Income (which, as I said, is paid out once a year -- before every
Spring movement phase), is simply added to whatever amount is
currently in a player's treasury. Money is only subtracted
from a treasury when offers are accepted by the various units or
when you're actually crazy enough to give some of your hard-earned
cash to another player, like I made fun of in rule 4.5.
If you have any complaints about these rules,
keep them to yourself.
5. Don't I Ever Get To Issue Any Orders In This Stupid Game?
5.1 No
- The Master will issue all the orders for all the units after he
determines, from the offer sheets, which order each unit will
follow.
5.2 Yes
- Except on retreat and adjustment phases, the country is yours
to do with as you please. No one can bribe your factory workers,
because you've got secret police patrolling the streets to, shall
we say, reinforce the patriotic will at home. And routed troops
which suddenly find themselves running for their lives also seem
to suddenly find a very patriotic conscience (surprise, surprise).
6. Everything You Never Wanted To Know
6.1 Well, At Least They Still Write Home
- It doesn't matter if, say, Italy is the only one who paid for the
French army to enter Munich. It's still a French army doing so,
and so the French player gets the build, even though maybe he had
no knowledge of or intent to perform the invasion.
6.2 Help Me! Help Me!
- This probably also goes without saying, but you can certainly ask
other players to help you get your own units to do something. Because,
remember, all the offers from all the players for each order are
totalled, and the winning bids are then subtracted from the treasuries
of all the contributors.
6.3 What Am I, Chopped Liver Over Here?
- If absolutely no one offers any money at all to a unit, it will
simply HOLD. It can receive support. The men in that unit
will probably feel bad, and certainly more than a little resentful, and
the HOLDing action will be wasted, because the military passes
issued to the men won't be very fun, since the men will have no money
to go spend on the town. But hey, you want to treat your men like that,
go ahead. It's your conscience.
6.4 Gone But Not Forgotten
- Players who suffer the unfortunate fate of having their last unit
eliminated may continue to use any money they have to influence the
remainder of the game. Also, other players will never be told when
or if an eliminated player has run himself broke, so governments-in-
exile remain free to use and/or threaten to use real or fictitious
money. The services of eliminated players may even be available for
a price; by writing them one of those stupid checks I talked about.
7. What Did He Know And When Did He Know It?
7.1 Ignorance Is Bliss
- Although you will find out how much each of your own units got paid to do
what it did, you will never find out who spent money to get
the unit to do what it did. You will also never find out how much
money each of the other players has in their treasury. What'd you
expect? You're dealing with Switzerland, after all!
7.2 Balance Your Checkbook
- The only thing which you will get are the results of the moves and
then something telling you how much money you have in your
treasury.
That's all you get. If that's not enough for you, then you just
wasted your time reading all these rules, because you obviously
don't want to play. Well, fine. Be that way. Take your ball and
run away home. See if I care.
7.3 What If The Master Can't Add Or Is A Cheat?
- Unfortunately, there's no way for you to know, so try not to think
about it. But at the end of the game, the Bank of Switzerland will
open itself to a public audit, and the complete litany of all offers
made in the game will be revealed for everyone to see.