Can we talk about godmoding?

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The Role-playing Scientists

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Can we talk about godmoding?

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Wizardblizzard

Wizardblizzard

@disqus_PW1MzRyGwx 2 years ago

(Edit: I've been reminded that since Mz. Hyde is the moderator I should ideally have asked her before putting up this. Didn't think of it at the time, I'm a bit tired. Sorry about that, Mz - do as you think fit, you can take threads down once posted and I can't, anyway. Wish to clarfiy that I am not in any way a moderator and this thread is just my own idea.)

I thought it might be good to discuss the question of "godmoding" and "railroading", and what we each think is or isn't OK and why. It's easy to talk about "godmoding" and be angry about it but how exactly DO we each like things to be done in RP, and do we all think the same, or not? Maybe come up with some "house rules" that we can all agree on, for the benefit of new players, particularly (but also old ones!)

(For those not familiar, "godmoding" means making someone else's character do or say something without their owner's permission, and "railroading" means deciding where you want the RP to go and then forcing it to go like that so that the other players don't get the chance to have much effect on things at all. They can overlap a bit. "Godmoding" can also refer to just making your character so unfairly powerful that they can do whatever they like and win everything, but that's a bit different.)

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Wizardblizzard • 2 years ago • edited

My two penn'orth, or considerably more than two penn'orth because I got rather carried away

In my experience it IS a bit of a fine line. I'm prone to never taking the initiative at all with making anything happen in a thread, just in case the other person had something in mind that I don't know about yet. I just react to what they say and wait for them to come up with something, which often leads to the thread going nowhere at all.

And if you're too pernickety about not assuming other characters' actions at all, even things like whether they follow you when you head out of the room, then it can literally take me days of postings to get across a room. But you certainly can't take that too far.

And if you mistakenly say that someone else's character does something that their owner doesn't think they did - either because you assumed (sometimes things that seem unimportant enough to assume turn out to be important because of something that you don't know about) or because you just made a mistake about what the other player meant to say - then I think there can't really be any argument, you just have to alter it.

"Railroading": A "Game Master" planning a big story generally has at least some pre-determined ideas about what's to happen, even if only that character X should make it out alive - or maybe that they mean character Y to die. But there should be a lot that IS negotiable. Because if the GM doesn't let other players' actions change the course of events at all, either ignoring their actions or repeatedly making ad hoc things happen to cancel them out and put things back to the way the GM expected them to go, then the players are understandably going to be fed up. They're putting time and thought into choosing the best move (whether best strategically or best for drama or laughs) and it's not being allowed to make any difference.

One idea I had was that we could have a rule that if any player A says that player B's character does something, player B has a right to just post, "Actually, no, they didn't, they did this..." and carry on from there. The owner's decision is canon.

Obviously that shouldn't be a replacement for asking each other OOC questions and trying to agree on what you're doing BEFORE you do it, or I can see it leading to complete chaos with each person saying one thing and the next contradicting it! But if player A just said something to save time because they didn't think it would matter and it turns out it did matter, or player B had in fact said something and player A had just ignored it, then it might help to sort things out quickly. And it would mean a high-handed player simply COULDN'T overrule other people's decisions about their own characters, because if the worst came to the worst and negotiation didn't have any effect their interventions simply wouldn't be counted.

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