11 Rules of Literate RP

Rule 8: No Godmoding

What is godmoding?

It’s different from being a Mary Sue (though Sues and godmoders can overlap), and the two are often mixed up.  A godmoder is an overpowered character who refuses to take a hit (or claims to survive everything), blows away all enemies and opposition like they’re made of tissue paper, and generally rubs their disproportionate amount of power in everyone’s faces.  Learn to recognize the telling signs of a godmoder and adjust characters accordingly.

First off, bullets cannot be dodged.  I don’t care how good your Spidey sense is, nor do I care that your level of ninja skill is beyond The Matrix.  Bullets cannot be dodged.  Once a bullet leaves the barrel of a gun, it’s going too fast for the eye to even see, much less register and avoid.  A shooter can miss, but if they’re accurate, that bullet cannot be dodged.

Now that we’ve covered dodging bullets (*shudder*), why is there a character with a loaded gun?  One of the generally accepted rules of any RP is that you don’t start off with the best stuff.  The Master Sword, the Necronomicon, the ability to use the Spirit Bomb, and Invincibility Stars are not found in the bushes, and do not grow on trees.  Your character is going to have to work to get that stuff, because if they walk into the club with The Blade of Epyk-aa’summ, well, there’s no use for anyone else to try and get any swings in when battling monsters, is there?  One of the party members is Baron Bloodrage!

So, once Bloodrage and his buddies are off to do some dungeon diving, we discover the final sign of the godmoder: meta-gaming.  Meta-gaming, put simply, is using out-of-character knowledge (like player discussions or others’ character sheets) to affect in-character actions/decisions.

For example, going back to the Baron and the dungeon, let’s say that the party is headed into Skuldafn to get to Sovngarde.  There’s a path up ahead that branches into two—one to the right and one to the left.  Now, the players know that the path to the right is booby-trapped, but the mechanism to activate it is invisible, so the characters can’t know about it.

Bloodrage decides “something isn’t right” about the path on the right and goes left.

Continuing into Skuldafn, there’s a room with several sets of iron bars blocking the way forward.  The players know that the levers to open them are hidden around the previous chamber, and they’re about to start making their characters look around when Baron Bloodrage comes in and announces he’s found and pulled them all.

That’s meta-gaming, and it’s really, really annoying.

The main point I’ve been trying to make throughout this section is take a hit.  If you’re doing some fighting, your character might get hurt.  So let them!  If your character is anything less than Superman, they’re going to show some wear and tear after endless Pokémon battles, gunfights, dungeon dives, and territory disputes.  Since your character is only human (ish), they’re going to make mistakes from time to time.  And making mistakes, while you might think makes them look weak, actually makes them a more relatable character.