God-Moding

Or is it god-modding? Not that it strictly matters, because you know what I’m talking about, but the lack of a unified term makes for good representation of the problem itself. For the sake of this post, I’ll try and be consistent and refer to it as “god-moding” simply because that’s what I’m used to, and it makes more sense to me, but you could make a reasonable argument for either. Like meta-gaming, this is a term that probably gets most of its popularity from the tabletop scene, but it’s spread to all other forms of roleplay. Our desire to play the deity part is because we are already human.

If this term really did gain traction through tabletop games, then the primary fear there would be simple fairness. If one character “god-modes” then it upsets the tentative, statistical balance, which is usually reserved for upending by a designated game-moderator or dungeon-master. Also like meta-gaming, the rules are simple here too: you control your character and no one else’s. To disrupt this balance is poor sportsmanship and damages the integrity of the game. We make rules against god-moding in roleplay for the same reason we make rules against going out of bounds in sports. In football, the quarterback has to throw the ball behind the line of scrimmage. In basketball, the player has to dribble the ball to move it. In soccer, the player can’t use their hands. In roleplay, the writer cannot play as God. This is fundamental.

It’s also complex, though. For this reason, this post is one of my longer ones, even though I’ve done my best to keep it concise and on point. Bear with me; there’s a lot to think about here.

The "Simple" Idea

As I’ve done in the past, let me make quick work of the obvious stuff. God-moding is the act of controlling circumstances you’re not supposed to control. (Notice how that could mean virtually anything?) It’s when the writer steps beyond their authority and implements or enforces a reality upon the other writer that would normally be the other person’s proprietary right. The ultimate and (painfully) obvious example of this is controlling the other person’s character, the stereotypical example of “I throw a fireball at you, light you on fire, and watch you burn to a crisp over the next thirty seconds.” I don’t even need to explain why this is a problem, but for the sake of my larger argument I want to deconstruct that particular idea a little bit.

What are you doing? Throwing a fireball. Okay, got it. Then it lands on your character, and now we have a problem. Well, why? Simply, because your character, in the moments it took mine to throw the attack, could react in some fashion. They could dodge, raise a shield, or just… I don’t know, eat it—maybe literally. The rules against god-moding state that I have to give you a chance, because otherwise I’m subjecting you to a reality I do not have total permission over. We play a delicate game of joint-venture here. I control my actions, you control yours, and we somehow split ownership of the environment. As long as those things are respected, the god-moding rule can lie dormant, and everyone can feel good about themselves for not falling as low as to god-mode of all things.

The Disconnect

Suppose there was a civilization that had a law against murder, the chief aggression, but no law against torture, rape, and so on. There’d be an issue, right? The singular law against the chief evil, while important, might create a disconnection. People would know that murder was off-limits, but everything else might seem like fair game—or, worse, expected. The idea of making god-moding a singular rule to deflect bad roleplay is troubling, and most places will recognize this. If it’s a roleplay based around fighting, action, adventure, and the like, you’ll probably see rules against “Power-playing”. However, whether the extent of the violence is throwing fireballs or just throwing insults, most communities recognize that you don’t want an army of unbelievable characters running around, tearing up the landscape.

By creating a singular rule against god-moding, and then by trying to fill in the gaps with “don’t make your character too crazy” rules, most people seem to think they’re safe, but they’re not. The sad fact is that most people god-mode regularly and unknowingly, but because they’re so used to considering it only one direction, they assume they’re doing just fine. After all, they’re not like ‘those’ people who have no regards for a character’s boundaries, blatantly disregarding the rules of common roleplay. Err, right? In many ways, this is the same problem as with meta-gaming, but it’s actually a lot more challenging to define and approach properly. With meta-gaming, the street you’re worried about is the one between the writer and their character, and that’s pretty simple. With god-moding, the concern is between your character and their character, and that can look like anything. You could be chopping their head off, but you could also just be assuming what they’re wearing, what they’re doing, or what they aren’t doing.

The "Expanded" Idea

In reality, the issue actually isn’t between the characters; it’s between the writers. Let me return to the definition I gave a minute ago: God-moding is when the writer steps beyond their authority and implements or enforces a reality upon the other writer that would normally be the other person’s proprietary right. In other words, you’re supposed to think about it like a human interaction, and not like a novelized interaction. In a novel, you control all the working pieces and parts, from start to finish, but in a roleplay (I would argue) it’s supposed to be different by its very nature. If you want to write a novel, go out there and write a novel, and let roleplay be its own thing in the meantime.

So let me take god-moding a step further. I’ve hinted at it above and talked about it in other places, but you can cut into the other writer’s proprietary space by simply tying their hands. If you write a ‘Long post’ for example, you can easily god-mode and exclude my character from being able to breath. What if they would cut you off halfway? What if I wanted them to sprain their ankle halfway through that walk, but you just finished it and now we’re someplace completely different? You can god-mode by forcing someone into action (such as taking our analogical fireball) and you can god-mode by forcing them into inaction. People do this all the time! But they don’t think about it nearly as often as they should, because they assume that its indirectness makes it acceptable or, worse, necessary.

I’ve only heard the term used a few places, but to “bunny” a thread along is basically saying, “Hey look, I’m bored, so now they’re in this new place, and I skipped over some stuff.” It can effectively dismantle the other writer’s ability to respond at all, robbing them of perhaps a vital character moment, and it’s incredibly frustrating. Sometimes people have the common sense to ask, and other times (hopefully more often) they just have a good sense for the tensions and stopping places between the characters. There’s an art to this, and I’m not saying it can’t be done well, but I’m bringing it up because the concept is really important: before you “bunny” the plot along, consider it just as carefully as putting a knife to my character’s throat, slitting it, and watching them bleed out in one go.

But the God-Moding Rule is a Problem

Sorry, what? Wasn’t this fundamental, basic roleplay, and it exists as a rule on every community for a reason? Well, sort of. Just because a rule is there—just because a rule has always been there—doesn’t necessarily make it right. We put up rules against god-moding for the same reason we put up requirements for character applications to have a history. Primarily, it’s a mitigating factor designed to stop the bleeding the worst offenders would make by romping through our roleplays. Once you go beyond that, though, the rule begins to create more problems than it fixes, and this is where we come full circle.

Remember before when I said that if my character hurls their fireball, you’re supposed to have a proprietary right to respond? What if, reasonably, your character actually shouldn’t be able to? What if my character has the edge, your character is slower, and no reasonable reality exists that doesn’t end with a smoldering corpse? To push the edge and just assume the logical result is pinned as god-moding, and that may or may not be accurate. Regardless of what you call it, though, it’s not inherently bad.

Consider again the origination of the fear and consequent rule: tabletops. Is it fair to say that post-by-post roleplay is a little different than a tabletop game? Yeah, this may vary depending on the style, but there are a lot of differences, and that’s a good thing. To just assume that simple god-moding rules are just as applicable to written roleplay as it is to a tabletop, though, seems short-sighted. I started this by talking about the “Simple” idea and then compared it to an “Expanded” one. Here’s my distinction: simple god-moding is not always bad, but the expanded idea almost always is harmful. Let me pick that apart for a minute or two.

What’s Actually Included in the Writer’s Proprietary Rights?

Playing the “Victim of God-moding” card covers a multitude of sins. I jokingly suggested your character could simply (literally) eat the analogical fireball. Compared to the horrors of how atrocious god-moding is supposed to be, a response even as ridiculous as that is suddenly fair game. Even though logic may suggest your character really should be a smoking wreck by the end of this, the rules against god-moding provide the infinite ‘out’ of any situation. Where rules against god-moding were supposed to protect your character’s sovereign right to respond to a situation, it goes further. Suddenly they support a claim that you not only have a proprietary right to your character’s response, you have a right to their very destiny.

This is not true.

Have you ever been powerless in your life? Yes. By extension, wouldn’t that mean that your characters (who we want to be like real people, right?) would also experience that? As their writer in roleplay, to try and pull the cord to save them from something is god-moding in and of itself. Why? Because you don’t have propriety over everything. It doesn’t belong to you. The moment you enter into a roleplay with another person, you are submitting your character the possibility that you as a writer may lose control, because you’re entering into a shared domain. This is roleplay, not a cooperative fanfiction. In roleplay, I can nudge and maneuver and instigate, but to assume I can control my character’s very destiny puts me in a deity-like state.

Because when things fall apart and suddenly it’s not going the way I want it to, I have some options. I can pull something ridiculous together (I know it’s unbelievable I would dodge that bullet, but I really can’t afford to let them die right now, and it’s technically possible, so…) and just try and move on. Alternatively, you might try and play the ‘Deus ex Machina’ card and manipulate the environment to save your character by means of divine intervention. Or, maybe you just simply ask the other writer to change their post, explain your situation, and hope they’re nice to you. That last option is probably the most reasonable, in a roundabout way, but I’ll talk about OOC constraints another day.

If your character is screwed, it's possible they've been screwed for a while, and it’s just now coming to a conclusion. I’ve been talking a lot in terms of overly dramatic events, like character death, but this applies on any level below that too. Maybe your character is having a fight with a friend over who dates who, or something silly, and your character says something dumb. The ownership of responsibility for that is yours, and contriving a way around it with a god-moding ‘oops’ button is cheap and disingenuous to the writing. The god-moding rule gives people a ‘Control Z’, an undo button, which reduces responsibility and promotes careless writing. Not to mention, so much of the fun in writing is the tension and drama between characters. If, at any time, you can invalidate someone’s actions, it takes away from the tension a little bit, doesn’t it?

Better Tools

The reason we feel the need to have godlike control, to have a do-over button, is because of the inherent limitations of roleplay and, consequently, our inherent limitations as people. When writing, you may very well just make a mistake. It could be something huge, like forgetting where your enemy is, or it could be something small like forgetting the time of day in the roleplay. We allow for some Out-of-Character gimmicks because we as writers make mistakes. After all, if the character made a mistake they shouldn’t have made (because of the character’s nature is better than that), to punish them for the writer’s shortcoming is actually, I would argue, meta-gaming. In that situation, it seems appropriate to shoot someone a private message and explain the situation.

If that’s the human limitation, though, then there’s certainly a system’s limitation inherent in the writing medium and style. Roleplay should mimic human interaction, but there are natural restraints with timing, mood of the writer, and even just practical things like “I have no way of knowing if you’ll interrupt me right now, so this is the best I can do.” Instead of just living by the typical god-moding rule credo, where “what one writer has made, no other writer shall unmake”, there are a couple of better tools. Normally in roleplay, once a roleplayer has posted something there’s this understanding that it’s set in stone, unless they decide to change it. This is cornerstone in enforcing a god-moding rule, because where else would you draw the line? Consequently, this is why people get so offended when you disregard parts of their post. They’re thinking about this like writing a coop fanfiction, again, where the posting order is also neatly tied to the chain of events and realities of the story.

Roleplay is more fluid than that. Leave it behind, and you’re going somewhere better. The best tool for this is one of the most groaned at devices in typical story-telling, but it’s so useful in roleplaying in the short term: the retcon. Simply, you look at the person’s post and go, “Hmm, no. Actually you didn’t even get through half of that, because my character did something instead.” It’s the writing incarnation of “I reject your reality and substitute it with my own.”

Under the “Simple” idea of god-moding, where proprietary space is only a matter of posting separation, to retcon someone’s post infringes on a sovereign right they assume to have. With this sort of “Expanded” outlook, though, redefinition of some of those lines occurs, redrawing them more on realism and less on simple posting-sequence. After all, the need to retcon someone’s post exists because someone already infringed on your sovereign space, and you’re simply rectifying the matter. This doesn’t even mean the other writer has failed, because so much of this arises purely out of natural limitations that will never be completely removed. Rather, you’re just using a tool to keep things sane.

I said there were two tools, so the second is this: write really short posts. This can work in some situations better than retconning, so I won’t try and say one is always better or worse than the other. Generally, though, very short posts (like, it lasts as long as a couple of seconds, or a single line of dialogue) can create problems. Roleplayers have natural limitation like “I posted this on Thursday, and by the time I got to post again on Friday, I had forgotten something or my mood had changed.” Just be careful here. Theoretically, though, it also solves the problem, because it reduces the ability to god-mode.

The Breadwinner: Trust

As I wrap up this lengthy post (sorry), let me touch briefly on the thing that binds this altogether. Given all the arguments I’ve laid out above, it’s very easy to imagine something falling to pieces in moments if there’s no reason to trust the other writer. You and your fellow roleplayer are peers, and you need to respect each other as such. For this to work without ham-fisted god-moding rules that oversimplify your authoritative space, the writers themselves need to have a good sense for this and be willing to trust the other person. Seriously, I’ve seen people write long, isolating posts simply because they were worried the other person might take advantage of them, given the chance. Scary, right? Roleplay is social and peer-to-peer, so it’s no wonder you need trust to make it work. When you have it, though, it’s way better than the ‘he-said, she-said’ shouting match that the god-moding rules tend to create.