God-moding: The good, the bad, the ugly.

Okay, this is an issue that is dear to my heart, and one which other people have covered ad-nauseum, I'm sure, but given that someone has recently hit me with a pretty serious god-mod, I wanted to put down some thoughts about it.

What is God-moding?

At its simplest level, god-moding is defined as follows: Deciding what happens to another player's character, without the player's consent. It is sometimes subtle, but essentially, any time one player unavoidably affects another player's character, that's god-moding.

In a GMd game, the GM is the ruler of reality, and as such is theoretically incapable of god-moding, though I'd personally consider it good practice for GMs to allow players a way out.

But in a shared-world RP situation, such as you get in MMOs, or most online RP, then there is rarely one person "running" the game - there are just a large number of people who are playing it, and etiquette demands that they avoid annoying each other. Failure to do so tends to dissolve a game or scenario into "my e-peen is bigger than yours!" contests, which are laughable. But, and this comes from personal experience, when it's your character getting pissed on from a great height, it's really annoying.

Here's a little background for what happened recently: In City of Heroes right now, there's a character who rather severely needs their head seeing to. She's gone utterly off the rails, as far as several people (other characters) are concerned, and the number one suggestion for helping her has so far been for a psychic to take a gander inside her head and try to repair what's broken.

Now, one of my characters is psychic. Samantha Huntington, who has been known to brag that she is the fifth most powerful psychic in the world (she's not, but she's no slouch), whose skills are all based around memory alteration and mind control. I'm quite prepared to RP out a psychic repair session. I'm not very good at it, but I'll do it. Sam is rather arrogant, too, and confident in her own capabilities, and has strong feelings about right and wrong.

Now, Sam was engaged in a conversation with this character, and put across her feelings about the character's actions in a... rather blunt fashion. Sam also attempted a psychic probe of the character, which failed (because said player refused to let it work, which is fine). Said character got massively insulted and left. Sam really didn't think anything more of it.

Then I got a private message on the Official Game Forum:

(( sorry to disturb you...))

---

...but it seems that Samantha Huntington is now under subtle surveillance. She may, or may not have noticed white rental vans with darkened windows parked near her whereabouts. Vans appear empty if scanned with psychic powers. And they're only seen from a distance.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but that seems like something I can't control about my character. I wasn't asked if it was okay to put my character under surveillance, I wasn't given the opportunity to point out all of the HUGE flaws in trying to do so (which I'll cover in a moment), and it really does stink to high heaven of someone trying to muscle my character.

Now, I'm not averse to my characters being put under observation but I'd like to be involved in it. If I'd been approached first, I'd probably have agreed, because I'd have understood the reasons why it's happening. But right now this looks like someone who's in a mood with me (because of my character's attitude and actions) trying to "put one over" on me. Which is awful.

Now for the cathartic bit: Reasons why such observation is essentially impossible.

1) The Helena factor. Samantha Huntington built an Artificial Intelligence unit several years ago, called Helena. Helena constantly scans and observes the local area around Sam and her brother Richard (my main character), and warns of potential threats. The probability of such observation occuring for more than about five minutes is essentially nil.

2) Sam can teleport. Now, this includes the in-game teleportation travel power, which has a range of 100 yards (more than enough to break Line-of-Sight in most circumstances), as well as access to two Super Group bases with complete teleport beacon sets (meaning she can teleport to pretty much any part of the city, from any part of the city), so walking is something she does because she enjoys it. Good luck tracking her when she doesn't want to be followed.

3) Sam has a room in Huntington Manor. She hasn't been living there for a while, but she has a room inside a manor house with extensive grounds (walled grounds) that are constantly patrolled by a small cadre of ex-Knives of Artemis trainees (yes, they kept the stealth gear), as well as 100% coverage by a continuously active AI, extensive shielding and sound-proofing, and enough concealed firepower to hold off a small army - the manor is still standing after the second Rikti invasion for a reason.

4) Sam has a very protective brother. My main character, Richard, is what I tend to refer to as a "cosmic-level" character. He's one of those unbelievably awesome, Superman/Green Lantern/Dr Strange level people who tend not to get involved with the petty, but deals with threats from beyond. Let's take a look at some of his known (and easily represented in-game) abilities. A) He can move really fast. In-game, he's at the speed cap of 92.5 mph. For RP purposes, that's just the speed he sets himself inside the city limits - he can go a LOT faster. More than fast enough to reach a stationary van on a city street. B) He can walk through walls. Not represented in-game, unfortunately, but he does have the phasing power as a stand-in. Unless said van has some sort of weird multi-dimensional blocking technology, then he can get inside it. C) He doesn't need to rest. He can keep this up for days. I need sleep, but he doesn't need anywhere near as much as I do. D) There's a black hole in his head. Don't ask, the backstory is very complex, convoluted and comicy, but instead of a brain, he (sort of) has a black hole the size of a golf ball in his noggin, and he can control how much it affects the world, and if he wants to destroy a van that's spying on his baby sister, then he sure as hell can. (Yes, there are limits. I have no desire to destroy the game world, so I've set very stringent limits on the amount of control he actually has - when his choices jump suddenly from "energy blasts of serious pain" to "eat the world in less than a second", he's not about to go further than the energy blasts.) E) He can turn invisible. Yes, that's right, folks, he can fade completely from view and become undetectable to the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

The point is that all of these things have been established since before this player came along. I'm not suddenly making stuff up to be awkward. These things are all part of my characters' backstories/experiences, and a large number of my fellow roleplayers in the game are aware of them. So when someone tells me "Sam's under surveillance" without finding out how likely it actually is for her to be under surveillance, it winds me up.

Part of me wants to run with it, but I get the impression that if I try, I'll be trapped by whatever this other player wants to acheive, and effectively unable to play my own characters because "that doesn't work. Nor does that. Nor that." So I'm probably just going to write a short story explaining why it won't work, and put the kybosh on the whole deal straight away.