Taking Umbrage with a Harry Potter RPG

You would think that with all my years of role playing and the fact that I run a blog based on teaching fairplay, I would never ever be God modded and powerplayed. Not true at all. It still happens to me all the time and it will probably happen to me again and again and again with the more rpgs I join. It also hurts a whole lot more because I can identify it a lot easier and I feel compelled to stand up for myself every time it happens with varying results.

I recently left an rpg and I want to share this experience with you because in all my years I've never been God modded and powerplayed this bad, this many times and met with this much apathy by any one entire forum. I didn't think it would get as bad as it did because in joining the rpg, everyone had to read through a special list of "No-No Rules" to find the hidden password before being accepted in by staff. These rules were in addition to the normal rules and they specifically outlined God modding and powerplaying. I approved completely of this practice and every rule on that list because each one I have preached on this very blog. I had such high hopes for this rpg and I trusted them completely.

Systematically, each hope was dashed. I would say that maybe two rules from the No-No list were NOT broken against me through out my entire 50 post run in the rpg. Many were mild yet still completely heinous infractions but here is the list of the worst three offenses I had to endure:

1. My character hadn't seen Hogwarts for a very long time. I created a thread where he was looking over his old haunting grounds and he encountered two characters that he didn't know, referring to them as the Gryffindor and the Ravenclaw. I would think it would have been rather obvious that no one would know my guy but the Gryffindor went ahead and proclaimed that he'd known my guy for 7 years and considered my guy to be a regular douche bag he had to "correct" often.

2. My character left the scene because I getting very angry about each violation that seemed to mount in this Gryffindor's presence. I vowed that once my character left the scene, I would have nothing more to do with him again because he just couldn't take a hint. However, after leaving in a very definitive way, the Gryffindor decided to claim that before my guy left, he stepped on my character's toes and then left himself. The Ravenclaw, who was being played by the mod, went ahead and locked the thread and moved it into the archives before I could come in and ask WTF????

3. In a thread that didn't include my presence at all, where I thought I was free and clear of God modding and powerplaying, I was highly pissed to see that it happened again. The Gryffindor and the Ravenclaw, now involved in a romantic relationship, were talking about how they met through the events with my character. The Gryffindor states in one post he hadn't seen my guy since then night, then two posts later, with the aforementioned post still visible on that page, states that my guy had been obsessively stalking his for quite some time and trying to get the better of the Gryffindor but failing every time.

Of course I complained about all of these things every step of the way. I sent many PMs to the mod who was very wishy washy, to the player who said he'd fix his actions or told me to calm down and then to the owner who told me she'd handle it but then I never heard from her again. I went from peaceful reminders, gentle explanations, firm teachings to fully apeshit hoping someone would understand how all of this was utterly unacceptable and I got nothing but giant wall of apathy.

When the immediate threat seemed to be over, I tried to go on role playing but I really wasn't comfortable anymore. I had no solid assurance it wouldn't happen again let alone that anyone really understood why I was upset. It wasn't enough for me to role play with other players because the damage had been done. I started to get suspicious that all this resistance could have been because the Gryffindor was being played by another staff member and everyone was covering for him. I had asked the Gryffindor who else he played because I didn't want to run into him again but he glossed right over answering that so I couldn't ever be sure a character new to mine wasn't him with a different account.

Moral of the Story: If you get God modded and powerplayed and you think you've gone through all the proper channels for fixing this but you're being ignored, don't be afraid to walk away. It's better for your sanity in the grand scheme of things because some rpgs just go through the motions of trying to look sparkly clean when they aren't. If management isn't unified and doesn't have a system in place to deal with rule breakers, don't hold out hope they ever will.