In the world of rolaplaying and the world of general writing, people have agreed on certain guidelines that make character no fun to roleplay with or read about. In this chapter, we will be discussing them.

1. Godmodding:

Godmodding is the act of making your character more powerful than they realistically are. While godmodding can be used for creating a villain (we will discuss the uses of having an overpowered villain in a later chapter), general characters should not be overpowered.

"Why can't I make my character super powerful, Lesath? So long as his story is consistent, who cares if my character can destroy a city with his pinky?" This is a common kind of response when somebody is accused of godmodding. As good as it is that your character didn't /just/ develop his ability to wipe out a city with his pinky, and as good as it is that your character's been able to do that all this time, having a character who's power level is vastly different from his opponent's is never a good thing. If the person you're roleplaying with can't go toe-to-toe with your character, chances are that person isn't going to want to roleplay with you. As cool as it is to have a character who can't be beat, overpowered characters are the most uninteresting characters to read about. Don't get me wrong, two dragons battling makes for an interesting story. A dragon battling a child though? Not so much.

There are many ways to avoid godmodding.

First, don't try to have your character fight another character if your characters can't have a fair fight. If your character isn't fighting, though, go ahead and roleplay an overpowered character. When it comes to a fight, though, you'd better follow tip two.

Two, make sure your character has weaknesses. Make sure that the person you're roleplaying with knows your character's weaknesses (We will see why this is acceptable when we talk about metagaming). That way, if your character's opponent manages to find your weakness, your character's opponent can win fair and square.

Third, develop background information. We'll talk about this more when we discuss the importance of a character having flaws. When you initially create your character though, list traits about your character that makes them less powerful. Can your character not aim their spells well? Is your character afraid of the dark? Is your character allergic to a common thing such as latex gloves? While these things may not make your character look like the best, they make them look realistic, which is just as good. For those of you who feel that having a character with weaknesses reflects badly on you, remember that you and your character aren't the same person. Besides, being able to craft a realistic looking character will reflect greatly on you. Just keep at it.

2. Metagaming:

Ah, metagaming! The easiest of all the guidelines to break. Also, the worst guideline to compromise on. Metagaming is, put simply, when a character knows something that they couldn't actually know. The reason why this is so easy to break is because not every character thinks alike and not every character knows the same thing. Metagaming is especially used in fighting roleplays (or dueling roleplays, as we have on HiH). It ties directly into what I talked about in godmodding. I'll provide an example.

The Horcruxes. In HP, Harry had no idea what a Horcrux was for most of the books. Therefore, Harry did not know that he couldn't defeat Voldemort without destroying the Horcruxes. Harry didn't know that Riddle's diary was a Horcrux. Harry didn't know how many Horcruxes there were, or what they were. So much information that Harry didn't know. If this was roleplay, and somebody wanted to metagame, JK could have just had Harry go "Oh, Horcrux! I learned about that piece of highly advanced magic in a book I accidently found in the part of the library nobody's supposed to go to! Good thing Ol' Voldy left it laying around where anybody could find it, huh?" Obviously, though, this is unrealistic. So JK developed an interesting line of plot evidence which didn't contradict anything she previously stated. She had Dumbledore get suspicious (which is logical because Dumbledore wants Voldemort dead), had Dumbledore investigate (which he could do since he was a highly powerful wizard), had Dumbledore reach the conclusion that the diary and ring contained a piece of Voldemort's soul (which Dumbledore could find out, since he was a powerful wizard and it's logical that he could uncover secret traces of magical if anybody could) and finally had Dumbledore have Harry ask Slughorn for his true memory (which happened, as we saw). All of that work for one tiny piece of information. So why did JK created that intricate set of events when she could have just used metagaming? One, it was more realistic. Two, JK isn't lazy. Instead of botching up background information, she put more than five minutes of thought into what she wanted to do and found the idea she thought was best.

Why isn't metagaming good? It throws 'fair play' out the window. It insults the effort of the person you're roleplaying with. It's a sign of not caring about the quality of what you write. Finally, when you metagame, it's an insult to yourself most of all.

// More to be added soon //