Obsessions motivating "all actions"

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Varyon

The dialogue treats his Obsession as "Slay all the goblins." But thinking on it further, his Obsession would be more appropriately "Protect everyone from goblins," it's just that the primary method he's decided for doing this is killing them down to the last anytime they crop up.

Yeah, the fiction won't be stating things in GURPS terms, so where the fiction says "obsession is killing all goblins," we can't assume that's stated in the GURPS terms of the Obsession disadvantage with the goal "kill all goblins." It might be, but it might translate into game terms as something different.

But while he's obsessed, he does do things without any mind toward furthering his goals, largely just because people tell him it's the right thing to do (or he figures it's what his sister would have wanted him to do). The fluff text for the GURPS disadvantage disallows this

But it doesn't. "Make a self-control roll whenever it would be wise to deviate from your goal." If people are telling him that action X is the right thing to do, but his Obsession tells him to do action Y instead, then doing X instead of Y is a deviation from his goal, and he must make a self-control roll to do X. If he succeeds in the roll and does X instead of Y, he doesn't have to rationalize X.

The sentence about rationalizing all of your actions as an attempt to reach your goal is followed by the sentence about making a self-control roll to deviate from your goal. The self-control roll cancels out the need to rationalize. If I've got an Obsession to "kill all goblins" and I succeed at a self-control roll to "save my friend even though it doesn't kill any goblins," I don't have to rationalize saving my friend as a way to reach my goal of killing all goblins. Successful self-control rolls make exceptions to the need to rationalize.