thread: 2009-07-26 : Very Briefly about Authority
On 2009-08-04, cc wrote:
re "drawing contributions", I am not clear on what you mean here. I can think of a few things you might mean, but either way, discussing that as either authority or assent is not clarifying it. But, in the case of contributions of this nature, the players would not be authorised to have contributions drawn from them, they would be authorised to make them, surely.
Riffing on your example of Sebastian and his "brave" trait, many games have rules that might require a character to run away, or freeze up and be unable to act. Under normal circumstances, a GM/player saying to another that "your character runs away" would be a pretty severe imposition; the special rules about fear abilities grant the specific authority to make that such a statement. And Sebastian's player, by virtue of the bought-and-paid-for trait, has acquired the authority to say "but not me".
The provisional glossary gives Authority as "The privilege given to a person, process, or written material to establish anything into the Shared Imaginary Space." So I don't think that this applies only to vetoes and talking sticks, it is quite possible for a rule to bestow authority to make certain changes to the IS, in the way that "you all run/no I don't, I'm Brave" does.
In your "reconciling player interests" post, you provide 3 statements about "what happens to Vincents character", and then say that authority was not assigned because everyone assents. But it seems to me, in each case authority absolutely was assigned: first to the the GM, then to J, then to Vincent. Whether or not their interests are aligned is essentially irrelevant, because what required authority was the change to the IS made by that statement - Vincents characters arm is now snapped, and that is a now True thing in the IS. If the speaker, whichever of them it might be, had not held authority over the IS when they spoke, that statement would not be True.
In this example, you present authority as governing interactions between the players, and therefore feel that authority was not present because their interests were aligned. I think authority governs the IS rather than the players, and so it definitely was present in order to make any of those statements true in the IS. The fact that their interests were aligned is certainly virtuous, but that does not obviate the presence and exercise of authority over the IS.
