thread: 2009-07-26 : Very Briefly about Authority
On 2009-08-04, cc wrote:
Alright.
It seems implausible to me that "the rules" of poison'd do not assign authority, in the general sense. Certainly, the specific rules operational at that moment do not, but surely at some point the rules must have established that such authority is shared overall. This seems to me analogous to the way the classic GM model has its authority assigned up front too. That universality of authority over the IS has to be established up front else the players cannot agree to it.
I don't think "assignment of authority" implies that this assignment is "to one player"; there are quite a few GM-full games that have employed quite dispersed forms of authority. So, I don't see that such dispersal implies some act that is not appropriately described as an assignment of authority. Also, you say that you do not feel that assigning authority to one player solves the problem, but it is not clear to me that there is a problem, or what that probelm is meant to be.
A dispute over the PG definition of authority complicates things greatly, because if we cannot use the term with a shared meaning we are speaking past each other. Certainly, I have only used in the sense of "empowered to alter the SIS"; that is a much narrower concept than any discussion about the way in which authority might be used to impose a solution on someone against their will or similar issues, which seem to me to be social contract concerns.
I think therefore it would be useful to separate these issues into two discussions; one being your proposition that authority should be seen as "post-hoc and by assent", and another which addresses techniques and rule structures for resolving or obviating differing desires about what statements should be allowed to enter the IS.
