thread: 2009-07-26 : Very Briefly about Authority
On 2009-08-05, Gordon wrote:
Ralph - the reason I like the use of assent rather than authority to describe the what's-happening-now of roleplaying is that it better conveys the constant, often unexamined, and persistently interactive nature of the process. A sufficiently sophisticated understanding of authority may be in some ways a more accurate description, but that's not the understanding of authority I usually run into.
I think that you'd agree that while Universalis creates a (VERY helpful) currency for authority/assent-in-the-moment (and also, importantly, ongoingly), it isn't (and NOTHING can be) the only tool a group will use to negotiate that authority/assent. If I'm less than enthusiatic when Sebastian buys "Brave", he may - in an entirely nonconfrontational, unproblematic, good-for-the-game way - change his mind about how high he buys it, or even if he buys it at all. The fact that he has the authority to do so anyway is trumped by - what?
It's entirely accurate to say "by another of the many, social authorities available in any human interaction", but to me, assent implies that mutiplicity of influences, while authority conveys a singular answer that can often distract from the other important, powerfull and fruitful-to-rewarding-play influences.
I take Vincent's point to be "designers, what you should be caring about is the whole of that in-the-moment interaction, not just particular authority-shaped chunks of it." (Vincent. is that close?). Now, if you already understand authority to include the whole process, you're golden. You know that any particular set of authority-chunks, no matter how well-designed, won't add up to the whole.
Labeling the whole as assent and authority as one tool for managing it seems useful to me. And not because The Man smacked me with his big, um, Authoritahy.
