Quote from: Elliot Wilen;423044Again, total smokescreen and Forgist sophistry. The underlying aim is to gain acceptance of mechanically-enforced "narrative authority" on the grounds that it's "no different" from the social limitations and trade-offs that occur in healthy, normal play. Completely false! If it were true, then in a game that formally gives a player "narrative authority", the player wouldn't be subject to the additional social limitations and trade-offs from the rest of the group. But they are. Social influences are sui generis and can't be replaced by formal mechanics or "distributions of authority". Attempts to do so either result in horrible games or are themselves reinforced socially by ideologies such as "I Will Not Abandon You", which attempt to displace the group-cult's goal of mindfucking onto the rules.

Hold on a second. You're not playing fair. The OP asked, "What if there was such a thing as [players with] narrative authority?" To keep dog-piling on by saying, "No, no, there's no such thing" is threadjacking. To be fair, you'd have to let BWA or whoever talk about the implications of player narrative authority as a concept. Once he did that, you could raise objections based on logical errors in his argument and the divergence between his conclusions and your experience, but this going round and round yes there is no there isn't, no there couldn't possibly be and it's a trap is just poor sportsmanship at best.

Quote from: BWA;422959That's where I disagree. In practice - at most gaming tables, not just crazy hippie ones - the GM does not have the authority, in a social sense, to veto anyone else's input for any reason he wants. And that social authority is all that matters, when it comes to RPGs.

So now we are talking about "social authority" in order to frame what the players are doing as "authority"?

In practice, in most places in the United States, the police don't stop and question people for any reason and even let plenty of minor traffic violations go without stopping anyone.  It still doesn't mean that any normal person would refer to a driver as having "authority" because of that.  Liberty is not authority.  And it's only because of post-modernism's insistence that we look at everything through the lens of "power relations" that anyone would even think of describing this in terms of "authority".  The next phase will be to lament the horrors of "narrative privilege" enjoyed by GMs, even if they share authority with the players, leading to yet more concessions from GMs to put them into a subservient position.

Quote from: John Morrow;423070*snip*
  Liberty is not authority.  
*snip*
.

I like it....

Quote from: CRKrueger;422772If he wants to discuss how you could give players authority without ruining immersion, that would be interesting.

Quote from: BWA;422889That's a big question, and all I can say is that different people clearly play differently. I play lots of different games, and the preferred style of play to to influence the game world through my character. But if I have the ability to influence in-game events, it doesn't bother me at all.

Maybe that means you and I experience immersion differently. Maybe it means that you value an intensity of immersion that I do not. Maybe it means that I hate role-playing games and I only want to destroy all fun. Hard to say.

If you want to talk about that for serious we can start a new thread.

I would find that discussion interesting.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;423044Again, total smokescreen and Forgist sophistry.

Elliot, this is a discussion/argument we are all having. Maybe I am wrong. That is certainly possible. Plenty of people clearly think so.

But this bullshit thing that you (and some other people on this forum) do where I'm not wrong, I'm deliberately LYING in order to trick people? That thing? That thing is fucking lame. Don't do it. Disagree all you want, but do it like a normal person.

Quote from: John Morrow;423070So now we are talking about "social authority" in order to frame what the players are doing as "authority"?

I don't see them as separable in a meaningful way. Everything that happens in an RPG is social, one way or another. Unless I am missing your meaning?

Quote from: John Morrow;423070The next phase will be to lament the horrors of "narrative privilege" enjoyed by GMs, even if they share authority with the players, leading to yet more concessions from GMs to put them into a subservient position.

If you're suggesting that this is my secret agenda in this thread, I assure you it is not. I simply don't subscribe to that nonsense about GMs being "subservient" or "disempowered" by a game. It's not how I look at the role of GM at all. And that's not an ideological war thing, it's a fundamental thing about how I play games.

Quote from: Bill White;423057Hold on a second. You're not playing fair. The OP asked, "What if there was such a thing as [players with] narrative authority?" To keep dog-piling on by saying, "No, no, there's no such thing" is threadjacking. *snip*
 just poor sportsmanship at best.

....I accept my portion of threadjacking and apologize....so,what if players had "N.A."....:hmm:

seems that has been answered as there are games that allow this. Kinda pointless to say "well, what if TradRPG had this as a "rule" as then they would not be TradRPG (as we understand them) and we can just use the newer style games as example?!
or
maybe if we define the question furhter...what level of "N.A." ie. at the world scale or a situational scale or a personal scale...? Limited to equipment or NPC as resource or within a PC's homeland? To what system specificly?

and as a side note to BWA: I am not sure if all TradRPG codify DM fiat but I have not seen one that explicitly said players have the same fiat (no distinction between player/GM )
Am interested to know if any do say that!

Grymbok: your post clarifies the subject nicely...

Quote from: Lorrraine;423194I would find that discussion interesting.

so would I...

Quote from: skofflox;423197and as a side note to BWA: I am not sure if all TradRPG codify DM fiat but I have not seen one that explicitly said players have the same fiat (no distinction between player/GM )
Am interested to know if any do say that!

Same here. I wasn't challenging you, I was acknowledging my lack of comprehensive knowledge. Someone mentioned Ars Magica as a trad game that has a degree of explicit player authority, but I've never played or read it.

Quote from: Lorrraine;423194I would find that discussion interesting.

Maybe we should drop this thread and move to THAT discussion instead, since we'd all agree on the definitions, and people like Elliot might stop shitting in the pool just to be disagreeable.

Quote from: BWA;423202Same here. I wasn't challenging you, I was acknowledging my lack of comprehensive knowledge. Someone mentioned Ars Magica as a trad game that has a degree of explicit player authority, but I've never played or read it.



Maybe we should drop this thread and move to THAT discussion instead, since we'd all agree on the definitions, and people like Elliot might stop shitting in the pool just to be disagreeable.

(bold above my emphasis) This is the interesting point IMO. Many times proponents of "TradRPG" play get all in a bother about players going berzerk and making all sorts of illogical and power trippy assertions,messing with the time flow etc.. This is not the case in most games so...what could mature players and GM's accomplish by shared "authority" or consensual agreements?

I would like to explore that...

Quote from: Bill White;423057Hold on a second. You're not playing fair. The OP asked, "What if there was such a thing as [players with] narrative authority?" To keep dog-piling on by saying, "No, no, there's no such thing" is threadjacking. To be fair, you'd have to let BWA or whoever talk about the implications of player narrative authority as a concept. Once he did that, you could raise objections based on logical errors in his argument and the divergence between his conclusions and your experience, but this going round and round yes there is no there isn't, no there couldn't possibly be and it's a trap is just poor sportsmanship at best.

Now, you hold on, Bill. I'm just following the flow of the thread. I just reviewed the whole damn thing, and what I see is a stipulation that "players have narrative authority", but no strong agreement as to what "narrative authority" is. There followed a robust discussion on that topic but following the rejection of the idea that "narrative authority" means a formal, unrestricted final say, BWA fell back on the idea that "narrative authority" is the informal phenomenon (I don't think we can really call it a "right") where people say stuff and the group as a whole accepts it, with or without explicit "ratification".

Now, I agree that this thing exists. It doesn't have to be "stipulated", in my view.

The question remains, so what?

Does it have an implication for the argument that there's a divide between story games and trad games? I don't see how it could, since by this definition, "narrative authority", which we can crudely gloss as informal "social power" is always present, no matter what the rules are, in any RPG.

On the other hand, the background of this discussion and innumerable others is why some people react to rules that grant formal authority in various ways. Some people see these rules as an absolute turn-off, others aren't dead-set against them but they find such rules to be a pretty clear marker of different categories of game. Others like these rules so much that they think every RPG would be improved by having them.

The ultimate point, however, is that the existence of "narrative authority" (or the argument that it can be defined in such & such a way) has absolutely no bearing on the way that formal rules about authority are received--certainly no bearing on arguing with people about their preferences.

Quote from: BWA;423202Maybe we should drop this thread and move to THAT discussion instead, since we'd all agree on the definitions, and people like Elliot might stop shitting in the pool just to be disagreeable.

Sorry, bub. Keep making idiotic arguments on behalf of your cult, and you'll keep getting called on them, at least until everybody gets tired of you and just puts you on their IL.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;423535(good summary and...)

The ultimate point, however, is that the existence of "narrative authority" (or the argument that it can be defined in such & such a way) has absolutely no bearing on the way that formal rules about authority are received--certainly no bearing on arguing with people about their preferences.

That about sums it up, as far as I'm concerned.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;423535Now, you hold on, Bill. I'm just following the flow of the thread. I just reviewed the whole damn thing, and what I see is a stipulation that "players have narrative authority", but no strong agreement as to what "narrative authority" is. There followed a robust discussion on that topic but following the rejection of the idea that "narrative authority" means a formal, unrestricted final say, BWA fell back on the idea that "narrative authority" is the informal phenomenon (I don't think we can really call it a "right") where people say stuff and the group as a whole accepts it, with or without explicit "ratification".

Now, I agree that this thing exists. It doesn't have to be "stipulated", in my view.

The question remains, so what?

Does it have an implication for the argument that there's a divide between story games and trad games? I don't see how it could, since by this definition, "narrative authority", which we can crudely gloss as informal "social power" is always present, no matter what the rules are, in any RPG.

On the other hand, the background of this discussion and innumerable others is why some people react to rules that grant formal authority in various ways. Some people see these rules as an absolute turn-off, others aren't dead-set against them but they find such rules to be a pretty clear marker of different categories of game. Others like these rules so much that they think every RPG would be improved by having them.

The ultimate point, however, is that the existence of "narrative authority" (or the argument that it can be defined in such & such a way) has absolutely no bearing on the way that formal rules about authority are received--certainly no bearing on arguing with people about their preferences.

That's fair. I wasn't accusing you or anyone of arguing in bad faith. I just thought that the direction the thread in fact took happened to walk away from a potentially interesting direction implied by the OP.

I agree that one of the pre-conditions for that discussion to be interesting would be some kind of elaboration of "narrative authority" such that it was more than merely the concession that people say things at the table and other people let them say it. That's the minimalist read on narrative authority, and really just an acknowledgment that tabletop role-playing involves talking around a table.

Additionally, it would have to proceed differently from arguments that suggest that narrative authority is not shared in traditional tabletop games but is shared in many "story games," and that's the fundamental difference between the two, because otherwise we're talking about turning traditional games into something they are not. Following your lead, I'll call that the formalist read on narrative authority, in that it posits [player] narrative authority as existing only in the presence of formal rules to that effect, the presence of which disqualifies a game from being a "true" role-playing game.

No, the direction the conversation would have to take to stay true to the OP's question would have to be to imagine "narrative authority" as both present and widely distributed across participants in any circumstance where you have players around a table engaged in the collaborative description of an imaginary set of events in accordance with a formal set of rules for modifying the make-believe.

So it turns out that what is required to satisfy the OP is in fact a way of thinking about RPGs in which narrative authority makes sense--a model of what happens in play, in other words, that can serve as a description of previous experience and a guide to future action. To the extent that that model diverges from the real, it is of course problematic, but one of the things about theories of communicative behavior is that they have a strong constitutive element: in other words, how we think communication works shapes how we try to communicate.

I personally believe that such a model would focus on "narrative authority" as being connected to the idea that your presence at the table gives you some moral right to participate in the creation of an imaginary world, that it is in fact a power that you possess as player to speak about that world through the medium or instrument of your character's intentions (minimally).

The deployment of the term "moral right" will probably strike people as peculiar in this context, but you'll recall that I said that embracing a notion of narrative authority would require us to think about RPGs in a different way. By moral right, I mean that a player acts rightly toward others at the table by participating in and facilitating the collaborative dimensions of the game, and acts wrongly in denying others that opportunity--by not listening to them, by disregarding their attempts to participate, and so forth.

Now, it may be the case that it is some kind of category mistake to suggest that role-playing games are properly considered a domain of moral action, but given that RPGs are fundamentally a communicative activity, and that communication is all about how we treat each other, maybe there's room to develop that idea after all.

I don't claim at this point to have actually made the argument I'm envisioning, but I think it might proceed along the lines I've suggested, and that might be an interesting way of thinking about the OP's question.

Quote from: Bill White;423565I agree that one of the pre-conditions for that discussion to be interesting would be some kind of elaboration of "narrative authority" such that it was more than merely the concession that people say things at the table and other people let them say it. That's the minimalist read on narrative authority, and really just an acknowledgment that tabletop role-playing involves talking around a table.

I agree, but since even that obvious, bare minimum has given rise to all manner of intransigence, vulgarity and wild-eyed accusations of conspiracy, I suspect that theRPGsite is not the place for that discussion.

More's the pity, because most people on this site have interesting things to say.

Quote from: BWA;423618I agree, but since even that obvious, bare minimum has given rise to all manner of intransigence, vulgarity and wild-eyed accusations of conspiracy, I suspect that theRPGsite is not the place for that discussion.

More's the pity, because most people on this site have interesting things to say.

You can always pick and choose whose posts to read and to respond to.