Fast thread is fast (avg. 5.56 posts/hr for 36 hours running!) I'll likely miss stuff, I can't keep up, but I owe responses to "old" things now.
Your definition--"absolute power doesn't stop being absolute just because it grants tacit [let alone explicit] permission"--is difficult, because that means both the UK and the US meet it. The UK is an absolute monarchy by your definition because all laws require Royal Assent before they become law, and legally the monarch is completely empowered to refuse to give it to any bill from Parliament, meaning the bill is simply vetoed, with no defined way for Parliament to assert the law anyway. This won't happen, not with any current member of the royal family, because the Queen and her descendants value decorum, but if it did, it would mean an immediate constitutional crisis in the UK and, almost certainly, the stripping of any remaining power the monarchy holds--in other words, it would end the relationship and someone else would "become DM" (likely the power would simply be vested in the Prime Minister directly). This and other aspects of the Royal Prerogative, the few remaining powers given to the UK's monarch, exactly meet your definition of "absolute power"--and yet almost anyone who looks at the UK would agree it is NOT an absolute-power relationship,
specifically because the Queen (or whomever holds the throne) knows that using their power in ways that defy the representatives of the people (the House of Commons) would be the end of their relationship.
Likewise, properly speaking, your definition means the United States is an absolute oligarchy: it is ruled by the Supreme Court of the United States, which has the power to unilaterally declare any law unconstitutional, and has no further check on its power than its members being unwilling to take such measures because it would ruin the relationship between the courts and the people (a relationship that is already notably strained). No one IRL argues that the US is an absolute oligarchy because of the SCOTUS power of judicial review; instead, we recognize that
choosing not to defy Congress because it would end the government as it currently exists is, itself, representative of NOT having absolute power. When exercising power inherently forces a Hobson's choice--taking what is on offer or
nothing at all--your power is, quite simply, NOT absolute. It's much like when Ford (apocryphally, IIRC?) said that you could have any color of car you wanted, as long as the color you wanted was black: if your choice is "black or no car at all," you DO NOT have absolute power over what color your car is. You accept the offered solution, or you abandon the relationship (transaction, in this case) entirely.
Perhaps I misunderstood, but it
definitely came across as "players shouldn't contribute things to the world-story, they should only contribute to the world through the choices directly made by their characters." This seems like a pretty reasonable description of
@Jack Daniel 's position; please correct me if I'm wrong, Jack.
Right. Even with friends, though, I see little reason in forcing the gaming equivalent of a constitutional crisis...ever, really. Absolute power that "grants tacit permission" to do things the absolute power would prefer not to do, as far as I'm concerned,
is not absolute. Full stop.
Yes, very much this. Or any of a dozen other remedies that aren't absolute unilateral autocratic declarations, but rather listening, adjusting, and compromising--aka all the things that
aren't demonstrations of absolute power.
I don't understand what "spotlight" means in this context.
Honestly, not much? I judge both sides (and, indeed, I judge WotC too!) by very very similar standards. It's why the lack of a 5e Warlord, or calling certain types of Paladins "Avengers,"
seriously annoys me. But if you want a difference, it's the difference between an original author creating her own fantasy universe, and a fanfic author creating a derivative work. The original author has
more leeway (but absolutely not infinite leeway) because they're the one making it up from scratch. The fanfic author is choosing
which pieces to keep or discard or add--and such decisions
do warrant justification to one degree or another. I need to know why I should "buy in," as it were.
There's actually a very neat solution to this one: time displacement. There was a LOVELY Theme from 4e called Ghost from the Past, which did pretty much exactly that: it made your character someone who had, through whatever means, been carried forward a LONG time from the year of their birth, centuries or millennia. Like Rip van Winkel or certain Merlin stories or the popular "medieval noble booped into modern city" romance plot or the like. Someone who only remembers a time when the world DID have dwarves, and now has NO explanation for why there AREN'T dwarves. That makes for a great personal story, tying the character directly to the world and giving them a reason to hunt down the secret as opposed to just passively waiting for revelation. (It's worth noting that, in TES, they actually did something like this with an NPC: there is ONE living Dwemer, who has a disease that makes him immortal; he didn't suffer whatever fate befell the rest of his race because he wasn't on the mortal plane when it happened, and as far as anyone knows he's the
only one this applies to.)
I've done something vaguely similar with the aforementioned tiefling character in my party. Keeping things spoiler-free just in case my players ever come here (fantastically unlikely but not impossible): The tiefling character is descended from
two tieflings, of opposite lineage (one devilish, one demonic). He knows his demonic great-grandmother, she's a (now-former) succubus. He does
not know his devilish ancestor...but he has since learned that this is a devilish ancestor of great power. From doing research on his bloodline and what bits and pieces have survived the thousand+ years that it's been around, it looks like his ancestor is either Baalzephon (former prime minister of Dis and a general of the Blood War)...or friggin'
Glasya, one of the nine Princes of Hell and
daughter of Asmodeus himself. And it's looking very much like this powerful archdevil ancestor, whoever they are, has had many more irons in the fire than JUST keeping one particular bloodline going for century after century, without forking but without ending either. This has leveraged an idea that I already intended to use, taking what was a secret that would simply be abstract until much-later pieces fell into place, and given it a more direct, overt path for the players to learn more. They'll still have to work through most of the details to figure it out, I suspect, but they've gained a more "direct" line, if you will. Nothing broke the mystery by having a tiefling in the party.
Um, because the DM can tell them like an adult instead of demanding unquestioning faith? "Listen, this is important to me, okay? This is something that will help shape the campaign, and I have what I think will be a really good story if it's allowed to play out. We can try to find a solution that preserves the mystery while still getting you what you want, but I really can't budge on this one without severely impacting the campaign I'm putting together."
And if you can't say that sort of thing? If the honest answer is, "Because I think the thing you like is the stupidest thing ever"? Maybe you as DM need to look at whether you actually respect your players. Maybe that reflects a problem between the group as humans, before any consideration of player and DM. Because
that is ABSOLUTELY the kind of thing that WOULD disrupt my ability to trust the DM and their judgment.
First, I don't see how authority is relevant here. A responsibility to explain yourself has little to nothing to do with whether you
can exercise your power; it's simply an extra step in the process of doing so. One that, in general, implies that you actually respect the people subject to your decisions, and thus generally a pretty good idea even if there is no obligation to do it.
Second, I can't agree that the rules are suggestions. They're a
common starting point. They're what everyone gets to see, without needing to dig into the DM's brain. You are 100% correct that the DM is always free to walk away from that common starting point. But if they do so,
they have an obligation to tell their players. And I absolutely think that "dragonborn is a playable option" (or whatever) is a part of that common starting point that needs a clear statement
that it is being left out, and a reasonably clear statement as to why (though, as noted above, that statement can be "I really am
doing something with this, I'm not just shitting on your preferences because I think they're dumb").
Sure. But how is this that much different from banning dwarves for literally no reason other than "ugh I hate dwarves, they're so stupid and short and lame"? Shitting on your players' preferences and unilaterally declaring that no preferences other than your own will ever matter is
corrosive to trust. Citing that the players
should have trust in their DM despite that sort of thing is not a good thing!
Um, no. You're literally just wrong here. There is a
vast gulf between "discrimination" and "not having 100% perfectly identical behavior toward literally all persons." If that were true, then giving pap smears only to women and prostate exams only to men would be "discrimination," and that's
patently ridiculous. Offering (for example) special opt-in services for the deaf or the blind is not "discrimination" toward anyone, it is being respectful of the fact that different individual people may have different individual needs.
Asserting that a one-size-fits-all approach is the only way? THAT'S discriminatory, because it asserts (without justification) that all people HAVE to fit the same norm.
See above for the problem of invoking this as a response:
when the DM does things that challenge trust, it's not good to assert that people should just trust them. Or, to phrase that a little differently, this is EXACTLY equivalent to saying, "You should be trusting your DM, whatever moves they make, or else you never should've played with them at all." But trust issues have to BEGIN somewhere, don't they? We don't have the ability to just INSTANTLY know that a person will always be completely trustworthy forever. We HAVE to have the ability to step back and say, "Hmm, you know, having just seen X, my trust in this situation isn't as strong as it used to be." Forcing a binary 100% trust/0% trust, and
further forcing players to absolutely commit to one or the other before literally anything else, is not acceptable. It is possible to have something that takes you from 95% trust to 75% trust, it SHOULD be possible to re-evaluate as you go, and it SHOULD be okay to push for better understanding of what's going on so that you CAN trust your DM.
Trust is both given
and earned. Which means it can also be squandered.
Beyond that, I didn't read most of the thread, so yes, I understand whatever I said may well be redundant. Again, I expect people can ignore whatever they aren't interested in 
