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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Michael Silverbane" data-source="post: 8161217" data-attributes="member: 38016">In my experience, the DM has almost unlimited (what I'm going to call) Soft Authority.That is to say, the DM makes a decision about the game rules or the setting or the allowable options for the campaign, and the other players go along with it. They may not necessarily like it or agree with it, but they go along to get along, as it were. As long as the DM bends a bit when coming up against input from the other players, this works out fine. The vast majority or rulings or rules interpretations made during play are Soft Authority, at least in some part because those decisions are backed up by the rules of the game.When the DM won't bend, or comes up against a particularly asynchronous player, then they must exercise Hard Authority. This is in much much more limited supply. A DM who exercises their Hard Authority too much will eventually get punched in the junk (usually this is metaphorical), and in extreme cases, will get exercised right out of the DM seat. Hard Authority is things like, "No, [player], you cannot play [character option], because there is no [character option] in [thing]." It doesn't particularly matter what [character option] is, though race, class, and alignment choices often top that list. And it doesn't really matter what [thing] is, because by the time the DM gets to that, the other player has typically stopped listening anyway. Another, though less common type of Hard Authority is the, "No, [player], your [action] fails." Sometimes this is followed by, "[arbitrary reason]," but is just as often not followed by anything at all. Rarely, it is followed by [previously established fiction], which can (but doesn't always) turn it back into an exercise of Soft Authority.Where that line is, between Hard Authority and Soft Authority, and how much is too much varies from group to group, and player to player, and sometimes even session to session.</blockquote>

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