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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8161242" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Yeah, it was a deliberately hyperbolic example. My actual experience is much more like yours. If the other players spoke up at all (which they probably wouldn’t), it would be to tell the player doing the key thing to knock it off.Really neither of those is common in my experience. Most often in my experience, most of the players won’t even have enough familiarity with the rules to weigh in at all. My regular group has one player who knows the rules fairly well (though she sometimes gets stuff mixed up with rules from previous editions) and four who know the basics well enough but aren’t particularly interested in any more than that. Usually if I need to make a ruling it’s because I forgot something, and it usually goes like “I forget how this works, so for now I’ll say [ruling], but [knowlegable player], can you look that up for next time when you get a chance?” and that’s pretty much it.Really though, I think this discussion is more about who has narrative control than about rules disputes. If a player asks, “can I play a Genasi?” I would say, “They’re not native to the material plane, so we’d have to work together to figure out why your character was here and working with the rest of the party,” and I’ve never had other players object to something like that.Does anyone hold the position that the DM is the ultimate authority? It seems to me that people are saying more that the DM is the final authority, and other people saying “I can’t believe people run their games so dictatorially!”I‘ve seen people on both sides of this discussion say something to the tune of “the DM has authority, but that authority is granted by the players.” And, yeah, that’s accurate. If the players collectively decide to overrule what the DM says, the DM’s options are pretty much to either concede the point, suggest a compromise, or if the issue is important enough to them, step down as DM. But that’s an exceptional circumstance, and if you’re DMing for a group where the majority of the players are regularly overruling you... You’re probably better off finding a different group.The more common circumstance is that, when running a game for like a pickup group, you have your session 0, and maybe someone isn’t too keen on one of the table rules. In that situation, usually the player voices their disagreement, the DM considers their perspective, and either accepts, offers an alternative, or sustains their original ruling, at which point the player either agrees, or leaves the pickup group.</blockquote>

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