@Clint_L
I know you've at'd me a few times, but as a general rule that I have learned over time I have found that some discussions are just not fun or productive given the subject and participants.
That said, a year and half ago I did touch on the subject of
player and DM authority in D&D (although my thoughts have advanced A LOT since then), and it's a subject I've returned to a few times in various ways since I think that the dividing line between authority/responsibility are one of the fundamental schisms that we see- and that while people often talk about
shared control over the narrative (the game world) what is often left unremarked about in the negative space is that this distributive authority can also lead to a lack of
personal control and autonomy over the character. Or put another way, people who truly prefer the "D&D-style" of play will often have strong opinions about whether or not other players or the DM can make choices or otherwise influence the control over their own characters actions. At one idealized spectrum, you have people collaborating to tell a story and play a game, and the frission and excitement comes from seeing what happens with your character- good and bad- in that shared fiction. At the other end, you have people making individual choices that matter, and the game and the story emerges from the choices that they make in relation to a
fixed fiction as adjudicated by a single source (individual). Neither is good or bad, and most games fall between the two spectrums, but it is.
On a few other points from the thread-
I found your commend about DM authority in D&D interesting in terms of history and thinking about it from a historical perspective. That said, I would highly recommend reading some of the recent histories that have come out, especially
The Elusive Shift and
Game Wizards to get a good background about the history of D&D and roleplaying- you will learn a lot more from reading those two books than from any number of conversations you have here.
Playing at the World is excellent, but a lot ... denser, and not as focused or readable (or new) as
The Elusive Shift. It's an unfortunate feature of many conversations that people would rather spitball about topics than actually, you know, learn about them.
If you're looking at 5e, the DMG does have rules for shared narrative authority. In addition to all the rules about success at cost, automatic success, saying yes, etc., there are rules for plot points that allow, inter alia, players to add and dictate narrative (or complications) or even to "seize" the DM's role. Of course, the inability to acknowledge or discuss these options that
exist within the core rules of 5e is why we see the refrain of "no one reads the DMG."
Next, if you're ever actually curious about FKR (Free Kriegsspeil Revolution/Roleplaying), I'd be happy to discuss it. It's something I've done some work with. I don't go into too many conversations about it here anymore because I had a flood of people with the whole, "I don't want to bother understanding it or playing it, but I feel it is necessary to forumsplain to you why it can't work because I once googled Kriegsspiel."
One more thing, since this came up and it tends to recur- those who think that D&D is popular
for some reason (because people are rational actors) and are interested in discussing why that might be, and why that might be reflected in the design, will inevitably run into those who will argue that it's just a stupid accident of history and/or sheeple love brands (it's first and it's got a name). Given that those conversations usually involve preferences and or devolve into conversations about "objective quality and design," they are tend to be unproductive.
Finally, in terms of what I found interesting about your post about the historical origins of D&D authority. I think that there may be something to that in terms of psychology, and taking on a role that, as you say, we are trained to covet. It's an interesting idea to explore - in the same sense that I think it's a truism that D&D, as originally conceived, was simply a Western given the trappings of Fantasy. That said, the specific manifestation of the D&D referee (as the DM was originally was called) was very much a product of the historical origins from wargaming- even the repeated calls that you have a "neutral referee," for so-called Gygaxian Skilled Play traces its lineage to the referees in wargaming that original D&D players were familiar with. I'd be curious to see if you could develop this idea more, and perhaps bring in some of the ideas of how the more recent, internet-based
collaborative fiction writing might be changing how we view authority in the TTRPG sphere given we have many people that are familiar with that as they come in- I know that when I was growing up, collaborative fiction writing was something that maybe happened as an exercise in a creative writing class, if at all.
