I think abstract discussions about "the consent of the table" don't yield that much insight. In all social interactions there are power dynamics, and in that sense someone might be part of a D&D group, and might go along with a GM's rulings, even though s/he would really like to be out with a different group of friends at the cinema.
But those sorts of power dynamics normally aren't the same as the sheer force and/or coercion that characterises criminal activities like kidnapping, or governmental activities like a criminal justice system.
When contrasted to those paradigm cases of force and coercion, RPGing - like other leisure activities - is voluntarily and hence whatever happens depends, in a formal sense at least, on mutual agreement.
When trying to shed light on RPGing, once we have the starting point that
RPGing involves collective agreement on a common fiction and that
the rules of RPGing are a device for helping to establish that agreement, and to determine who gets to change the fiction and how, then we can talk about the allocation of responsibilities and authority by those rules.
When we do that, we can see that there are different ways of doing that. It's very typical, but not universal, for the rules to establish two particular and distinct participant roles -
the GM and
the players. But across the variety of games that do this, there is plenty of variation on what the rules say about who can change the fiction and how. Some of those differences are found in the rules themselves - eg a 4e D&D GM can introduce new elements into an unfolding scene largely at will (but is expected to have encounter-building guidelines in mind when doing so); a Moldvay Basic GM is expected to be constrained by his/her map and key when doing so but within those constraints has a comparable degree of freedom; a MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic GM is expected to spend Doom Pool dice in order to do this. And some are established not by the published or expressly-stated rules but are implicit in a group's expectations, or perhaps in a wider set of expectations that are part of a gaming "culture".
Baker gives some examples that illustrate these differences as they arise both from express rules and implicit expectations/understandings:
So you're sitting at the table and one player says, "[let's imagine that] an orc jumps out of the underbrush!"
What has to happen before the group agrees that, indeed, an orc jumps out of the underbrush?
1. Sometimes, not much at all. The right participant said it, at an appropriate moment, and everybody else just incorporates it smoothly into their imaginary picture of the situation. "An orc! Yikes! Battlestations!" This is how it usually is for participants with high ownership of whatever they're talking about: GMs describing the weather or the noncombat actions of NPCs, players saying what their characters are wearing or thinking.
2. Sometimes, a little bit more. "Really? An orc?" "Yeppers." "Huh, an orc. Well, okay." Sometimes the suggesting participant has to defend the suggestion: "Really, an orc this far into Elfland?" "Yeah, cuz this thing about her tribe..." "Okay, I guess that makes sense."
3. Sometimes, mechanics. "An orc? Only if you make your having-an-orc-show-up roll. Throw down!" "Rawk! 57!" "Dude, orc it is!" The thing to notice here is that the mechanics serve the exact same purpose as the explanation about this thing about her tribe in point 2, which is to establish your credibility wrt the orc in question.
4. And sometimes, lots of mechanics and negotiation. Debate the likelihood of a lone orc in the underbrush way out here, make a having-an-orc-show-up roll, a having-an-orc-hide-in-the-underbrush roll, a having-the-orc-jump-out roll, argue about the modifiers for each of the rolls, get into a philosophical thing about the rules' modeling of orc-jump-out likelihood... all to establish one little thing. Wave a stick in a game store and every game you knock of the shelves will have a combat system that works like this.
(Plenty of suggestions at the game table don't get picked up by the group, or get revised and modified by the group before being accepted, all with the same range of time and attention spent negotiating.)
These examples are helpful in themselves for drawing our attention to the variety of ways shared fiction gets established and "incorporate[d] . . . . smoothly" by the participants "into their imaginary picture of the situation."
They also highlight some notions that might be used to help unpack that variety: a participant
having ownership of some element of the fiction; a participant
establishing credibility; and different ways of establishing credibility, like
introducing more fiction to join the dots ("cuz this thing about her tribe . . .") or
making a roll that generates the requisite authorial permission.
We can also extrapolate - eg some rolls might generate
obligations, or
prohibitions, rather than permissions. This is what a classic D&D saving throw does: the GM narrates
You see the medusa, whose gaze will turn you to stone and then the player rolls the saving throw, and if it succeeds then the GM is prohibited from introducing, into the fiction,
that the PC has turned to stone.
This also sheds some light on the hit point issue: when a player narrates
I hit it for 7 points of damage! what new thing is everyone at the table obliged to incorporate into their imaginary picture of the situation? Not much, except that the foe has in some fashion been set back - at least for the moment - in the back-and-forth of combat. (We can also see, as has long been noted, that hit points work better for melee or perhaps mass missile attacks rather than for single shots of arrows.) It's only when the hit point loss reduces the target to zero that something more concrete has to be imagined -
the foe drops from your attack - or when a morale check fails that some more concrete outcome is obliged to be introduced
- the foe flees or
the foe throws down its arms and surrenders!
The example of morale checks shows that in respect of at least some components of the fiction a classic D&D GM has less unilateral authority - less ownership - than a modern D&D GM.
