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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9034599" data-attributes="member: 42582">Assigning authority is necessary to establish who gets to say what. It is not sufficient. This is why Apocalypse World spends only a few sentences on assigning authority to the MC (over everything that is not assigned to the players - ie everything except (i) what PCs say, undertake to do, think and feel, and (ii) answers to the questions the MC poses to the players), but spends many many pages on what the MC is obliged to say when they exercise the authority that they have been given (this is elaborated in detail in discussions of player-side moves, the agenda, the principles, the GM-side moves, the discussion of fronts, and probably other places too that I'm not remembering at the moment).EDIT:As per the OP, Baker saysSome very good designers consider the assignment of authority to be the point of rpg design. I do not. As a designer, it's my job to make as sure as possible that the game won't break down into moment-to-moment negotiations about raw assent despite the game's rules and the players' upfront commitment to them. But the brute assignment of authority is NOT how to accomplish that. When my games assign authority they do so in strict service to what I consider the real point: setting expectations and granting permission.Why are games prone to breaking down into moment-to-moment negotiations, despite upfront commitment to rules? Because the rules are adopted purely voluntarily, and hence can be set aside at any time!And "brute" assignments of authority - you get to say what your PC tries to do, while you other get to say what happens in the setting - won't avoid that risk. If anything, as I noted upthread, they are prone to exacerbate it: there's a reason why conflicts over GM authority are a recurrent feature of RPGs like many approaches to D&D that deal with authority primarily in this fashion.By setting expectations about how authority will be used, where those expectations are acceptable, rules help ensure that they will be followed. And one way to set expectations is to grant permissions - ie permissions to say things that might not be said in a purely negotiated environment. We can see this in BW: If I succeed on my roll, intent and task become part of the fiction; but if I fail, you - the GM - get to narrate something about how my goals for my PC are defeated or set back.The GM is conferred a clear permission to narrate horrible things about what befalls the player's PC, but that permission is gated behind a mechanism which also generates an expectation about when the player gets to establish truths about the fiction that are good for their PC. This in turn makes the player accept that when the GM gets their turn, what they say is OK.This is extremely different from (eg) how [USER=6747251]@Micah Sweet[/USER], [USER=23751]@Maxperson[/USER] and you have characterised "trad" or "immersionist" play in this thread.</blockquote>

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