OK. If you guys insist...
The way you've phrased this makes it sound like "narrative authority" is about who's in charge at the table, but the way I've most often seen the phrase used is to suggest the right to introduce things into the fiction (i.e., into the make-believe or imaginary world in which the characters operate). Simply put, when the GM says, "There is a 30 x 30 room here," he is establishing that it is true in the fiction that a 30 x 30 room exists at a given spot in the game-world. By the same token, when the player says, "I swing at the goblin," we all understand that she's really saying "[It is fictional that] I [intend to] swing at the goblin."
And it is that "[intend to]" that means that, in a traditional role-playing game, the player does
not really have a
right to introduce things
directly "into the make-believe or imaginary world in which the characters operate". The ability to ask, request, suggest, or state intent is not "authority" any more than a child asking their mommy for a cookie has the authority to take cookies if the mommy agrees and hands the child a cookie or even says, "OK, take one." That's a misuse of the word "authority" started by people looking to justify the exercise real authority over the game as players by getting the camels nose into the tent. And the idea that players must exercise "narrative authority" or want to is even more absurd.
So the first thing that "narrative authority" as a concept establishes is that role-playing takes place via fictional (make-believe) statements about what is true or what happens in the game-world.
The concept doesn't "establish" anything (see
Proof by Assertion fallacy). In traditional role-playing games, the players don't make statements about what' is true or what happens in the game world. They ask, request, suggest, or state intent and the GM has the sole
authority to decide what is true or what happens in the game world. To erase that distinction and to pretend that there isn't (in a traditional role-playing game) or even can't be a separation between the statements of the player and the
authority to decide what is true or what happens in the game world is to miss a great deal about the meaning of authority and the relationship between player and GM in a traditional game. Given that many story-games focus specifically on giving the players that authority by actually giving the players the ability to decide what is true or what happens in the game-world directly and without approval means that the authors of those games somehow know this is the case, even if they are using language that obfuscates it and can't articulate it properly. In fact, that's also what the whole "Say 'Yes' or roll dice" stuff is all about. It's designed to take the authority from the GM to say "no", thus giving actual authority over what what is true or what happens in the game-world.
Both player and GM make such statements--but they do so asymmetrically: "The players plays the character and the GM plays the world." This forces us to recognize that narrative authority is something that's distributed, both around the table (so everybody has something that they're permitted to introduce) and over the game-world (so players and GMs have different things for and about which they may make statements).
I don't recognize that "narrative authority" is "distributed", in a traditional role-playing game, because it isn't. See the
Proof by Assertion fallacy. The goal of this assertion that "narrative authority"
must be distributed to the players in same way, even in traditional role-playing games, is to frame the changes in story games simply as a shifting of authority rather than a fundamental change in how the game is structured.
Even in a traditional role-playing game, the player can make statements about the game world as well as their character because "making statements" doesn't necessarily correspond to what is true or what happens in the game-world, the point that this assertion misses. A player in a traditional role-playing game, upon entering a town for the first time, can say, "I go to the tavern and look for information," before they know that there is, in fact, a tavern in the town. This is a statement about the game world but it is not necessarily a statement about what is true or what happens in the game-world. The GM can always say "no" -- "This town doesn't have a tavern." And even if the GM says "yes", the GM retains the
authority to decide what is true or what happens in the game-world.
So what? I hear you saying. The fact that you grant this premise requires nothing more on your part--it should not matter in the least that you as a player are exercising your "narrative authority" whenever you make declarations of intent on behalf of your character, whether you're doing so in order to engage the game-mechanics ("I swing at the goblin." "Roll to hit.") or to evoke GM description ("I open the door." "You see a 30 x 30 room.") or to role-play ("I scream, 'Leave me alone, damn you! I'm not your slave!'" "But you owe me, yes yes, by the blood that flows in both our veins--you owe me, and I will have my due!'").
I don't accept the premise because I think it is flawed and leads to flawed thinking about how role-playing games work. For example, assuming that players in traditional role-playing games in traditional role-playing games are exercising "narrative authority" over their own character seems to lead people to not only assume that they
want to exercise "narrative authority" in the first place but that narrating a bit more about their character alone, such as whether they succeed or fail or how they fumble and so on is something that a player that accepts and expects to make choices and state intent for their character should have no problem accepting these other things. It's sloppy and inaccurate thinking that confuses authority and perspective.
What it does do, I think, is open up a design space for games where narrative authority is distributed differently in order to simulate different kinds of game-worlds.
That "design space" was
always open. The first time I used role-playing rules to play, the games had no GM and the players played groups of characters. People in my hometown also played what they called "solo games" using role-playing rules and random tables to make up adventures for their characters when nobody else was around to play with. Ars Magica had players create multiple characters. Various games had hero points of some sort. There were diceless games. Theatrix predated Forge ideas of "narrative authority", too. Instead, what the concept of "narrative authority" does is allow game theorists to suggest that all that story games are doing is "redistributing authority" rather than changing more fundamental aspects of the game. In other words, under the concept of "narrative authority" that you are proposing, asking a player how their character fumbles when they fumble or what they see in a tavern that they just answered is simply a shifting of authority when, in fact, it's asking the player to do something that they might not be doing at all and have no interest in doing. Remember, at least part of why we are talking about this is an inability to accept the idea that a player might not want any narrative authority because of the flawed thinking about traditional role-playing games the idea of "narrative authority" promotes.
(To be honest, this whole idea of needing some sort of permission to experiment or open up the design space always baffled me when, for example, people praised Fudge for giving them the right to tinker with the rules. If I'm not mistaken, I had that right from the moment I started playing role-playing games, created my own rules from the very beginning, and used homebrew or heavily modified rules for most the games that I've played over the years. I needed someone else to tell me it was OK to do that?)
When I play, I don't want "narrative authority" in any meaningful sense. I want the GM to have the real authority over what true or what actually happens in the game-world, expect and want the GM to say "no" (forget the "Say 'yes' or roll" nonsense, and want to confine my input into the game world to the set-up and, during play, to statements of intent and appeals to the GM. In other words, if I say, "My character heads to the tavern to look for information," I expect that I might hear, "No, there isn't a tavern in this town." If I think that sounds wrong, I might appeal to the GM about why I think there should be a tavern in the town but the GM can still say "No". The GM has the authority, not me, and I like it that way because the GM may have a very good reason for why there isn't a tavern in that town that I'm not aware of, and as others have been saying, mystery is one of the huge draws of the traditional player and GM structure.
That any of this is controversial or seems false to people who buy into the idea of "narrative authority" and that I have to actually explain and defend it illustrates exactly what's wrong with the idea of "narrative authority". It makes it impossible for people who buy into it to really understand what people are doing in traditional games and make all sorts of false assumptions about what they like and should be able to do. It's a
bad theory because it doesn't match reality.
Suppose in one game you played a powerful enchanter, with the ability to cloud men's minds. It might be the case, then, that rules stipulated that you could, by expending some sort of in-game resource (like, "Magical Power") change other players' (including the GM) declarations of intention for their characters. ("I swing at the goblin." "No, you don't." "I stroke the goblin gently." "Okay, good.")
Yes, that's a change in the actual "narrative authority" in a game
if it takes the right to say "no" away from the GM. It's not a change in the degree of authority that a player already has but a shift from "no authority" to "some authority".
Given that, I'm not sure that it's necessary to stipulate either that narrative authority is granted to the GM from the players, or that RPGs can create stories. In terms of where narrative authority derives, I'd argue that it's like any other "speech genre": the conventions for how it operates are derived from prior experience of participants, and being conventions are thus open to innovation, variation, and change. In terms of RPGs and story creation, I've seen a lot of arguing here that "no story exists" because play is experiential rather than narrative, but there are lots of traditional gamers who think that what they are doing is creating story.
More logical fallacies and post-modern nonsense? A lot of role-players also think that they are experts about combat but that doesn't mean that they actually are. And is the point to use "story" in a meaningless, technological, and tautological sense or in a meaningful sense where there is such a thing as a "good story" or a "bad story"? If I watch a movie or read a book for the story, then the quality of the story matters to me, yet the quality of the story, as a story, doesn't matter to me when I role-play or ride an amusement park ride or when I take a vacation.
Yes, you can pedantically claim that in some technical sense that riding a roller-coaster generates a story but the story would be pretty awful and it's totally not the point of most people going on a roller-coaster. Focusing on the story could not only cause one to miss the point of why most people ride roller-coasters but also miss the point of what someone who does ride for the story value (e.g., a person looking for bragging rights or to break a record) is actually trying to get out of the ride. When a person does want a story, then story
quality matters.
As for "granting authority", the GM in a traditional role-playing game
does not do that, which I think you should know, since you just mentioned a theoretical point-based mechanic that would actually give the player real authority. Non-interference is not a transfer of authority unless the GM gives up their ability to say "no" at any time to the players, and that doesn't happen in traditional games. To frame it as a granting of authority, again, obfuscates the actual authority structure of a traditional game.
And saying that an RPG
can create stories does not mean that RPGs
must create stories, that they players are playing because they want a story, or that the stories they create are good. One
can generally use a screwdriver as a hammer (I've done it) but that does not mean that a screwdriver is a hammer or is a good hammer when used as one.
This whole point you are making is evidence of just how poisonous all of this theory really is. Rather than simply accepting that a lot of role-players don't care about stories and don't create stories in any meaningful sense when they play, you are using this crappy agenda-ridden theory to insist that, no, people really are creating stories even if they don't care about them and don't want to. The whole point of this theory is to promote the agenda that story is the reason for playing. For plenty of people, if not most people, it's not the reason for playing.
Ironically, in her book The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games, the author Jennifer Cover talks about her own gaming experience as both immersive and story-producing. In any event, I think it's a separate issue from narrative authority, which is simply a way of describing what's going on at the table. A simplification, to be sure, but a useful one from a design perspective in my opinion.
What do you mean by "immersive" and what do you mean by "story"? If you aren't talking about thinking in character to the point where the character takes on a life of their own, then you aren't using "immersive" in the sense that matters to me. And if your definition of "story" is a tautological definition so broad that it happens whenever anyone does something and doesn't consider or address the quality of the story being generated, then you are using "story" in a sense that only a person suffering from university-induced post-modernism poisoning could appreciate and love. Most normal human beings concerned with story are concerned with "good stories" and "bad stories".
Yes, your trip to the grocery store might be a "story" in some technical academic sense just like what happens in all role-playing games might be a "story" in some technical academic sense but it's not the point of going to the grocery store and the quality of the "story" is going to be so awful that few people would have any interest in it as a story unless something exciting happened along the way. What's the point of calling it a "story" if nobody is interested in it as a "story"? Why is it so important that people agree to look at their games that way?