More Ownership/Authority/etc. in RPGs

More posting inspired by Vincent Bakers' anyway. For all the (uncorrected) flaws I currently see in it, I think the section below from my book SNAP covers a lot of what I'd have to say about ownership/authority/leadership in RPGs:

Step Zero: Collaboration, Leadership, and “the last word”

Yes, I’m calling this first step “step zero,” because it surfaces throughout both the story preparation process and the actual play of the story. You’re never entirely done with step zero, because it describes some of the basic fundamentals of what it takes to make SNAP work.

The driving principle behind everything in SNAP is collaboration. If you want to create a story on your own, there are plenty of books and teachers to help with that process – SNAP isn’t one of them. As players, everyone is working towards the same goal: to create an engaging story involving the various PCs (either together or separately). That doesn’t mean leadership is unimportant. A collaborative enterprise always needs leaders, organizers, instigators, managers – that’s just how the process works.

The discussion of story preparation above mentioned one thing that needs “leadership” in SNAP: guiding the group through these steps and recording some of the results. That’s a role that needs to be filled. There are, of course, lots of ways to take care of that. But to keep things simple, this book assumes there is one person who takes on that role and a number of other leadership roles in SNAP. I’m calling that person the story leader, and wherever you see those words, you can mentally add a parenthetical “or whichever person or persons the group has agreed will take on that role.”

But since SNAP is a collaborative process, the story leader is never SOLELY responsible for anything in play. Everyone should keep in mind from time to time the issues that the story leader has to deal with, and should feel free to offer ideas and suggestions about those things at appropriate times during (as well as outside of) play.

Part of the point of having a leader, though, is have someone who can get “the last word” in a discussion that’s just not getting anywhere. Someone who, after all the discussion and debate, has the authority and responsibility to make a decision that everyone will then follow.

The SNAP system is actually set up so that the last word does not always fall to the story leader – at certain times in play, or about certain issues in play, it is another player who has the ultimate authority and responsibility. Of course, it’s often good to accept input from others, including the story leader, but those decisions will ultimately be their call.