Assigning Authority to the Dominant Player in Role-Playing Games

This paper investigates how a dominant player is socially assigned authority that legitimizes behaviours of gamesplaining and rule lawyering: it delves into how authority is distributed and validated between players and examines how social norms and implicit consent play a part in both the validation of authority and the normalization of exercises of power. The research introduces a synthesized framework derived from theoretical analysis of the social process of assigning and consolidating “expert authority” (Haugaard 2018 & 2021) to the dominant player in the context of playing tabletop role-playing games.