As another entry in my series about the commonalities between RPG design patterns (an RPG’s system is the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play) and the ideas presented in Robert B. Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (certain human behavior patterns can be leveraged to get people to agree to things), I next want to talk about authority. Humans have an innate predisposition to obey authority figures. The extent to which people will set aside their own judgment in deference to authority figures can be amazing, such as in the famous Milgram experiments. It can be tempting to jump to disparaging conclusions about people’s response to authority (“Those sheeple are so weak-minded!”) but I think it’s more useful to try to understand behavior patterns without trying to saddle them with value judgments. After all, as with many human behavior patterns, deference to authority figures is often the right thing to do (people in a burning building should listen to the firefighter, people in a courtroom should listen to the judge) but it also means that clever manipulators can leverage the tendency to get people to do things. Authority is obviously a big deal in RPG design circles – many innovative games have come from examining how authority can be parceled out.

In addition to actual authority, people have a tendency to respond to the appearance of authority, which is often much easier to manipulate. Having a prestigious title, for example, can cause people to agree to what you want. For example, researchers have found an alarmingly high willingness for nurses to carry out medical orders from people who say they are doctors (even if the person is unfamiliar to the nurse, and even if the orders seem to be self-evidently inappropriate or dangerous for patients). Con artists frequently portray themselves as people with prestigious titles in order to get their marks to comply. RPGs, of course, have a long history of given certain players titles like Game Master, Storyteller, or Keeper. These players are often the ones who generate fiction that the other players might be inclined to reject (“a monster attacks you!”), so the special title helps get the rest of the players to accept their contributions.

Compliance professionals often use clothing to give themselves the appearance of authority. Con artists love things like uniforms or doctor’s coats, for example. Researchers have demonstrated the people are more likely to obey requests coming from someone dressed like a security guard than from someone in normal clothes, regardless of the type of request. They’ve also shown that people waiting on a crosswalk are more likely to follow a pedestrian crossing against the light if he’s wearing a business suit than if he’s wearing work clothes. I’m not aware of any tabletop RPGs that explicitly ask the players to dress in a particular way, but costumes are common in LARPs, and dressing in something genre-appropriate is sometimes recommended as a GMing technique for gaming conventions.

The trappings of authority can also get people to be more compliant. In an interesting experiment, researchers tested how long it would take people to honk their horns at cars in front of them that stayed stopped at a green light. The delay before honking was much longer if the stopped car was a luxury car than for an older economy model. Many games provide special GM-only accoutrements like GM screens or specialized rulebooks, which may help make the GM’s contributions more acceptable to the other players.

As a type of authority figure, people tend to defer to experts. Although it’s usually not formalized, rules expertise frequently confers increased ability to have one’s contributions accepted in RPGs. For example, many players of traditional games expect GMs (who need to have lots of their contributions accepted for many of these game to function) to also have the greatest rules expertise. Researchers have also found that a perception of impartiality increases people’s tendency to accept the word of experts. In an RPG context, that may mean that games that place players in an impartial role more likely to have their fictional contributions accepted than in actively adversarial roles. In Rob Bohl’s Misspent Youth, for example, the Authority player doesn’t make any mechanical choices at the expense of the other players (the game system dictates them), but roleplays the embodiment of the things that the actual human players hate about real-world authority. The impartiality of the role (and the title of Authority) helps the other players accept these otherwise unwelcome elements into the fiction of the game.

Although a lot of my examples have been about GMs, I think that’s simply an artifact of there being a longer history of RPGs that use GMs from which I’ve drawn the examples. Understanding the human responses to authority ought to have plenty of applications in designing many player interactions, not just across the common GM/player divide.