We bandy about a lot of pretentious terms when we’re talking to each other. One is this idea of narrative authority. When we say narrative authority, we’re talking about who is allowed to say what happens in the story. One of the things about indie RPGs I find most compelling is the way responsibility for the story gets divided up among more people than in classical RPGs. But it’s only been recently that we’ve been talking about interpretive authority.
Again, terminology gives me hives so I’ll clarify what I mean here. When I say interpretive authority, I’m talking about the ability for someone at the table to re-interpret something in the story. It’s not creation whole-cloth. Rather, it’s when a previously introduced element is recast to have new properties or meaning. Unlike with narrative authority, which is concerned with “what is?”, interpretive authority is concerned with “what does that mean?”. When a bridge across a chasm is later determined to be a rope-bridge and consequently turned into a bunch of rope to tie up villains, or the combination to a safe ends up being the birthdate of a character formerly unrelated to the safe owner, the person who decided this new property exercises interpretive authority.