Player ability vs character ability

Player INT vs Character INT

I feel like this is a topic that comes up a lot in discussion about role playing. Perhaps the perennial vocalization is how to play a character of a different intelligence than your own. There's a recent thread on RPGnet linked above. A lot of the discussion there got sidetracked, in my opinion, on the matter of puzzles. I just realized I need to write about what Eero Tuovinen calls challenge-based adventuring in order to really discuss that.

Problems are most evident when player ability and character ability are not equal. For instance, when my character is smarter than I am then I am incapable of figuring things out as easily or as quickly as my character. My ability to role play the character is limited by my ability as a player to do things that have nothing to do with the game, assuming we are playing the One True Way that I haven't even really talked about yet. But I can also be smarter than my character. Here we end up in a weird situation, because I want to take advantage of my intelligence to achieve my goals, this is a game after all. However, my character is not supposed to necessarily act that way.

A common response to the problem is to say that the player ability can substitute for character ability in many places and so it should. The only place where player ability is not used is for combat because players can't actually do that. First, if this is true then the ruleset should not cover in any way character abilities that will be substituted for player abilities. In D&D there should be no intelligence, wisdom or charisma if these are not going to be used to somehow determine the character's ability. Yes, some of this is factored into other parts of the game, but part of it is to represent the inherent nature of the character. This is probably even more true in systems where you can buy disadvantages to character abilities, allowing the purchase of powerful advantages to be used in the part of the ruleset actually being used. Note a lot of this falls under Cheating.

Second, the players can actually do everything. There are these things called boffer larps where people run around and hit people with sticks and throw spell balls at each other. I'll admit to not being personally experienced in such matters, but I'm pretty sure that there everything is determined by player skill, at least to some degree.

The solution is to separate, in a sense, the mechanics from the fiction. It goes back to what I said before in Playing to the system. The fiction should take cues from the mechanics, the mechanics should not be ignored because of the system. You come up with the course of action, which should be awesome. Then roll dice to see how well it works. Just like in combat where you swing your sword to chop the orc's head off and you roll dice to find out how it works, when you deliver a beautiful speech to convince the king to knight you you roll dice to decide how it works. For matters of intelligence I think it breaks down to essentially saying, "I try to best the merchant at chess" and then roll to see if you do. I think chess is a good and bad example. It's good because the players could sit down and play a game of chess, but we're here to play a role playing game not chess. And chess can take a while. It's somewhat bad because it depends on skill at the game and not just raw intelligence, but again, the player's chess skill probably doesn't line up with his character's.