So you can never play someone with capabilities different from your own? That's a pretty weird role playing game.
Only if you assume human beings are static creatures unable to learn anything more than they already know.
But just as characters can learn new skills, then so can players. For instance it is pretty silly to say, as an example that a fighter can learn to fight with both a dagger and a sword, but a player can only learn to fight with a staff, cause that's all he knows and therefore all he will ever know. A character after all represents nothing more than a fictionalized version of a player, but there is absolutely nothing to prevent a player from training for new skills like his character does.
As an example much of our game often involves communications in Koine, Greek, and Latin. Well, interested players have learned Greek as a result of independent study and whereas before "some things were Greek to them" now they can read the Greek of the gaming era. They learned, so did the characters.
But to address what I think was your real point real world skills do not preclude or exclude games skills any more than in-game skills preclude real world skills. That is to say I allow my players to choose in-game skills and to choose real world skills. If they don't know something because it is only an in-game skill, like some survival technique then they may choose, like in the fighting example above, to resolve it by dice roll. Or they can attempt to reason it out, or they can employ their real world skills if they know a thing. But if they have an in-game skill that they commonly want to make use of then I simply tell them, learn how this really works and they usually do and then they can demonstrate it easily and assuming no other factors are involved (some force specifically working against them) then they cannot fail at it. (Most real world skills, and most game skills for that matter, consist of extremely simple techniques that once learned can be easily demonstrated and described. It's juts a matter of exposure to the basic ideas and training methods. They only seem complicated because of lack of experience. Most skills once learned are so easy they require little conscious thought, just practice. And that's easy to demonstrate. Once you learn to throw a ball or ride a bike or start a fire or climb a rock face or shoot a rifle, and practice at it awhile then thinking about what you are doing only gets in your way. Proper habit is more important to skill mastery than conscious thought. And once again habit is anything but random and chance driven. You actually become better through practice, not more random.) If it is a survival skill like locating water, then they know how to do it, and they will keep at it til they find water by the proper method given that environment. They don't have to rely upon dice roll for "a chance" demonstration of skill anymore than they have to rely upon a chance demonstration of combat capability. (As a matter of fact, as far as real work and capacity are concerned, chance and skill are antithetical terms if you think about it.) They know by training and experience. But if it is something rarely used then they may decide to train in other real world skills, or other in-game skills, and simply rely upon chance. But I didn't mean to imply it was either/or. They can choose both and the method normally employed. But if they know something then they can demonstrate it, really demonstrate it, and not have to rely upon chance to determine their level of success or failure. But we don't do away with in-game skills, we augment them through use of real world skills.
Then again you have those skills and abilities, magical for instance, that cannot be successfully emulated or demonstrated in real life, they can only be represented. So in cases like that real world skills are not applicable, though they may be helpful for demonstration purposes.
Indeed. But what makes you think that this is how D&D works?
I've played D&D, and the precursors, really since Chainmail, and very rarely have I ever been asked where I intended to strike an opponent, or in what manner, or what my attack intention was, etc, when playing a fighter of any stripe. (I could probably count those times one hand.) But if you stop and think about it for a second the method of allowing dice to resolve combat intention and potential is as silly as saying to a magic user, "just throw your fireball in any direction and we'll let the dice decide if you hit, where, and to what effect."
No professional combatant would ever enter any combat by saying, "chance will determine my success." In a real combat you would know, as an experienced professional, what you intended, where you were aiming, and how you were striking and with what intended effect.
Now the argument could be made that D&D isn't about real combat, and that it is merely representational, and that's true enough because math is a substitute for real skill and intention in the game, but then again you are supposed to be representing professional combatants (in the case of fighters). At least vaguely and real combatants do not rely upon chance to determine combat capabilities. It just isn't done among the living. Dead combatants rely on chance a lot. Surviving ones, not so much. Though a combatant can be very good and skillful and still get killed through no fault of his own.
That happens too. But it has been my experience, that where actual survival is concerned, no real method has the same end result as "very bad method."
A sniper for instance goes to shoot a man and says to himself, "boy, my target is a long way away so rather than setting for the proper shot and taking into account all possible variables and getting a proper line of sight, I'll juts roll the dice and let's see what happens." You aim for the specific part of the body you intend to tag, and if you miss you don't hit the foot instead. You hit a few centimeters off-mark. Or something interferes and you go off-mark. But you don't almost hit the brain because that was what you were aiming at and then accidentally end up hitting the pelvis instead.
I have however been in numerous D&D games where this is the approximate case, or where worse, in my opinion, no method is even considered of where on the body a hit actually strikes or what effect that would have. Only hit points are considered. A puncture to the lung is no different than a slash across the forearm and indeed both may do exactly the same in hit point damage though each different type of wound would have very different effects upon most targets.
I'm not saying this is the way D&D has to be by the way, simply that this is the way it usually is, if my anecdotal evidence and experience has any weight. It is simply the hit-point/pay no real attention to wound effect so common in most D&D games I have ever observed or played in. But it is not the way anything like a real fight goes. Puncturing a lung has an extremely different effect than slashing an arm, though in most D&D games I've ever seen this plays no role in-game as to effect upon the victim. For séance I ask you, and your situation might be different, how many games have to ever played in where somebody took an arrow center of body mass and it had nay different effect than taking an arrow in the shoulder, forearm, or thigh? I'll bet the vast majority of players and DMs would say, "well it has made no difference at all in the games in which my fighters fought." But if you were a real combatant, if you could actually become the character you're playing, believe me, it would make a huge difference in every possible way.
And in the same way if you could become your Ranger then believe me he'd know exactly where he was aiming his shaft, and whether he intended to put it in the target's thigh, his heart, or in his gut. It would be the first question he asked himself as he bent for his draw, consciously or unconsciously, he wouldn't just be thinking, "well, I'll shoot and see if I happen to hit the guy and where it will hit." He'd know exactly where he was aiming, if he was a professional, experienced killing man, and he'd know why he was aiming there. Because to tell the truth a fighter's job in-game is not to fight, it's usually to kill. And if you kill for a living then you know exactly how to do that. Not as a "+ 5 to hit and a +6 to damage hit points," but as a "I'm sticking this right through your ear-drum the first time I try and you won't be living through it." Case closed. Fight over. I know exactly how to do this.
Real fighters don't fight to fight, they fight to kill (assuming they are involved in lethal combats, a non-lethal combat has another end). And D&D is just unprepared for that reality, though truth be told, it is the only real reality that real fighters really care about. If I were a D&D fighter believe me the last thing I'd care about is learning how to extend a fight into seventeen rounds of slugfest and happenstance body-strikes from big-toe to shoulder blade. If I were in a fight where somebody else were gonna kill me, man or monster, I'd be learning how to kill, not how to fight. And killing, not fighting, is what I'd be a doing.
That is to say that killing is the end of the fighter, the purpose of his profession, and technique is his method, and technique is not a vague, wandering, chance driven mechanism. It is specific in operation and functions towards a specific and desired outcome. Few, in playing D&D would think of allowing a dice roll to determine what spell a magic-user threw, where it hit, who it targeted, what effect it had, if it hit or had the intended effect, and so forth and so on. The magic user knows, he operates by exact technique and by studied application and experience. He chooses his targets, he applies the spell and does as much as he can to control effect. His technique does not include, I'll let chance determine how successful I am at employing magic.
Unfortunately D&D just normally doesn't recognize that very same and basic truth about combat, that combat ain't about fighting, it's about killing. And killing involves real technique, experience, and professional application. (Unless of course you're aiming not to kill and that's a different kind of training, but it can be learned too.) But where killing is concerned, as far as the combatant classes go, the game is very far from the real mark and the real intention of combat. It doesn't have to be that way, but it is the common paradigm. Now maybe you play differently, we do too, but I'll bet most players do not account for combat effects other than hit points or critical hits because the game just doesn't include real mechanisms for what would really be happening.
It's a game contract weakness. There's no law saying it has to have that weakness, but it does have that weakness.
Then again another thing I found silly about typical D&D fights is letting the dice dethrone what area of the body you hit...
I hate Microsoft products. That should read "determine what area of the body you hit."
But what I mean by that is the fact not of where you hit because of weapon, but that you are intentionally striking or trying to strike those areas because they assure killing effect.
