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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sunseeker" data-source="post: 6869249">So much this.  The character is just the lens through which the challenges of the game are attempted.However, there are problems.  Mental challenges: puzzles, mazes, riddles, etc... are ONLY challenges for the player.  Sure, you can roll a die to determine if your character realizes the answer like the player does.  You could limit your answers or the amount of energy you put into arriving at an answer based on your character's mental stats, but at the end of the day: the character doesn't answer the riddle.  The player does.  Because mental challenges transverse the gamestate into the real world.Conversely, physical challenges are ONLY challenges for the character.  They don't exist, and can't exist IRL for the player to attempt with their own physical prowess.  That boulder you need to move, that lock you need to pick, that cavern you need to jump, you can't attempt those with your own physical stats (most gamers probably wouldn't want to anyway).  So the player/character dichotomy exists within certain contexts.  Understanding that it exists helps alleviate certain problems that are more/less severe based on the type of game you play.  Not understanding them leads to punishing the group when people who don't have a high IRL IQ try to play a high INT character or any sort of combination of "player doesn't have, character has".    It's one of my qualms with the hard role-play approach and likewise, limiting player/character knowledge.When the DM presents you with a riddle, if you are a heavy role-player, you are going to attempt to solve that riddle with PLAYER intelligence.  Because the heavy role-play approach would frown upon rolling a D20, adding your mods and asking the DM if your character got the right answer.  Once the riddle has been presented, the player/character divide is destroyed, utterly.  Your brain, whether you like it or not, will begin computing all the possible answers to the riddle based on any and all information it can access in your mind.  You can direct this, focus this, limit this to some degree, but inevitably, your experience working on an internal combustion engine (which doesn't exist in the game), may help you solve the riddle.If you understand the player/character dichotomy and know that when you present any mental challenge AND demand a role-play approach, you're going to have to acknowledge that you can't separate in and out of character knowledge, because the mental challenge is inherently a challenge for the real-life, living human being behind the curtain.  Moving that boulder though just requires some feigned grunting and some bad acting.  You can't act your way into the answer for a brain teaser.</blockquote>

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