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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8704708" data-attributes="member: 6785785">I’m not sure what you’re saying here. The average player is one I assume you mean to be of average intelligence and/or capability, is that right? And you’re saying they can’t act like anything other than an average player? I assume you mean that they can’t actually be smarter than they are, which may or may not be true based on how we define smarter. Certainly if I reward the player of the high intelligence character with more information, then they are now more informed… and so on. So using the kind of method I described, the player of the smarter PC will have more information at his disposal than another player. Is it possible they may not use this additional information well? Sure. Is it the certainty you present it as? Clearly not. But even setting that aside, players absolutely can act as characters who are smarter than they are. I mean… it’s acting. I don’t think I’d agree with your categorization at all. But I also don’t see how what you’ve described is less true of games that don’t allow for character capability, games that only test player capability. Surely those players in that game would also just slump and say I don’t know what to do. How do you deal with this in your game? Telling people what to do with information is different than simply giving them information. Why do you say this? It’s all make believe. There isn't a person alive who’s up for dragon ambushes, no matter how smart they are. And who decides what works? The DM? Which implies that the DM is smart enough to understand such things. Which means that I can’t see this as much more than “the DM’s smart and players are dumb”.  At my most traditional GM-led play, I never had these problems. I would say that if this is how your games tend to go, you should try some different ways to try things out. See if that changes the results. I just finished up a campaign of a game called Spire: The City Must Fall. That game has characters who are incredibly smart and capable. The way the game portrays this is through class abilities. Each class has abilities that allow them to declare things that are true about the world. The scope of these things depends on the class  and ability in question, but I can offer a couple examples. The Knight Class has the ability “Pubcrawler” which allows the player once per session to declare that there is a pub nearby and his character knows the owner. The Vermissian Sage Class has an ability that once per session allows the player to select two NPCs and declare that they’re connected in some way. That’s one way to do it. I’m currently a player in a game of Stonetop, and I’m playing the Judge character, who is a kind of lore keeper/ arbiter. He knows a lot of things and can apply that knowledge in different ways through his playbook abilities. One ability allows him to always know what nearby is tainted by chaos, even when he fails a “Know Things” roll. Many games have elements designed to allow players to portray characters more capable than they are. Fate, Gumshoe, Burning Wheel, Blades in the Dark… many more.</blockquote>

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