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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6747827" data-attributes="member: 6775031">Is it satisfying for anyone when the Wizard repeatedly fails to remember any clues in an investigation, and can't solve the simplest of puzzles, only for the Paladin or Barbarian to repeatedly save the day? Because in my book, that's bad role-playing; the dumb character shouldn't be shown to reliably out-think the smart character. Ability scores actually should mean something. And I know that I'm not alone in this, because they talk about it all the time over on Happy Jacks RPG Podcast, even calling out the (relatively common) method of making an Int check to decide whether a character is smart enough to come up with an idea that the player has.I get that this isn't the way Gygax handled it, but he was very up-front about challenging the players rather than their characters. That was back before meta-gaming was even a thing. There was no concept of the character as a distinct entity, within the fiction, with its own knowledge-base. Characters didn't have personalities, or even really names. (Seriously, this was back when you could get away with the name of Melf for your Male Elf character.)Ever since the late eighties, at least, it's become an expectation that Thou Shalt Not Meta-Game; the player is to approach all decisions from the perspective of the character, using the knowledge and personality of that character, and ignoring information that the player has which the character does not. That's what I mean when I say that the player doesn't exist, because as far as everyone at the table is concerned, for the purposes of how you play the character and what decisions he or she makes, nothing about the player matters at all. It doesn't matter whether you're a stand-up comedian in real life, or if you could personally design and build an automated crossbow turret, because your character only possesses the abilities listed on (or extrapolated from) the sheet.</blockquote>

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