Sometimes it’s difficult to separate what the player knows from what the character knows. The reverse can also be true, in a manner of speaking. There are going to be times when the character would have certain knowledge or information that the player would never ever know themselves. This is just part of how the game works. You have to accept it if you’re going to play RPGs.
When it comes to combat there’s rarely any concern between the separation of player and character knowledge. Combat has clearly defined mechanics that involve a lot of dice. It doesn’t matter that I’m not proficient with a great sword, if my PC has the appropriate proficiency then the mechanics account for that and I keep on rolling my dice.
Where this becomes more troublesome is outside of combat. During the non-combat parts of role-playing games players have to be more mindful of separating what they can do from what their character can do. This situation can be troublesome when playing characters with exceptionally high ability scores or playing characters with exceptionally low ability scores.
During the past couple of weeks I’ve come face to face with this conundrum. I’ve been working on some articles about traps and puzzles for Dungeon’s Master with Dungeonmaster Johnny, one of our new contributors. He’s come up with some fantastic ideas. However many of his puzzles challenge the players and not the characters. I personally enjoy a good brain teaser, but I don’t want to spend an hour of real-time while the real-life me tries to figure out how to escape from a trapped room. I’d prefer to have a way to solve a puzzle that involves at least some mechanics that relate to my PC’s numbers.
This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with challenging the players. It all depends on what kind of game you enjoy. Both approaches have merit and both have drawbacks, as we’ll discus below.