Quote Originally Posted by Crake View Post
You don't need 30 intelligence to come up with an idea, and likewise, having 30 intelligence doesn't mean you're guaranteed to come up with a great idea. A fighter with 10 int is perfectly plausible in coming up with decent ideas, and yes, the point is that narrative power comes from player ability. There's literally no way for mechanics to actually provide narrative power, because that comes from creativity and decision making, something that the rules can't give you.
The average Fighter with Int 10 has 0 ranks in any knowledge skills. That means they know only 'common knowledge.' They have no understanding of monster abilities they haven't personnaly experienced, they don't know how fortifications work, they do not understand advanced tactics, and because they don't have any ranks in Spot or Listen, they have any situational awareness worth a d*** either. A 3.5 fighter plausibly knows how to climb walls, maintain their weapons and armor, train a dog, look fearsome, making a running leap, ride a horse, and swim. That is the some total of things they know how to do. Everything else requires cross-class skills and if therefore implausible. Yes, this includes a wide range of concepts, such as: recognizing the traits of common non-human opponents (various knowledges), leading small squad combats (diplomacy and gather information), serving as a sentry (Spot and Listen), choosing which loot to carry off a corpse (appraise), launching a surprise attack (move silently), etc. that they don't have the skills to viably do, and don't have the skill points to support doing even if they did. You know who does have most of those skills? The Aristocrat NPC class. The aristocrat is far better at producing a viable quasi-medieval trained soldier than either the fighter or the warrior. Meanwhile a Wizard, or any other Int-based character, has a huge bonus to all Int based skill checks, and has the spare points to take a whole bunch of them. A Wizard with Int of 30 has a nice shiny +10 to any Int-based skill check, meaning they can put 1 rank into any Int-based skill and Take 10 for a 21, which is pretty nice, and there are a lot of Int-based skills.

Oh, and an optimized Fighter doesn't have Int 10. Int is a Fighter dump stat, and you can very easily play a Fighter or Barbarian with Int 6, all you're losing is some skill points, and that's not much of a loss since you've got no good skills anyway. At Int 6, no, it isn't plausible to come up with good ideas.

Mechanics absolutely can, and do provide narrative power. At the simplest level the mechanical power to brutally murder all other members of the party at your whim translates into the narrative power to make said party do whatever you want. This isn't very nice and is a gameplay no-no, but it absolutely is power. On the opposite side the power to completely ignore threats that could utterly slaughter other party members also provides narrative power, specifically the power to ignore those threats and move on without wasting time, which is a mechanical power that the GM is forced to adjust the narrative to accordingly or by cheating outright. This is a common issue in superhero games wherein one character often literally cannot be harmed by levels of damage that instantly kill other members of the party. In such a situation the GM is forced to cheat and have certain enemies only attack certain party members or accept that one player will be completely immune to damage for the entirety of the campaign, and if you actually read or watch comics you can see this sort of blatant cheating in action all the time.