Snake Snake Whale, Bear Moth Owl
I spent the day playing Skyrim.
I made it through the Dawnguard quests with Serana "helping" along the way. A vampire princess who is hundreds of years old can't one shot a random bandit but the rat hermit who has been living off skeevers in a cave for six months nearly kills us both. I love this game.
When I add bits like this to my story people will read it and get upset that it's not "realistic". "That's not how it should work in the story." Yeah, but that's how it works in games.
I once put a bit in my hacker thriller where the MC goes into an office to gain access to an adversaries computer. Just for kicks she flips the keyboard upside down and low and behold there is a yellow post it with the users password written down. In a book this would not happen. The readers won't like it, not because its an obvious thing to check for but because then our MC doesn't have to try. She isn't challenged at all and the key bit of info just falls in her lap. In the story she has to prove to us that she is better than other red team employees by doing things that are impossible - like guessing a password before the computer locks out. But we as readers don't want that either because that's not realistic. What has to happen is that she just installs the keylogger and gets the password the next day remotely. It takes longer to set up but the MC is validated in the way she does her job.
But in a game you are HOPING to find the password that easily. You run up and click on everything in the room in hopes that you can progress quickly. With my RPG story I can use the concept of easy to solve puzzles to my advantage. In Skyrim whenever you enter a room with a puzzle the answers are typically shown somewhere on the walls or in a journal or some other place that isn't exactly hard to find. The game wants you to progress easily. Readers on the other hand don't want that in a story.
There are several times so far that the MC's stats come into play in a way that is shown during interactions with other characters. The wizard will say something that the MC doesn't quite understand that the reader will get instantly. Early on you find out that the MC has high STR and low INT, she doesn't use magic at all but the disparity is shown when she misunderstands something. During a fight two party members will explain exactly how to fight a monster using specific tactics and abilities. She loses track of the order of what part of the monster to attack and just fights it head on, only winning because she was strong enough to kill it before taking too many hits. This keeps her from becoming an "all knowing", "chosen hero", "smarter than the stats" borderline Mary Sue character.
The last thing I need is people dropping the book in the first chapter because the characters are acting like they are lvl 99 from the start. They have to have limits so they can tap into on the expertise of others in the story, just like in real life.