You don't have to have a trait, but you do have to be able to understand it. If you're normally fairly silent and private, you won't have an easy time playing a gossiper. We're not saying its impossible, but we do think it'll be more challenging to play than a trait you have/understand fully.

our characters tend to have traits that overlap ours, but they are not carbon copies of our own traits.

When we play with traits like intelligence, we provide the character with a better understanding of how things work, give them a more natural understanding of knowledge that is partially OoC. But it can be even more fun to give characters misunderstandings of such. like seeing a series of facts, and making it so that two plus two equals five.