[@Bishop] and that's the difference between, what is in my opinion, good writing and bad writing. 

If you write 'Bob uses his tracking skills to track the bandits' what is my character gonna do? You didn't describe [i]anything[/i] except that he did tracking. What is he doing, tasting shit that bandits left behind? Looking at their bootprints with a magnifying glass? IDK, not a lot to respond to with [i]my[/i] character. So all I can say is 'my character watches Bob track'. Nice. Good post.

And yes I was talking about intellect, which I stated kinda. But it wasn't very clear. Even so I disagree. I am a martial artist myself (woe me, I hate saying that, but I have a black belt so I suppose I know a thing or two about my respective martial arts style, so just ignore the air of arrogance that sentence causes and bear with me). The amount of shit I've seen written because a character was a supposed genius has me shaking my head in displeasure. Just because he's a genius doesn't mean the way you write him is immediately sensical.

[i]Calling him[/i] a genius is not the same as him actually showing traits of a genius. [i]Telling[/i] is worse than [i]showing.[/i] It's writing theory 101. The only time telling is more acceptable than showing is in free roleplay, when you can't be arsed writing a paragraph explaining the details of what you are doing. Any other time it is, again in my humble opinion as I am not the perfect roleplay, impermissible. 

It's the equivalent of calling yourself a genius of martial arts when you don't understand a thing about it, and then trying to do a crane kick in real life. It's just silly, it doesn't work, and it makes you look like a moron. The same goes for you as a writer. Don't pose your character as a master of chemistry and then say he 'mixes together some fluids' and creates gold. That's just silly.

But coming back to the original point, yes I was referring to intellect. I do believe 100% that if you are not a genius, you cannot accurately play a genius without powergaming, metagaming or godmoding. If your way of playing a ultra-perceptive character is to metagame in information to show off how perceptive he is, you're a bad roleplayer and you should feel bad.