Narrative Permission
People can do a lot of different things and RPGs are usually not concerned with making up rules for every single possible action anyone could take.
There are some actions that are neither so common that it can be reasonably assumed that anyone can do them nor are they something that the game system concerns itself with.
Languages and artistic skills are pretty common examples that less complex systems usually don’t bother with. In cases like this, your background could give you the narrative permission to use these skills.
For example, if your Scoundrel character in Thirsty Sword Lesbians is a musician you have the narrative permission to play a song to impress the Baroness while other characters might not. Functionally, you are still just rolling +Heart for an Entice move, but you can flavour it differently.
Another type of narrative permission can be found in Call of Cthulhu.
While your skills are obviously mostly there so you can roll skillchecks, they can also grant various kinds of narrative permissions.
For example, while regular driving explicitly doesn’t require a skill check, you’re (usually) still going to require narrative permission through skill investment to drive anything that isn’t a car. For example, if you want to drive around in some kind of construction vehicle like an excavator, you’re gonna need a couple of skill points in heavy machenery, even if you don’t need to roll to drive it (again, assuming regular driving. If you’re in a desperate fight against a dark young and try to hit it with an excavator despite not having any experience controlling one, go ahead and roll for it)
High levels in skills can also give you narrative permission to know a guy. An average investigator probably isn’t going to know any professors of physics but if you have a high education stat, you might know someone.
Equipment in CoC is also mostly done through narrative permission. While you might name some important items explicitly during character creation, most possesions in the game are handled by asking “Would it be reasonable for someone like this to have this?”
Does the 1920s student own a truck capable of transporting a bunch of crates full of evidence? Probably not. Does the 1930s smuggler? Of course.
In ICON, there are many cases where narrative permission plays an interesting role.
Obviously they only matter for narrative play because in tactical combat, what you can and can’t do is pretty strictly defined. However, your abilities in tactical combat can influence your narrative permissions.
A spellblade with various teleport abilities has narrative permission to teleport. Depending on the GM, this may increase effect or decrease risk on some Traverse checks, or it might even remove the need for them entirely.
But this can only get you so far. If you didn’t put any points in Smash, no amount of arguing about being a Collossus who can do all kinds of cool Smash-adjacent things in combat is going to make it so you have more than 0 Smash in narrative. You need to select your narrative skills in a way that supports the fantasy of your character, including their tactical combat fantasy.
Also there is your narrative gear, which isn’t supposed to represent every single piece of equipment your character posses, just the stuff that really matters, and which broadly falls into two categories: Things that are listed there so you don’t have to argue about whether you have it (e.g. light sources, rations, a tent) and things that are supposed to inspire you (e.g. single-use flash bomb, copious sweets)
Both exist to grant you narrative permissions, but the first category is more about making sure you have narrative permissions you probably would have had anyway in a system without gear tracking (such as previous editions of ICON), the second category can actually expand your narrative permissions or give you new ideas for things to do.
Without your gear explicitly mentioning you have these things you might have never even gotten the idea of using a flash bomb to escape the guards, or use sweets to calm down a child. But even if you had gotten the idea on your own, explicitly calling out that you have these things can save a lot of time on trying to convince your GM that you have them.
However, the flipside to this is that having a gear system like this makes the gaps stand out more. I keep bringing up not having to convince your GM that you have something, but if there is something that you feel like you should have but that isn’t listed in your gear, the existence of the gear system might make it harder to convince them that you should have it.
The system is an interesting middle ground between gearing systems that make you track everything you have (e.g. dnd 5e) and one that barely makes you track anything (e.g. CoC)
Are there any intersting examples of narrative permission you know?