First, I want to point out the apparent mixed messages being given to players. We've been told many times that we should "play our stats," and not RP our characters as having abilities/knowledge/characteristics beyond what their stats, substats, and skills allow. From the "help stats" file:
PLAYING TO YOUR STATS
On Sindome, your stats and skills play into what your character is capable of doing in character. First and foremost, Sindome is a roleplaying game and you should endeavor to play to your stats and skills. This means that if your charisma is really bad, your character shouldn't be super friendly or really likable. Playing a likable character without decent charisma is ignoring that your character doesn't have that stat.
Now here we are told "Your stats are not your character's ability. You are." This is a seeming contradiction to the "play your stats" message, not to mention the fundamental essence of roleplaying, i.e., playing a character different from yourself.
With all due respect, I think the staff members need to sit down, talk, and get on the same page about how they really expect players to play this game. Are our characters' abilities and characteristics defined by their stats, or are we supposed to just play them using our own IRL (and potentially OOC) abilities and knowledge?
I am also going to wholeheartedly disagree with this statement:
"A player cannot be better than their real life experience. You cannot say something more charismatic than you are in real life. That's just a limitation of the roleplaying medium."
I do this in RP all the time. For Charisma, I can draw on my imagination, and I can use inspiration and examples from movies, TV, and other media to come up with things for my character to say that I personally would never have the confidence or skill to pull off IRL. But when I slip into a character, the lines come easy and I can pull it off. There is so much more to being charismatic than just knowing what to say; a lot of it is in the delivery, the body language, etc. I can't do it IRL, but I know enough to write for a fictional character who can. Not to mention that in this game, half of the Charisma stat is the Appearance substat, and it's very easy to make a character with a better (or worse) appearance than myself IRL.
And the same thing is true for Intelligence. I don't have to be super smart to play a character who is. No one is asking me to write a master's thesis as my character. Usually it just takes a few creative phrases and comments to convey a character's intelligence, and then the skill rolls do the rest as their actions back up the RP and demonstrate the intelligence. At worst, I might have to do a little bit of online research about a topic related to what my character is supposed to know, just enough to have a rough idea of how things work and to be able to make up a sci-fi/cyberpunk equivalent (which is the beauty of the setting; how things work is all made up anyway, so it's usually not too difficult to make up something else plausible that my character is knowledgeable about, even if I don't have a clue how it works).
So no, I do not believe that a character is limited by their player's real life experience. They are limited by their player's creativity, but that's different. The whole idea of roleplaying is to step outside yourself and play a character with a personality, abilities, skills, and experiences different from your own. Stats and skills are a mechanic most RP games use to help shape and define those characters, and to provide a means of acting beyond a player's own ability; it's their whole purpose. My characters are not me. In some ways, they know more than me, in others they know less. There are things they can't do that I find easy, and feats I could never do that are daily activities for them. Character stats are the guide for this, and creativity is the means to play to those stats.
And on that note, I will reiterate the difficulty of "Playing to Your Stats" as instructed when a major part of those Stats, the Substats, is unknown to the player. Is my character a great looker but can't string two sentences together, a great orator but ugly as sin, or somewhere in between? Whatever they are, I'm supposed to play to it, but I'm not allowed to know it. The end result is I just ignore that those substats exist and play what I want, because I can't possibly act according to something I don't know.