In the Savage Sword of Conan comics, there was a story in which Conan and a caravan he happened to be traveling withis ambushed by an army of Lovecraftian aberrations. These ghoulish attackers subdue the caravan's guards, and eventually even Conan himself. Conan is thrown to the bottom of a pit that's serving as a mass grave. The story begins with him forcing his way out of the pit, through the earth, past dead bodies, and despite his many wounds. It's a impossible and implausible feat, even for Conan, but it's a surprisingly effective and powerful scene. It's also the sequence that made me realise that in speculative fiction (SF), physical attributes are often a metaphor for a character's willpower and charisma.
Speculative fiction has been around long enough now for there to be the odd character study that happens to be set in a fantasy world, but generally it's a genre with a strong focus on adventure. The hero has a quest or a mission, or some kind of goal that seems unobtainable. Character development usually happens, by degrees, but speculative fiction isn't known for its character studies. In this format, an author doesn't exactly have the tools to convey a character's sense of justice through intellectual debate. Instead, a character demonstrates a sense of justice to the reader by performing some action that other characters in the book acknowledge is just. It's the old rule of show-don't-tell, and because it's often done in shorthand there's room for a lot of it in relatively few chapters. You get a lot of data about characters in just a single speculative fiction story, because every action a character takes aligns with an archetype.
Tabletop and video games often share this speculative fiction shorthand. It's difficult to provide players with the tools to express the complexity of a game character's thought process. It's easier to give a player a binary choice, and then to extrapolate archetypal meaning from that. Given the choice between sneaking past some guards and killing them, the player who chooses to sneak is assumed to prefer subterfuge to violence, while the player who chooses battle is assumed to prefer violence. Given the choice between arresting an NPC for stealing bread and helping an NPC steal bread, one player is assumed to be lawful and the other chaotic. And if you want to give players the opportunity to assert ownership and dominance over the game world, then you hand them a weapon and have a bunch of baddies threaten their lives.
The problem with a metaphor is that it is, by design, indirect. It's easy to mistake Conan clawing his way out of a premature grave as a feat of brute strength and not as a force of will. It's easy to mistake a character slaughtering a dozen men as mass murder and not as a strong sense of justice. In fact, it takes extra mental effort to reinterpret a metaphor as something other than what it obviously actually is. It's a hard problem to get around though, because comics are a visual medium and it's more interesting to see people doing things that people talking about things. Games are an active hobby, and using game tokens and miniatures to represent physical strategy is easier than using them to represent philosophical insight.
One of the most fascinating experiments of game design in Pathfinder 1st edition were the social interaction rules of the Ultimate Intrigue source book. In chapter 4 of Ultimate Intrigue, there are rules for literal verbal combat. In the system, each side of a debate (a player on one side, an NPC controlled by the GM on the other side) gains a number of Determination points at the start of the battle of wit. By using pre-defined Tactics (and rolling dice in hopes of success, of course), you chip away at your opponent's Determination until you've reduced them to 0. It was a fascinating, and I think undervalued, method for demonstrating a character's force of will without resorting to metaphors. There's abstraction so that players don't have to come up with the actual arguments their characters are meant to be using in their debate, but there's no confusion about what's meant to be happening in the game world. It's a verbal debate, not physical combat, and it's a good and mostly literal indication of determination and willpower and belief. Because there are game mechanics involved, there's a chance for success and failure, and this provides the tension we'd expect from a game.
Whether it's a fair substitute for pretend combat is another question.
Aside from violence and feats of strength or acrobatics being cultural short hand for excellence of character (or maybe because of it), it's fun to imagine a character doing something that we find impossible. That's one of the greatest appeals of a fictional world, after all. In speculative fiction, the impossible is possible. It feels satisfying to roll higher numbers on dice, and to have allotted more points to just the right skill for a maximum bonus to those rolls. But it's quite not the same when you imagine 2 people having an intellectual debate and 2 people dueling with rapiers.
Brute force is an inherently willful thing. Luckily, in the real world, many of us refrain from using. In a fictional world, you don't have to refrain. Your enemy in a fictional world exists only to be manipulated. You can pretend like the enemy doesn't exist just as easily as you can pretend that you're hitting them over the head with a warhammer. It doesn't matter the method you use, and the message is unmistakable. You were better than your enemy, because you out-willed them, by force of will. How that force of will is represented, in stories or games, is an interesting thing to notice, and I think it can be an interesting thing to experiment with. I'm not sure there ever will be a better representation than combat, and that's probably due to deeply sociological and psychological topics I'm nowhere near qualified to ponder. Still, looking at systems that manipulate the settings of those tropes can be a lot of fun.