I had a dream last night where I was being chased by young punks bent on beating me up and perhaps killing me. I'm sure that this in no way reflects my subconscious mind's concerns with my getting older. In any case, like one does in dreams, I couldn't move fast enough to keep ahead of them ... though I remember consciously thinking in the dream, "They're not very fast; if I was still young, I could outrun these guys easily."
This got me thinking something peculiar when I woke. Why couldn't I run faster? I could when I was younger, I used to run competitive track. Obviously I have brain cells that remember when I could run faster; it's not like my brain doesn't know what that feels like. And it's not like my legs can't function or my lungs haven't the capacity in a dream to manage it, with that stored information available. What — does my brain think that's air I'm breathing?
Apart from this revisitation of the Matrix, it goes to show that perception is more crippling than logic. We all have the capacity to learn things ... but when we're convinced we can't learn things, we won't even try. We tell ourselves a tale, proving to ourselves that something's simply impossible ... and we will even go the next step and argue that it's impossible for others to do as well, just so we have company.
For example, let's say we have a D&D pundit who wants to argue that the game should be simple. That's common enough. And to make the point, the pundit makes an argument that there's just so much information we can keep in our heads at any one time. And the pundit pulls out a number; something that sounds like a really big number; a number that's just beyond our ability to manage: say, 20,000 things. No one, says the pundit, should have to remember 20,000 things.
Hm. That does sound like a big number.
Of course, I'm writing this in English. And English has about 520,000 words. Most don't use that many ... and still, a typical scholar, someone who works with words, will have a common vocabulary of about 170,000. That's 170,000 words that I expect to "pop into my mind" at a moment's notice, any time I want to express something. It's not like a spend a lot of time pondering each word. What's more, these words all have a peculiar sense, a specific purpose in a specific context ... so that, for example, if I want a word that let's me talk about perspicacity, I have a word that expresses that.
170,000 sounds like a much larger number than 20,000.
Let me try a different example. If you take all the literature that's survived from the end of the Roman Empire, 476 AD backwards to the beginning of human writing, all those books together will fit on one bookcase about six feet high and three feet wide. It is completely possible to start with the first book on your first day of university and finish the last book before starting your fourth year. The number of pages calculates to about 500 an inch, or 85,000 pages. Give or take 25 million words. Yet I didn't have a single classics professor who couldn't remember any passage from any of those books if a student chose to discuss it, having spent their lives entrenched in the material ... and none of those professors considered this very much information to remember. Any history scholar of any time period after the 12th century has a hundred times as much core material to account for; classics profs have it soft.
No? Not convinced that 20,000 is a small number?
Let's consider the original DMG, Players Handbook and Monster Manual. I'm taking those because I'm avoiding people set to complain about how many splatbooks exist for the later editions. Altogether, those three books consist of about 420 pages. I can't be bothered to count ... and anyway, at least a score of pages are publishing filler and have nothing to do with the game.
Every meaningful page has about 400 words on it; a mere 160,000 words. On the whole, it takes the books about 100 words to say something really meaningful that ought to be remembered, which is only 1,600 things. Not very many.
Still, there is a great deal the books don't talk about. There's nothing about the nature of weapons, or how to put together the castle parts you're given, or anything about proper mapmaking, what an environment looks like, how lanterns, ropes, ships and wagons work, how to harness a horse, how to fix a wagon wheel, what an "artisan" is, what people do with their day, how governments or even cities function, or religion, or magic for that matter, past a few broad strokes. If you want to describe anything to your players with a semblance of detail, you've got to look beyond the core books, digging through libraries and the internet, watching obscure and often bad films, documentaries, reading novels and history books ... and with or without your awareness, the number of "things" you begin to learn pile up. Pretty soon you find yourself dredging through the pages on Stack Exchange or Reddit and, wow, no matter what the people here talk about, you know a little about that! It's like you're just gathering all this crap together in your head, and keeping it there without really trying. Sure enough, someone mentions the Village of Hommlet and bang, right there, you can practically draw the village map from memory and argue about the best means to reveal the module's dark secret to the players. Come on ... there's got to be at least 300 pieces of information related to Hommlet alone. Just look at the shelves of modules and game designs that people collect and pridefully show off on the net!
You can't tell me that 20,000 things is a lot to remember. It just isn't. What's more, you must have some measure of how much useless information you keep rattling around in your head, just from the fucking dreams you have.
You know, one of my players will say, constantly, that "the rules don't matter if you have a good story". He can't be bothered to read any rules (though he will, of course, complain about the rules when things don't go his way). He audibly groaned when I announced I was about to keep stricter control over encumbrance (needless to say, he had been the biggest abuser of my "just use common sense" approach). He says that he likes "cinematic combat" (which I absolutely hate because out of the already many different functions of a DM, improv choreographer shouldn't be one of them). He once asked me, after taking a job from an NPC, if that was "the main quest or just a side quest".
ReplyDeleteThe point I'm trying to make is that this disdain of the rules seems to be, more often than not, connected to this insidious understanding as RPGs as storytelling games. It now attracts a type of player who isn't really interested in properly engaging with the game unless it involves playacting, hence "Who needs rules? Rules get in the way of FUN! There are only two rules: rule zero and rule of AWESOME! Refer to Matt Mercer if you have any other questions."
D&D (or "the game") is now a lifestyle brand they get to tack onto their identity. They see guidelines such as "you should take the rules and make them your own" and read it as "the rules don't matter", which is convenient because learning rules requires reading and reading requires concentration and social media is little by little eroding our attention spans.
I recall reading that we can't punch, run, etc in dreams not because our brains don't remember the sensation, but because while asleep the brain lacks the haptic feedback from your arms and legs actually moving. One theory, anyway.
ReplyDeleteThing is, we aren't really remembering 20,000 individual things anyway. It's more like the brain networks it out and strings everything together in a web: you pull one thread and a hundred more follow it. Speaking of dreams, I've read also that this may be an important function, to catalog all the "stuff" you know efficiently. One theory, anyway.
Isn't that sweet, Calvin? Takes thousands of hours of person-labour to make something appear believably "cinematic" on screen ... and a D&D player co-opts the word to mean "make shit up."
ReplyDeleteI hesitate to say that social media is shortening our attention spans, personally. More like, the sort of person who was never going to read anything now has a million libraries at their fingertips every day, and still doesn't read anything.
ReplyDeleteOur hobby is more common, and that means that more "common" people play instead of it being a really niche thing for niche people. Is that good? Maybe, if it means that it can subsidize more content that fits your particular niche.
The most popular commercial board game ever is Monopoly, and pretty much everyone plays it wrong in a way that makes it a much, much worse game than it already is. I'm willing to say that D&D has something of the same thing going on.
I don't think I can convince the average monopoly player to play Hansa Teutonica any more than I think I could convince the average D&D gamer to upgrade their play to something more substantial. I just want to do it for me.
I'm excited to know how people play Monopoly "wrong." I'm sure they do, but I want to know in what way?
ReplyDeleteI believe Pandred means the popular house rule involving placing all the money from fines, taxes, and similar (money that would otherwise be removed from play) under Free Parking, and whoever lands there gets all of it.
ReplyDeleteOf course, one could also argue that playing Monopoly at all is a wrong move
On the Monopoly question, I'm sure Pandred is referring to the common "house rule" of putting all the money paid to the bank from Community Chest and Chance cards in the middle of the board and awarding the money in the middle of the board to whoever lands on Free Parking at the end of a move. It makes a long elimination game even longer by letting players sputter on the edge of bankruptcy instead of just going bankrupt.
ReplyDeleteMy mom and uncles used to play that way as kids, but it was axed pretty quickly when they introduced our generation to the game.
Tax Money on Park Place. Not Auctioning a property when it isn't purchased. Upgrading straight to a Hotel when there are no more houses to purchase (houses are limited in number, and you can't upgrade from 0,1,2,or 3 houses straight to Hotel, you MUST buy a 4th house. If the houses are gone, tough luck).
ReplyDeleteBy putting a ton of extra money into the game and not auctioning property a game that should be over in an hour or two can become a six to eight hour grindfest that doesn't improve or change much from the first hour of play.
And yet, because everyone learned to play these ways from friends and family, it is by far the most common way to play.
You get around a "hard" mechanic like auctioning that's in some small way skill-testing, they avoid a "feel bad" from not being able to upgrade, or running out of money too fast. People like not losing.
Except those feel bad moments are how the game progresses. By eliminating all the points of failure, the game just keeps going and going and nobody wins, so everybody loses in the long run.
So you get to hear about how "board games are boring" even though you can be reasonably sure that most people's experience is by playing a game that isn't very good to begin with using house rules that make it explicitly worse.
You know, exactly like D&D.