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.
