OK, this is going to be very brief, because every second of spare time I have is devoted to looking at cute cat gifs on Buzzfeed writing Rogue Planet.

I’ve commented, often, that the perception of AD&D as being “rules light” has more to do with how many of the rules are ignored, vs. what playing the rules would actually be like. D&D 3e, and its successors, didn’t so much add in “restrictions” as provide rules for actions that were generally playable and well-integrated into the system. (As a simple comparison, using the unarmed combat rules in AD&D required information that, in many cases, the system didn’t provide — such as whether the hobgoblin you’re fighting was wearing a nasal helmet or not. No, I am not making that up. Go check your AD&D 1e DMG.)

Over time, the conflation of “how we played AD&D” with “how AD&D was actually written” has become so great that some people a)Get outraged when I point out, with quotes and page references, that they’re wrong, and b)Insist, and I swear upon whatever shreds of honor and self-esteem I have left that this is a near-virtual paraphrase, not in any way a distortion of meaning, “Playing AD&D by the rules was contrary to the rules.”.

Anyway, there’s a moment of faux-outrage going on over at Gizmodo over some new edition of Monopoly. What’s interesting and relevant is the comments thread, where there’s a debate over whether you collect rent while in jail. Many people insisted, loudly, that you don’t, and that anyone who says otherwise “playing wrong”. Sorry, no. Other way around. The RAW for Monopoly have always said you collect rent while in Jail. Not collecting rent in Jail is a house rule so common, people have confused it with the real rules, which they never read. The game is taught mostly by oral tradition, just like D&D was back in Ye Olde Dayse.

Before I discovered D&D, I was a big Monopoly fan. I bought books on Monopoly strategy — yes, they existed — and memorized various tables on the odds of landing on different squares. (Boardwalk/Park Place are for suckers. The violet-tan-red sequence is the best intersection of probability and ROI.) I took great delight in bringing up the letter of the rules when dealing with those who didn’t know them. (For example, other than in the early game, there’s no good reason to “get out of Jail” early — having three turns where there’s no risk of landing on someone else’s property, while you still collect rent, is great. Remember that, and get some sucker to pay you good money for your GOOJF card.)

Anyway, my point, such as it is, is how the same patterns of behavior assert themselves in countless contexts. People rarely verify their memory against source documents, and often act irrationally when confronted with the conflict — as if being human is a moral failing. The human brain evolved for a much more soft-edged world than ours. Our storage and retrieval mechanisms are “good enough”, because there’s rapidly diminishing returns in increasing accuracy at the cost of speed and storage space. Human memory is very fallible, and the more you reference a distorted memory, the more reinforced the neural pattern that contains it becomes. I suspect that people’s often hostile reaction to being shown that they’re wrong is due to the brain, in essence, protecting its investment in false information. It’s spent a lot of energy digging those neural channels, and to be told that it needs to tear them all up and start over triggers a “double down” reaction. (This is also why, the more implausible and ridiculous something gets, from conspiracy theories to Nigerian scammers to Ponzi schemes, the more fervently people believe. The brain, much like a con artist caught in a lie, can’t just admit the lie, and so frantically piles on one lie after another — except that it’s itself it’s lying to.)

Humanity is badly broken, and there’s no patch forthcoming.

Patch is not yet available. Please check back.