Please Don't Be . . . - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/21/factions

I can't remember the comedian that was talking about it, but they were saying that any time they hear about someone stupid in the news/media, they just start chanting to themselves, "Please, don't be black, don't be black, don't be black, please. . ." and then it turns out to be a black guy who did it, and they just rage.

In that same realm, any time that I hear about anything coming out of Utah, the first thing that I start thinking about is, "Please don't be about polygamy, please don't be about polygamy. . ." a close runner up is, "Please don't be about extremist outlying mormons, please don't be about extremist outlying mormons. . ."

Unfortunately, this episode of This American Life, starts off with the worst of those, and talks about 'fundamental' Mormons in Utah who believe in polygamy, and also sharing the bed with more wife at the same time, and to top that all of they are a special flavor of bonkers, but only slightly bonkers compared to actual Mormon belief traditions. Just let it be said here before I move on to what I actually want to write about, that we're not all like them. There is a reason that the crazies shown in this show are excommunicated and completely removed from the actual church.

Onto the actual topic of the whole deal - factions.

Unlike the people on the show, I don't have any religious factions that I've had to deal with, I don't have much of any factions at work or in social connections, so I'm sort of at a loss to where factions would even come into my life and when I've been deep into the world of factions, but then I remembered, the tried and true faction causing game - Dungeons and Dragons.

What you don't know about D&D players is that they get deadly related to their characters  and what they create. Being a GM for players means that you have to make a game that challenges the players, but also makes them work together as a team, while also falling more in love with the characters that they are palying as. The problem with this is that ocasionally, you try to add a new player into the mix and lines are firmly drawn in the sand and factions are made.

The problem to this is that new players screw everything up. Up to that point, your group is set. You have whatever you have, sometimes it isn't even balanced, sometimes it's totally broken and needs more people in it to make it work (five fighters? There's nothing wrong with that!), but the group has been through some hard times together and they've learned to work together as a group. But then comes in the new person, or people, and you might as well have just given them a boss monster that has a real life person sitting on the other side of them.

The first time that this happened was with a guy back in high school. He was a transfer student that had moved from the UK to Las Vegas, and through talking to people he found out that we had a group, and wanted to join. But the problem was that he was SUPER high brow about his play and super duper into what he was doing. He knew the lore, and he knew exactly what he wanted, but it was just too much, so the group, without any prodding from me, sabatoged and got rid of him in one or two game sessions.

Then came the big one - boy scouts.

Most of my old D&D group were in scouts with me, and we would play ocasionally on camp outs and what not. One time our leaders said that they wanted to play, as well as the other boys who were not in the group,  so characters were drawn up and we flipped the story around and forced the groups together of those new players, and the origional group. Things were going well. . . until one guy realized that he was male, and that another guy in the group (the old well played group) was a girl, so he tried to flirt.

Things started to go down hill from the guy on guy playing as guy on girl flirting, a slap turned into a punch, which turned into a sword, which turned into spells being cast, which turned into a beat down, drag out, five on five match of the gladiators with the group worried more about killing each other, hunting each other down, and trying to survive the attacks from the other group, than they were about any story line, and I was stuck trying to GM the entire fight between one faction and the other, constantly reminding them that they could in fact do whatever they wanted, which typically lead to whoever just asked doing something completely ridiculous.

I mean, this fiasco of group versus group went on for an entire night. Jokes about it, insults about it, and references to it, went on for years afterwards. In fact I'm pretty sure if we got the right people together I could reference the fight, and they would be able to fill in just about every insult, comment, and flirting song that was sung from one person to the other. That's the weird part about D&D. It's totally made up, it's not real, it's played with DICE and a PENCIL, and yet somehow the stories that people play in those D&D games can be so memorable that people can remember them YEARS afterwards and remember them better than their own life.