To LARP or not to LARP

Picture me standing in a small church hall. Scattered in front of me are about a dozen people sitting on cheap fold-away chairs. They‘re looking up at me with their tired, dead eyes and I know that they’re waiting for me to speak, that they’re not here to judge me, but still they need to hear the words that I have to say.

I open my mouth but no words come out. Taking a sip of water from the plastic cup in my hand I clear my throat and try again. Still, no words and this is beginning to seem more and more unreal, like a nightmare come true. Once more I try to speak and finally, in a voice that is weak and shaking, it happens.

“My name is Roy and I’m a Larper.”

Okay, none of that should be taken literally and I think that it may require some explanation as well. LARP – what is it good for? Who knows. Anyway, LARP or Live Action Role Play is a hobby which I have been involved with in some fashion or other for about half my life now and I have a love / hate relationship with it. I go through phases when it’s my main pastime and then I go through phases when it strikes me as being slightly ridiculous.

LARP is a form of role-playing where instead of sitting around a table and rolling dice or frantically pushing buttons in front of a game console you get dressed up as your chosen character and go and live as that character for a short length of time. You enter into a make-believe world with a group of like-minded people and you do your best to grow and prosper in this world. There are rules and guidelines that you have to follow, but to a large degree you are free to act as you see fit.

Yup, it is Cowboys and Indians for grown-ups. Although grown-up may not be quite the correct word for us. There are many genres or types of LARP game, everything from the afore-mentioned Wild West to Vampire, Middle Earth, futuristic, horror and pretty much anything you can think of.

Those who have any kind of opinion on LARP tend to be divided into two separate camps. On one side of the cloth fence that has been painted to look like a stone wall are those that love it. They view it as being the highest form of role-play, a way to express your creative side, to deal with problems that you would never face in your real life and to push your imagination as far as it can possibly go. It promotes both team work and lateral thinking, it is an environment where people from all kinds of social background can mingle on an equal footing and it is good, clean, healthy fun.

The other view is a bit less complex, basically all Larpers are socially inept losers who try to escape from their sad lives by wearing stupid costumes and hitting each other with rubber swords.

My view is somewhere between the two. LARP can be a lot of fun but it has more than its fair share of people who take it way too seriously. The mix of people involved always impresses me. On one side of the coin there are the highly creative types who love to experience a small slice of life from the viewpoint of someone other than themselves, and then you have the less socially skilled types who do believe that pretending to be someone else is the only way that they have to really experience life at all. And of course the vast majority of us fit somewhere in-between those two extremes.

For the last year or so I’ve had very little to do with LARP in any form and I’m beginning to get withdrawal symptoms from it. I used to play in the Lorien Trust gaming system, a huge event where people from all over the country got together, and in a few different local Vampire games, mainly Embraced. The Vampire games tended to be higher quality than the national games, but when you see the same people at every game things can grow stale.

I enjoy the side of LARP that lets you push yourself, lets you learn a bit more about yourself and lets you deal with problems and situations that you are never going to face anywhere else. How often do you have to find a way to stop a Demon Lord from gathering sacred artefacts and raising an army of mindless zombies in your normal office job? Okay, the mindless zombies bit may have a bit of a cross over, but you know what I mean.

So, I’m looking into going back to LARP, at least in a small way. Time to get back in touch with old friends, or at least adventuring companions and see what world needs to be saved this week.

Or, of course, I might go along to one event and realise that I stopped playing for a very valid reason.

Time to roll the dice and see what happens. (Not really, we don’t use dice in LARP, that’s the whole point. Oh, you understood what I meant. Sorry, just didn’t want there to be any misunderstanding. Okay, yes, I’ll shut up now.)

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