Live-Action Role-Playing

Live-Action Role-Playing, also known as LARPing, seems to have enjoyed a rather steady popularity for decades now, though always in something of a fringe group. And that's a fringe group to the already on-the-edges group of people who tend to like to role-play in other, more conventional ways, like through tabletop Dungeons & Dragons games, or any other venue. Because of this, I've seen something of a social stigma against those who do enjoying LARPing, as though because they're more on the outside of the social spectrum than the normal "geeks", they're even weirder somehow.

Attitudes like this, along with the notion that some people still associate any kind of role-playing with some sort of induction into a Satanic cult, are the reason that members of my local Camarilla group (a group of LARPers who play in White Wolf's "World of Darkness" games") are told to tell people not that they do live-action role-play, but rather that they belong to an amateur acting group. After all, if some people believe that rolling dice on a table can bring you a step closer to being evil, how much worse must it be when you actually spend your time immersing yourself in the character and acting like them, rather than just dictating their actions.

But seeing as how role-playing does not actually seek to indict people into secret evil societies and teach them how to use magics to take over the world, LARPing can be a very fun pastime, if you find the right group of people to do it with.

While LARPing does involve physically acting out what your character is doing, there are rules involved that protect the players. If two characters are having a brawl, for example, the players don't walk away from the game covered in bruises. And since a lot of role-playing games also involve magic systems of some kind, there are some things that just can't happen when playing, owing to the fact that we can't typically cast fireballs at our enemies or levitate ourselves away from them at a critical moment. Actions like these are usually done more in a traditional way, by describing the character's actions to the game-master (the person who is running the game, responsible for moving the plot along and keeping the rules in place), moving, perhaps, in the way their character moves, but not actually coming into contact with any other players.

In fact, something I'd learned from my local Camarilla group was that in-game touching was typically a no-no, unless one player asked the other in advance whether it was okay. This not only lowered any chance of accidental injuries among players, but also ensured that people who didn't feel comfortable with making physical contact with other people could stay within their comfort zone while still enjoying the game. If a character needed or wanted to touch another character when their players weren't comfortable with physically acting out that part, one might say, "My character hugs yours," rather than an actual hug taking place. It worked to everyone's advantage.

A friend of mine is one who finds role-playing to be very therapeutic as well as a fun hobby. When things in life get to be a bit stressful, she enjoys being able to take a step back from everyday mundane problems and to get involved in a role-playing campaign, where not only does she get to spend a few hours being somebody else, she also gets to be placed in a setting where there are problems that she can play in integral part in helping to solve. Being able to solve a problem, even a fictional one, is helpful for her.

LARPing, for some people who can find the same sort of thing helpful, can take things a step further. It can be a bit more immersive, take you a step further in "becoming" the characters as in order to properly act them out, you have to get into their mind a little more than you might if you were just dictating your actions to people sitting around a table. In some ways this does make the group you LARP with an amateur acting group, people who act out the scenes as if in a play or a TV show for nothing more than the love of getting into a character. Heck, I've seen some LARPers with more acting skill than some professional actors, and the way they throw themselves into their characters, complete with costumes, voice changes, the whole shebang, is quite amazing.

A problem can arise when people start to have difficulty remembering to separate themselves from the characters they're playing. This can be a problem when role-playing any character, but in the more immersive world or live-action role-playing, the way the game draws a person in can make it easier for some people to get a little lost in the moment, so to speak. (Typically the people who have this problem are ones that would have the same problem even in a tabletop RP setting, so it is not exclusive to LARPing.) If one character seriously dislikes another character, sometimes those negative emotions can spill over into interactions between the players themselves, which can strain social relationships if people aren't careful.

Or things can go in reverse. If two players dislike each other under normal circumstances, it's more likely than not that their characters will dislike each other on sight and be unable to interact properly. Which this is a much more understandable reaction (it means the players are keeping themselves separate enough from the characters to have all their old biases in mind), sometimes it can make for awkward role-playing when those two characters are forced into a situation where they must get along, or at least work together and tolerate each other for a time.

This, however, can have unexpected benefits. In making the characters have to work together, old player problems can be put aside for a while, and it might help the players themselves become more used to each other and able to interact in the mundane world. I've seen cases of this. They're unfortunately less common than the opposite happening, but it still occurs enough to be worthy of note.

But as much as LARPing tends to be seen as something to be enjoyed by a tiny fringe group, it's appeal is much more widespread when it comes in a slightly different flavour, so to speak. While most people think of LARPing as something done within specific role-playing venues, this sort of hobby does stretch outside the bounds of fantasy worlds and pre-established fandoms. In a broad sense, historical recreationists and re-enactors, such as the Society for Creative Anachronism (also known as the SCA) can also be said to be LARPing, as the people involved create a character or persona, and spend the time fitting into that persona and acting them out. Historical recreation seems to have a much broader appeal than things closer to traditional role-playing, possibly because "history" is something that more people can relate to in some way, and many more people have history or various historical periods as pet interests.

There also seems to be more room for "average Joe" characters in historical recreation groups than in more standard role-playing groups. In a typical role-playing session, there is often a quest to be done, artifacts to find, a problem to solve, often the kind that needs specific kinds of people with specific abilities. It's not likely that a woodcarver or a weaver is going to save the world, thus they're not likely to have a big part in a game. But with historical recreation, there's room for that kind of character to exist, and they can fit into the game's society with greater ease.

A good number of historical recreationists seem to frown on participants who try to create a sort of powerhouse persona, the kind that commands armies and is incredibly intelligent and noble and is beloved by everybody. While that's fine in a hero-type character in a fantasy world, it doesn't fit in very well with people who are spending their days pretending to be regular people, albeit regular people from a different period of history. The world has enough people pretending to be better than they are, after all.

LARPing is also seen in a way in things like murder-mysteries, one-shot games that are often run as group bonding activities for office parties or organizations, or through hotels and inns in an attempt to drum up business. They tend to be very popular, and for a multitude of reasons. There's the fun of spending a night surrounded by other people having fun, for starters. There's the fun of getting away from your mundane life for a little while, making up a character (even if the character happens to be remarkably like you, just with some mystery-solving skills) and pretending to be them for an evening. There's the fun and satisfaction of helping solve a problem, a huge problem like a murder, even if it's only a pretend murder.

In many ways, LARPing appeals to the "grass is always greener" part of the average person, amd even the not-so-average person. Getting to take a break from a mundane life filled with mundane problems and instead getting to be part of the solution, or even just somebody who has different problems, problems that are so far removed from what we have to deal with on a regular basis that they almost become a joy to try and work through, can have great appeal to a wide variety of people from all walks of life. Who, at some point, hasn't wanted to be somebody else, in a different position or place in life or the world. LARPing can really give you the chance to experience that, whether throwing yourself into a different period of this world's history, or a completely different fantasy world inhabited by elves and dragons and vampires.