Live action role-playing games have something of a bad rap. Even among tabletop gamers, LARPers are described tersely with a curl of the lip and a dismissive tone.
This has always confused me. Sure, LARP looks and sounds quite silly, but I wager that a great many hobbies look and sound silly to outsiders. The only contact I’ve had with anything like LARP – that is, imaginative full contact, full immersion entertainment – is the Society for Creative Anachronism. I was active in the SCA for three years, and my persona in that world was a 12th century Anglo-Norman nobleman named Godric Alburne.
I was briefly involved with a small Amtgard group in South Dakota, which was a true LARP organization, but that doesn’t really count since I only went to a couple practices.
What really attracts me to the idea of LARP is costumed full-contact, unscripted medieval warfare. The usage of “magic” and other intangible effects seems clunky to me. Having to shout a “spell” and throw a colored ball to represent an effect strikes me as less problematic, though, then being the target of a spell – after all, in the midst of a four-person melee battle, are you really going to notice that you’ve been hit by a brown ball instead of a white one?
Developing a persona, acting in character, and dressing in costume – including the more “out there” idea of elves, orcs, and so forth – is a cool surrounding environment. Creating the outfits for imaginative games like this is part of the fun… and really, there is absolutely no drawback to learning how to sew.
Before I started designing board games and, later, role-playing games, I made up rules for unusual sports. Designing the rules for a live action role-playing game, then, is a natural thing for me to experiment with. As such, I’m writing a small set of rules to enable this kind of gameplay in the style I think it should be run.