Do: real armour, don't: real weapons

May 30, 2010 9:07 AM

LARP - what is it? - a comprehensive guide in comicbook form.
posted by Artw (151 comments total)

A Comprehensive Guide To Make Belief! I approve.
posted by The Whelk at 9:12 AM on May 30, 2010

Just reading the discussion about hajib's, does Poe's law hold for discussions of LARP activities and their proponents?
posted by sammyo at 9:12 AM on May 30, 2010

Advising potential LARPers to grow a beard doesn't help make the case that LARPing is not just for teenage boys.
posted by peacheater at 9:19 AM on May 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

Fucking LARPs--how do they work?

Honestly, it's some really neat artwork pressed into the service of some serious bean-plating that would be a revelation mostly to someone that has never had a hobby of any sort. You might spend too much time thinking about your hobby, or too much money? Really? I suspect that, as with RPGs, 90% (conservative estimate) of learning it really depends on just getting down and doing it.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:36 AM on May 30, 2010 [2 favorites]

How can you play a game with no dice? If you don't roll dice it don't make no sense.
posted by Bonzai at 9:36 AM on May 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

Interesting that they only really address boffer LARPs. I guess it's a shifting demographic; Vampire and Werewolf used to be about 70% of the LARPs out there, though that's been oh, five to ten years ago. White Wolf's complete system/setting reboot effectively killed the White Wolf LARP scene, with only a small fraction of die hards still carrying on.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:40 AM on May 30, 2010 [3 favorites]

Next: Yiffing
posted by Artw at 9:41 AM on May 30, 2010 [3 favorites]

(though the relationships section kind of covers that)
posted by Artw at 9:42 AM on May 30, 2010

Man, great drawings and layouts.
posted by interrobang at 9:57 AM on May 30, 2010

Heh. Boffers.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 10:01 AM on May 30, 2010

obligatory
posted by neuron at 10:05 AM on May 30, 2010

Interesting, but incomplete. Under 'dangers', Cube should have warned "And you automatically become a total fucking loser, forever, irredeemably."
posted by ten pounds of inedita at 10:10 AM on May 30, 2010 [2 favorites]

How is LARPpy formed?
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:37 AM on May 30, 2010 [3 favorites]

Part of me thinks LARPers exist to make normal nerds feel better about themselves. Another part of me thinks that LARPers have it over normal nerds because they play outside. A third part thinks that doesn't matter, because they look ridiculous and hit each other with Nerf and stuff. Mostly, though, I think gaming is dumb, and LARPing is uber-dumb. This is one of those rare nerd pursuits that looks no better on women than it does on men, unless the LARP in question is like an extension of a Vampire game or something, in which case the guys usually look stupid beyond comprehension and the women often look cool as hell, but even then I do not see why you would do yourself up in latex and/or a corset and/or PVC and then run around pretending to be the undead hellprincess of the Eternal Night or whatever when you could just take your awesome self to a club and rule that shit. I don't look down on LARPing so much as I really, truly do not understand it at all.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 10:52 AM on May 30, 2010 [10 favorites]

Under 'dangers', Cube should have warned "And you automatically become a total fucking loser, forever, irredeemably."

And in other news, your hobby sucks. No points for the haterade, sport. (Besides, it's implied in the Dangers section.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:59 AM on May 30, 2010 [4 favorites]

I do not see why you would do yourself up in latex and/or a corset and/or PVC and then run around pretending to be the undead hellprincess of the Eternal Night or whatever when you could just take your awesome self to a club and rule that shit.

Presumably because that's not what they're interested in. People engage in social activities that are going to group them with the sort of folks they like. LARPers LARP to meet LARPers. Clubbers club to meet clubbers. And in their defense, making sweet costumes and bopping people on the head with nerf toys, dorky as it may be, sounds a lot more interesting than OMG 120 BPM UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ all night.

waits patiently for inevitable dance remix of "last night a LARPer saved my life"
posted by phooky at 11:07 AM on May 30, 2010 [17 favorites]

Some kids I know in the rave scene around here have been adding LARP to their usual "go out to the woods, blast dance music, take hallucinogens all weekend" routine (or maybe substituting? for some reason the techno and the swords and sorcery seem like an odd combination but I never asked). It almost makes me want to fish for an invite to the next one.
posted by idiopath at 11:11 AM on May 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

Whatever. I'm a larper and I would totally show this to people to explain what I go do in the woods. The art is really good (although the war bonnet makes me roll my eyes...) and the layouts and hand lettering are nice. My group's guide to larping is laid out in unreadably small Lucida Handwriting. I'll take this any day.
posted by Tesseractive at 11:14 AM on May 30, 2010

Presumably because that's not what they're interested in. People engage in social activities that are going to group them with the sort of folks they like. LARPers LARP to meet LARPers. Clubbers club to meet clubbers. And in their defense, making sweet costumes and bopping people on the head with nerf toys, dorky as it may be, sounds a lot more interesting than OMG 120 BPM UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ all night.

I'm not sure I believe that, actually. I mean, have you ever noticed how every b-movie seems to have a scene set in a club? I can't think of a William Gibson-style science fiction movie or a vampire-type horror movie (set in modern times, anyway) that I have ever seen that did not feature a scene where the characters went to a club. Maybe they don't want to go to a sports bar or a dance club, that's fair, but it seems to me there's an implicit longing for just straight-up social interaction that, for whatever reason, can only be met in this roundabout fashion of getting together to pretend to do stuff. I'm not trying to sound judgmental; I'm a pretty nerdy dude, and have no room to point any fingers at anybody, but I do feel like there might be here something of an indirect means of getting at stuff that most people just kinda...go for without any weird pretenses?
posted by kittens for breakfast at 11:16 AM on May 30, 2010 [2 favorites]

I do not see why you would do yourself up in latex and/or a corset and/or PVC and then run around pretending to be the undead hellprincess of the Eternal Night or whatever when you could just take your awesome self to a club and rule that shit.

Because they don't want to be around alcohol, or get hit on every five minutes, or they can't dance, or their friends aren't the kind of people that club, or some of them are chubby and would get made fun of in a club. There may be clubs where none of the above would be a problem, but from what I've heard from people that do club, it's pretty rare.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:16 AM on May 30, 2010 [8 favorites]

I do not see why you would do yourself up in latex and/or a corset and/or PVC and then run around pretending to be the undead hellprincess of the Eternal Night or whatever when you could just take your awesome self to a club and rule that shit.

Don't assume that these two activities are mutually exclusive.
posted by device55 at 11:20 AM on May 30, 2010 [2 favorites]

or get hit on every five minutes

I should note that, based on what I've seen, if you're a woman of any sort (or a particularly pretty form of young boy), you're just as likely to get hit on every five minutes at a LARP as you are at a club. Also, the people hitting on you at the LARP are often the sort who can't manage to do so without being super-creepy.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 11:24 AM on May 30, 2010 [3 favorites]

My desire to jump around bridges made in the trees shooting nerf guns at people and swinging from ropes is dangerously, potently strong.
posted by The Whelk at 11:26 AM on May 30, 2010 [6 favorites]

I don't care if you want to call yourself Lightfoot The Swift or I gotta wear ears or something - give me sniper pits, arrows, and bad guys and you can call me Horrible A. Hilter The Fuckwit for all I care. I wanna do some real life pew pew-ing.
posted by The Whelk at 11:30 AM on May 30, 2010 [7 favorites]

Interesting, but incomplete. Under 'dangers', Cube should have warned "And you automatically become a total fucking loser, forever, irredeemably."

I think these are implicit in some of the great illustrations inside the letters of "DANGERS". I know you were just having a larff, but there it is.

Mostly, though, I think gaming is dumb, and LARPing is uber-dumb.

Your mother sucks dick in hell. Perhaps you are right, but no less dumb than making thousands of comments on MetaFilter.
posted by fleacircus at 11:32 AM on May 30, 2010 [7 favorites]

I wanna do some real life pew pew-ing.

Okay, now this I support pursuing in the most indirect means possible.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 11:32 AM on May 30, 2010 [2 favorites]

I just want to add that LARP, like Malamanteau Controversy, is fun to say, but in a different way. Larp. Larp larp larp larp. Larp larp? Larp! Larp larp, larp. Larp... larp.
posted by The otter lady at 11:35 AM on May 30, 2010

Advising potential LARPers to grow a beard doesn't help make the case that LARPing is not just for teenage boys.


"Teenage boys" and "beards" are usually a tragedy, not an improvement.
posted by rodgerd at 11:36 AM on May 30, 2010 [6 favorites]

Or more dumb, either. Uh.
posted by fleacircus at 11:36 AM on May 30, 2010

Wait - I think just describes laser tag and or paintball.


I am betraying so many class indicators here.
posted by The Whelk at 11:37 AM on May 30, 2010

Perhaps you are right, but no less dumb than making thousands of comments on MetaFilter.

Well, maybe, but I'm pretty much speaking here about things that I think are dumb -- I'm not saying they're dumb for everyone, for all time, et cetera. I mostly can't see the appeal. I'll get all Full Disclosure here for a second and say I played tabletop RPGs from about age twelve to age fifteen, and it was almost exclusively a social thing; without any particular head for math, all the statistics and shit were mostly Calvinball to me, and I would have been a lot happier actually just doing fun stuff with my friends in real life and leaving all the Conan/Neuromancer/vampire shit in the books and comics and movies, where they belonged. So I mean, I half-get LARPing, because it's like one day somebody said, "Hey, this pretending to do stuff is bullshit, y'know? Let's get out there and really do stuff!" and that's cool, but what they're doing is just a real-life extension of what they were doing in mom's kitchen on Friday nights in eighth grade, which isn't for me. But it really never was for me, even when it was on a tabletop, but sitting around a table hanging out with your friends is totally for me, and that's the part of the RPG experience that young me wanted to carry into his adult life, not all the Lord of the Rings stuff. Hence: Dumb to me, clearly not dumb to all.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 11:46 AM on May 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

At the Metafilter LARP we play capture the favorite.
posted by The Whelk at 11:49 AM on May 30, 2010 [3 favorites]

without any particular head for math, all the statistics and shit were mostly Calvinball to me

This is why I always thought LARPing would be more fun for me than tabletop. I never got into it because it wasn't what my social circle did, and now it just doesn't seem like it's worth the effort to do more than parlor LARPs. Or maybe that's my inner theater nerd speaking with her insistence on good costume and props.
posted by immlass at 11:58 AM on May 30, 2010

I'm pretty much speaking here about things that I think are dumb -- I'm not saying they're dumb for everyone, for all time, et cetera.

Okay. Totally not buying it, but okay.
posted by fleacircus at 12:08 PM on May 30, 2010

Okay. Totally not buying it, but okay.

Uhhhhhh...what's to buy? Look, I do think your favorite hobby sucks, but I'm coming at it from a perspective of just not being predisposed to it. I'm saying it sucks for me. I kind of thought that was implied. I haven't conducted a scientific survey to determine that it sucks. And everything I'm telling you is the truth as I see it, because frankly, there's no percentage in me unruffling your feathers about this whole thing.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 12:14 PM on May 30, 2010

There's an element of 'theater in the park' to LARP which is different from the way many people play table top role playing games.

Some people play table top RPGs as if they were an analog video game. Instead of xbox live you have people right there in the same room. Instead of a combat algorithm you have dice.

Other's play RPGs as a conduit to fantasy, where the goal is to immerse yourself in the fictional world and become the character. The dice and rules just keep you honest within the context of the game.

larping extends from this second approach.

A lot of people who like Larp, also like theater, performing, and other similar things.

(this is all based on observations of friends and family, not of my own experience. I don't have the will to commit to playing Final Fantasy on xbox much less dressing up and tromping around in the woods)

If you think Larping is dorky, well. You're right. But consider how many people play fantasy football.
posted by device55 at 12:16 PM on May 30, 2010 [4 favorites]

Anyone ever run a game where one of the teams are a bunch of lost modern-age people wandering around the middle of a drama they know nothing about?
posted by The Whelk at 12:20 PM on May 30, 2010

Nerds will eat their own.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 12:26 PM on May 30, 2010

Okay, let's see:

"DON'T wear socks & sandals - you should never do this whether you are LARPing or not"

What about Lyme disease? And how did the early Greeks and Romans stay warm in winter?

"DO use papermaché...DON'T use flammable materials"

See, this is where I went, "UHH...", "RU-UH..."

"Here is the reality"

Looks like the grappling rules were glossed over a bit...

DANGERS: Poverty? Heatstroke? Actual fights? Insanity?

I guess the author never LARPed RIFTS.
posted by Smart Dalek at 12:26 PM on May 30, 2010

But consider how many people play fantasy football.

I wouldn't say Fantasy Football and LARPing aren't close enough to be analogs.
posted by P.o.B. at 12:27 PM on May 30, 2010

Fantasy Football is a gateway RPG.

Sure it seems like a way to enjoy the sport when the game's not on, but soon you find yourself playing fantasy baseball in the spring just to 'stay sharp' and then hey why not fantasy baseball while you're at it.

Sooner or later one of your fellow footballers will be all like 'hey what if we made up our own players?' and hands you a 20 sided die.

In 6 months you'll be larping.
posted by device55 at 12:29 PM on May 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

Actually, you could set up something like this as a fun gift for someone who likes these kinds of things - create a little adventure just for them like a scavenger hunt crossed with theater.
posted by The Whelk at 12:36 PM on May 30, 2010

"okay, according to the map we got from that tree nymph in exchange for that ring we found in the flower patch we've got to cross this bridge and -"

"Behold! I am the guardian of the bridge of souls! You must answer me these riddle three-"

*they push the guardian off the bridge*

"Lateral thinking wins again!"
posted by The Whelk at 12:40 PM on May 30, 2010 [3 favorites]

Fantasy Football is a gateway RPG.

I'd say it's the other way around.

LARPing stands faaarrr apart from sitdown RPG and takes quite a bit of a leap of..."maturity" to be able to immerse yourself in it.

create a little adventure just for them like a scavenger hunt crossed with theater.

I know a guy who ended up in Lovecraft LARP. He didn't know it until he met up with his friends and they were playing it out. He kind of was like "wtf?" than shrugged and went along with it.

Of the four of five people I've met who LARPed, all of them openly admitted to how dorky it is. This was in a roomful of game testers, so take that for what it's worth.
posted by P.o.B. at 12:41 PM on May 30, 2010

Uhhhhhh...what's to buy? Look, I do think your favorite hobby sucks, but I'm coming at it from a perspective of just not being predisposed to it. I'm saying it sucks for me.

That's fine, but "dumb" is a dumb word for it then, and using "sucks" this way sucks. If this is just the kittens for breakfast way, tootling around saying stuff you don't understand or aren't predisposed to is dumb and sucks but that's just 100% subjective don't take it the wrong way, that's okay I guess, I just don't quite believe it.

It's okay if you think LARPing sort of objectively sucks, which is what I think you really do mean. Just seemed like a solipsistic dodge to me, that's all.
posted by fleacircus at 12:43 PM on May 30, 2010 [3 favorites]

It's okay if you think LARPing sort of objectively sucks, which is what I think you really do mean. Just seemed like a solipsistic dodge to me, that's all.

Well, deal, I guess. I'm sorry if my thinking that LARPing is silly offends you so much, but if that's the worst thing you find you have to cope with all day, you'll be fine.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 12:49 PM on May 30, 2010

In hell, kittens. In hell.
posted by fleacircus at 1:15 PM on May 30, 2010

I mean, have you ever noticed how every b-movie seems to have a scene set in a club? I can't think of a William Gibson-style science fiction movie or a vampire-type horror movie (set in modern times, anyway) that I have ever seen that did not feature a scene where the characters went to a club.

I think it's two things; first, people who take the time to dress up and whack each other with Nerf bats have a little more imagination than the norm, and it's probably a fun way to be creative in public. Second, insecure people can sometimes find it easier to be someone else than themselves. It'd probably also be good for those of us who are poor at small talk, because the setting automatically gives you something in common.

Never LARPed in my life. About the closest I ever get was grinning at the RenFaire people. Not my thing, but it looked like they were having a hell of a good time.

I had a friend who was really into the RenFaire, and she had many, many stories. I think the repeatable-story-per-minute rate must be higher in LARPing than pretty much anything else you can do.... with the caveat that your potential audience is pretty limited. :)
posted by Malor at 1:18 PM on May 30, 2010

Hey guys I don't get this thing but if you like it you're dumb and silly and why don't you do the things that I like and hey guys where are you going get back here I'm not done looking down on you STOP HAVING FUN DAMMIT
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:21 PM on May 30, 2010 [7 favorites]

The World According to LARP.
posted by kirkaracha at 1:41 PM on May 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

Fleacircus, I would just like to thank you for showing, in this circumstance, the immeasurable maturity that alone could shatter a thousand stereotypes.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 1:48 PM on May 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

The "you become a loser forever" warning isn't so much "LARPing makes you a loser", it's "LARPing will make a lot of people think you are a loser". I don't know about you guys, but even amongst my RPG-playing computer-nerd circles, LARPers are pretty much universally targets of ridicule. I don't really approve of it, but there it is. If you find friends actually abandoning you due to LARPing though, maybe you just didn't have very close friends to begin with.
posted by tehloki at 1:58 PM on May 30, 2010

I ran a combination Vampire/Werewolf LARP for about a year between high school and college. There were two game stores about 15 minutes away from me in opposite directions running their own games, so we combined the two of them and alternated venues. This was a couple years before Everquest came out, and no one I knew was playing Ultima Online, so it was pretty close to a real-life MMO before any of us knew what that was.

And yeah, it was deeply silly, but not much more so than all the tabletop gaming I did. Most of the people playing were between 16 and 21, so they couldn't go to most clubs on the weekends and there weren't any good bars where I lived anyway, so it was an excuse to hang out with 60+ nerds until 4 am.

I took over from the previous game-runners because I'm a rules and game design nerd and no one else really cared that much; most people were just there to dress up and hang out in candlelight. From that perspective, it was an awesome experience. When twenty people line up after the game to yell at you for changing a rule, you learn quickly that you don't change the game just because some little effect seems cool or you don't think people are playing the game "correctly"; you don't make a change thinking that you can just change it back if it doesn't work. In community-based games, goodwill and confidence amount to a lot more than I'd ever expected. I learned a lot about managing a userbase and the need to test and think through global changes before applying them to a "client", and how to design for the players and game you have, not just for the "perfect game" in your head. That's not stuff I could have learned just by playing tabletop with my four or five close friends with similar sensibilities, so in that sense I found it invaluable.

Geek story time: one of our storylines was building up to a big vampire vs. werewolf fight. When the evening came, we lined up the "werewolf" players at the top of the sloped store parking lot and the "vampire" players down at the bottom. On the count of three, all of the werewolves charged the vampires, picked out someone, and started "challenging". If you don't know, in White Wolf LARPS the task resolution system was rock-paper-scissors. So there's the count, then a horde of screaming people running down a hill, and then both sides stop in two lines and start about 20 orderly games of rock-paper-scissors, followed by half the people on each side suddenly crying out and flopping over. That is probably the nerdiest reenaction of a Braveheart scene I have ever seen.
posted by Errant at 2:17 PM on May 30, 2010 [26 favorites]

Historical reenactors, SCA, LARPers, taken all together the "wear a fictional and/or historical costume and stomp about and/or fight" hobby seems to have been around a long time. Did it all start in the 60s, I wonder, or was any of this around earlier?
posted by emjaybee at 2:42 PM on May 30, 2010

Also this is objectively the best shirt.
posted by The Whelk at 2:44 PM on May 30, 2010 [2 favorites]

Brief point (and I cannot speak for everyone):

Going clubbing requires rather dull social interaction. LARPing involves awesome stories of imagination. If I were to go to a club rather than LARP, I would end up bored unless we somehow busted out a board game or started a storytelling game or something. At the very least, the social interaction with my friends would mostly consist of discussions of awesome gaming stories, discussions of books and stories that we have read, or discussions of scifi/fantasy movies that we have seen or wish to see. Ergo, why sit in a dark and noisy room to try and talk about the games we'd rather be playing when we could go out and play the games?

To whit, the premise that the point of LARPing is the same end goal as clubbing is somewhat incorrect at its base. Not everyone likes social interaction, and sometimes gathering in groups has other purposes. (You can't bounce story ideas off of yourself and you never laugh at your own jokes and/or awesome plot ideas.)
posted by Scattercat at 2:49 PM on May 30, 2010 [2 favorites]

If you think Larping is dorky, well. You're right. But consider how many people play fantasy football.

FTFY
posted by Dr Dracator at 2:51 PM on May 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

I've been a LARPer on and off for the last 17 years or so. There are two main reasons I enjoy it.

First is the combat. I love to fight. LARPing provides an outlet for my aggression that minimizes the chance that anyone will actually get hurt. Being of the old school I prefer heavier weapons and more realistic fighting styles. Others want ultra-light weapons and to do nothing but flick their wrists. Either way the thing to remember is that the combat is fake but the adrenaline rush is real.

Second is the test of myself against time and the elements. Most people live their whole lives without testing their ability to continue to function after being awake for 36 hours while battling scorching heat, freezing cold, or pouring rain. I'm pleased to know my limits and what to expect in such situations. Knowing I won't be completely useless when faced with dawn patrol again is comforting.

Honestly though, I summed it up best for non-LARPers in something I wrote a few years ago:

People who hear about LARPing often wonder what's the point? What's the point of dealing with the heat, the cold, the rain, the mud, the bugs, the tedium, the injuries, the soreness, the chafing, the politics, the head cases, and the savages? Often, usually really, it's not worth it.

Sometimes though, as you march down to the field with your army and allies to face the final battle to decide the fate of all existence while your enemies sing the song that will end the world, the hair on the back of your neck stands up and you remember why you put up with it.

posted by ob1quixote at 3:08 PM on May 30, 2010 [4 favorites]

Kittens: You seem to be spending inordinate amounts of time threadshitting about how you're not threadshitting. If you don't like it, but you have nothing to say that applies to how other people interact with it, why are you here?
posted by agentofselection at 3:14 PM on May 30, 2010 [6 favorites]

Oh, I'm sorry: I totally missed that this comic (the actual subject of the thread) is a 100% respectful treatment of that most noble and elevated of all ventures, dressing up like Bilbo Baggins and hitting people with foam broadswords. I humbly recuse myself from further commentary on this topic.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 3:26 PM on May 30, 2010 [7 favorites]

If you think Larping is dorky, well. You're right. But consider how many people play fantasy football.

FTFY

Wait, you think playing football is dorky? Or are we going to hear the ridiculous and duplicitous argument that they are somehow the same thing?
posted by P.o.B. at 3:36 PM on May 30, 2010

The "you become a loser forever" warning isn't so much "LARPing makes you a loser", it's "LARPing will make a lot of people think you are a loser". I don't know about you guys, but even amongst my RPG-playing computer-nerd circles, LARPers are pretty much universally targets of ridicule.

Most if not all of us have probably already seen The Geek Hierarchy, but do you really get the point of it?
posted by Halloween Jack at 3:36 PM on May 30, 2010

Everyone has contempt for furries?
posted by Artw at 3:42 PM on May 30, 2010 [2 favorites]

Well, I've played a lot of tabletop RPGs, and done a lot of theater, so I should be a natural LARP-er, but it's never quite crossed my path. Oh, except costume parties, and murder mysteries on holidays, which I guess might count.

But I did do the cloakroom for a Vampire (?) gathering for friends of mine, and it looked like a heap of fun. Costumes, plotting, playing games. Good stuff.

The usual disdain and mockery from straights I can understand - too caught up in trying to fit in, maybe? What I never got was the generally mockery from fellow tabletop RPG types. Though to be fair the LARPers were also very mocking about we tabletop types. Amused me that such minor and generally-ridiculed subcultures should spend any time being rude about each other, but that's people for you!
posted by alasdair at 3:55 PM on May 30, 2010

No one claimed the comic wasn't goofing on the hobby, and no one said everything has to be utterly solemn and respectful. There's a difference between goofing on something and saying, "It sucks, it's dumb, and they should just go clubbing instead because isn't that what they really secretly want but are too damaged and neurotic to do?"
posted by Scattercat at 3:56 PM on May 30, 2010

Advising potential LARPers to grow a beard doesn't help make the case that LARPing is not just for teenage boys.

The women can stop shaving their arm pits.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:08 PM on May 30, 2010

I was already to slag off LARPing with the rest of them but I can now remember having a sword fight at an sf con once... though as that was at a British sf convention I'd probably just staggered out of the bar for some reason and I would have been all 'give me that fucking stick I'll show you how it's fucking done'
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:11 PM on May 30, 2010

Who are the bigger nerds here, the foam sword dudes or the guys metatweeting this thread? Smiles!

my earlier comment on this, complete now that Lore's hierarchy has been referenced.
posted by cavalier at 4:14 PM on May 30, 2010

Not apropos for the LARP fight, but is there a term or reason why artists color noses red like this guy does? I know I've seen it before and I always wonder at first why all their drawings have colds. Or maybe I just hang out with people who don't have red noses but most people in real life do? It's a mystery.
posted by barnacles at 4:17 PM on May 30, 2010

No one claimed the comic wasn't goofing on the hobby, and no one said everything has to be utterly solemn and respectful. There's a difference between goofing on something and saying, "It sucks, it's dumb, and they should just go clubbing instead because isn't that what they really secretly want but are too damaged and neurotic to do?"

Well, look, first of all, if you can't handle someone saying that dressing up like a fantasy hero and having playfights seems dumb to them, for God's sake, don't do it. Because I for damn sure won't be the last person you ever hear making that suggestion, and most of them will be much less nice about it than I have been. Nerdy people can only afford to be but so thin-skinned.

W/r/t the point about clubbing (or similar social activities), I genuinely do not know why someone would prefer to do this over...well...that. Someone suggested I shouldn't see these activities as necessarily mutually exclusive, which is a fair point. Someone else wrote very well about what makes LARPing appeal to him, and while that's not something that sounds like it would do anything for me, (a) I can respect that he enjoys it, and (b) I can see from reading it that there's a whole battery of enjoyable activity that would never even occur to me to regard as enjoyable, if that makes any sense -- and the point of that is, LARPing is something that I can't see personally as being enjoyable in itself, but only as a means to an end (hanging out with friends). So I acknowledge that LARPers may well not be socially damaged at all, but geared socially toward something that, were I to do it myself, would leave me wanting a totally different kind of social interaction altogether. It seems dumb to me, like I said, and I think it would be dumb for me. So anyway, any ambiguity there, any sense that I was saying people into it are damaged, I do very much apologize for, because I don't believe that.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:17 PM on May 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

The women can stop shaving their arm pits.

It's historically accurate! For, um, made-up fantasy time of elves and dwarves.
posted by Artw at 4:26 PM on May 30, 2010

The problem, kittens, is the way that you keep bracketing these apologies with sneering references to "dressing like Bilbo Baggins" and etc. I don't think LARPing is for everyone, and it sure as hell attracts more than its fair share of serious weirdos (and not normal fun weirdos), but the whole "I just don't like it personally" couples uneasily with that sort of thing.

I don't think you're the bad guy here (and some of the comments have been needlessly harsh) but the vibe you're giving off is very... off-putting, and the (near as I can tell) sincere apologies just kind of confuse the issue.
posted by Scattercat at 4:37 PM on May 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

Recusing ain't what it used to be.
posted by fleacircus at 4:39 PM on May 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

It should be noted that there is foam fighting without LARPing (e.g. foam fighting as sport, with no attempt to play a character), and there is LARPing without foam fighting (e.g. using rock-paper-scissors or similar methods to resolve combat situations).
posted by Jpfed at 4:47 PM on May 30, 2010

So this thread has been in the back of my head all day - while eating, shopping, having a good time with a friendly puppy. The thing in the back of my head is some kind of ideal LARPing-Paintball woodland environment. Temple ruins, magic glades, mother fucking tree forts and rope bridges. I haven't thought like this since I was 8. I wanna draw out the plans on crayon - no GRID PAPER cause I totally would have used grid paper.

Something you may not know about Mr. The Whelk: I have an active and experienced interest in archery. The practice of, history of, art of. I always rolled a Ranger. If I could some how harmlessly and yet skillfully shoot people with arrows from my hidden TREE FORT - taking guerrilla actions inside a environment with a STORY well I - I I don't know man. I'd just live up there and get wifi or something for when I wasn't whittin' a new arrow.
posted by The Whelk at 4:50 PM on May 30, 2010 [7 favorites]

I'm an ex-SCA person because the politics were more annoying and started to outweigh the fun, but damn sometimes I really miss hitting people with rattan sticks. That's about as close as I'll get to real life pew-pew and it was awesome. Archery and thrown weapons also are awesome!
posted by Wuggie Norple at 5:00 PM on May 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

Something you may not know about Mr. The Whelk: I have an active and experienced interest in archery.

Your mother and I are so disappointed.
posted by shakespeherian at 5:14 PM on May 30, 2010

Yeah but I can hit you both from a few hundred feet away safely ensconced in a larch.
posted by The Whelk at 5:16 PM on May 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

A Call of Cthulhu LARP sounds like it would be fun, provided I get to be Zadok Allen. Cthulhu LARPing sounds like it'd be completely different from the activity described here.

The HPLHS, that is H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, the people who made the Call of Cthulhu silent movie and are now working on Whisperer in Darkness, got their start making props for Cthulhu LARPs. One of their coolest props is an exact replica of the box that the narrator of "The Call of Cthulhu" reads through during the story, including much of the text of that story since it's nearly all discovered documents anyway. Thing costs $300 though.
posted by JHarris at 5:31 PM on May 30, 2010

I don't think you're the bad guy here (and some of the comments have been needlessly harsh) but the vibe you're giving off is very... off-putting, and the (near as I can tell) sincere apologies just kind of confuse the issue.

I would say that most of the comments have been needlessly harsh, and so my reactions have pretty much been torn between not wanting to hurt the feelings of people who are genuinely into this and seem like okay people and not wanting to get in a pissing match with people who seem to really want that. So I will put it this way, and then then really go do something else:

Some people do something that is of no interest to me, and that I think looks goofy as hell. They may take this too seriously. They may take it less seriously, and just be people who like to dress up and have fun, and while I'm still not into that myself, and while I may still make fun, we probably like most of the same stuff, and I do not mock their fun with malice. I mock their fun because people dressing up in costumes and yelling and screaming is inherently funny, and I would guess that they mostly know that and they don't need me to make it all better for them.

Some people who engage in these activities may come across as personally unlikeable, and while they may believe that they are unfairly stigmatized because they enjoy things that most normal people do not, the truth is that they are stigmatized because they are personally unlikeable for reasons that have nothing to do with their hobbies, and would be true whether they engaged in them or not.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:39 PM on May 30, 2010

Why begrudge anyone a creative hands-on hobby, where they make stuff, and do things in natural settings, with friends?
posted by StickyCarpet at 5:42 PM on May 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

Why begrudge anyone?
posted by P.o.B. at 6:04 PM on May 30, 2010 [6 favorites]

I don't really think anyone's mother sucks dicks in hell, that was a joke. Maybe a bit overstrong, but that's how you know it's a joke, and really the sort of thing to be expected when you swan in with a dumb/sucks kind of attitude.

But beyond the joke, I do think your arguments were lame, kittens, and considering how I don't even like LARPing but you seemed to have this desperate need to think that I did, that you'd offended me, that I was immature, all this stuff you kept amusingly ascribing to me that I wasn't, combined with an obvious need to get the last word and re-engage even after my sort of non-committal shruggo let's-agree-to-disagree answers, going on and on repeating your points (and insults) over and over... well, I guess I didn't really feel like backing off either. Usually I do! I must be very bored today.

If you've got any more to say, let's do so in memail or MeTa, and let's not do the silly indirect passive aggressive stuff. Because I'm not going to say more—no really, I'm not! Or you may stay here and play more to the crowd, if you wish.
posted by fleacircus at 6:10 PM on May 30, 2010

Kittens for breakfast, you came into the thread saying, and I quote, "gaming is dumb, and LARPing is uber-dumb" and followed that with a series of comments on how unattractive the hobby is aesthetically, then finished with an injunction to "just go to a club," as though the whole LARP were really an attempt to socialize that everyone is pretending is a fun game.

When you open with that kind of blazing salvo, you're going to have to expect people who DO legitimately enjoy the hobby to react quite negatively. I mean, you pushed the red button and then looked surprised when the Commie LARPers sent their warheads back at you. I believe you pushed the red button in all innocence, I really do, but I think that if you go back and read that first comment of yours, you'll see why someone who honestly identifies as a LARPer and enjoys the activity for its own sake might start seeing red.
posted by Scattercat at 6:19 PM on May 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

Dude, I could honestly give a fuck about a person who "identifies as a LARPer," no kidding. You're right, if you guys need to say anything else to me about this, memail me, seriously.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:37 PM on May 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

So, in summary, we been trolled. Gotcha.
posted by Scattercat at 6:39 PM on May 30, 2010 [4 favorites]

kittens for breakfast is so much more superior than people who LARP, their words of protest doth enrage him so.

What a dick this guy is.
posted by cavalier at 6:40 PM on May 30, 2010

I'm a LARPer of sorts, and didn't think much of most of it. This is a subtype of LARP and it's probably the most MMO-like, lowest-brow subtype: the sort where players create their own characters, who have no particular reason to be where they are or even to exist, and primarily engage in biffing each other with plastic swords.

I'm not saying that sucks. I certainly enjoy computer games of that type. I'm saying that the comic doesn't describe my kind of LARP and doesn't seem to even contemplate the possibility of other kinds of LARPing existing.

"Freeforms" are what we call them, and the way they work is that each player is issued (or chooses, usually just from a short description) a character, usually with fully-formed description, background, personality, and goals; players are told the "starting scenario", and then may interact with each other freely.

We're not against fighting as such, but fighting is a time-consuming (for GM and players involved) and distracting nuisance (for players not involved in the combat) that has a high chance of putting a player out of the game. So these days we mostly make scenarios that tend to discourage lethal fighting entirely, or channel it into a clear resolution path, or that are player-resolvable by handing a card to someone ("unless you can show a red card now, you are unconscious for sixty seconds"). For example, you might be family members attending a reading of a will (where there may be a fistfight, perhaps a poisoning attempt), or a spaceship crew who have discovered the oxygen supply is drastically reduced (there may be a raygun in the game, and some characters may be declared as having combat training).

These are a lot more structured than the described LARP but that's how we like 'em. Plenty of surprising things can occur. The "winners" are those who achieved their stated goals, but usually those goals will be unique to that character ("have someone promise to marry you", "obtain the silver locket", or "return to your own time") and often there will be no clear, obvious way to achieve the goal. In many games some characters will have unachievable goals (this may or may not be obvious to the actual player); the purpose of this is to set that character running about trying to achieve that goal, and cause interesting interactions. It's usually good to have at least one character of the "have you seen my puppy?" type, ie whose goals suggest actions that would require them to talk to most other characters in the game; these characters will have conversations with others, share goals, and cross-pollinate.

So ... most of the advice in the comic wouldn't really work for freeforms and some of it is outright bad advice for freeforms. Not all LARPs are the same. (Although the difference is of most importance to those most into it, of course.)
posted by aeschenkarnos at 6:58 PM on May 30, 2010 [3 favorites]

Yeah, the article was rather heavily slanted towards boffer LARPs. I like talking way better. One of my favorite LARP experiences was when I got there late and only had generic tickets, so the only roles left were the "optional" ones that didn't have any serious part to play in the Main Plot. I got to be a crazy old coot who told stories about his exploits, ran a store, and had a couple of basic goals that amounted to "Don't let the town burn down."

As is apparently tradition, I ended up as the television set. That is, players who had run out of plot or were tired of trying or just tired came and sat around me and periodically fed me a straight line so that I could start on another off-the-top-of-my-head story about giant radioactive cactus-squirrels or whatever. It was a blast, and at the end I won a T-shirt for being entertaining. So huzzah or whatever for free-forms.
posted by Scattercat at 7:03 PM on May 30, 2010 [2 favorites]

In summary: Kittens doesn't get this, thinks you should go to a club instead.

Can we get to the bit where people exchange rad LARPing stories now? Like the time I went to a Masque of the Red Death LARP at a con and someone had forgotten to stipulate in the program a) that it was a LARP, and b) that it was a D&D variant, not actual D&D, and a whole bunch of folk showed up with pre-rolled standard fantasy setting characters, with maybe five of us who knew the guy running it who came in with some loosely conceived Victorians - including one of my favourite LARPers ever, a young lady who found highly plausible and entertaining excuses to play Tscimisce in any White Wolf setting she could manage - and after a very neurotic twenty minutes working out how to covert a halfling druids and elven archers into something era appropriate ( I think we wound up with a few more midgets and people with thyroid problems that was really plausible) we went off looking for some hell beastie, with my overeducated spiritualist hack dilettante and the Tscimisce's biomagician reanimator (she's got a knack for it, I tell you) up at the front waving the arms and wading headlong into our respective characters, with the prerollers numbly trotting along in our wake, though we lost a few when I rolled a natural twenty on a psychometry roll on a corpse that had recently had its soul forcibly extracted by said hellbeastie and I re-enacted a portion of it by writhing and screaming a bit with the Tscimisce wailing and bemoaning above me while occasionally mentioning that arm would look good on her Frankenbeastie and after I recovered and we dressed the carpet-burn while I recovered from my hysteria and worked out how to explain in character the very out of character loss of the odd stage-fright stricken prerollers we trundled off into this mine, at which point the organisers turned off the lights and commenced their own hooting and hollering and I got to do a second round of histrionics when the hell beastie appeared and started nomming onto the party, at which point the Tscimisce and I removed ourselves because we were ladies, after all, and I threw myself in the path of an oncoming carriage to summon help and in the end we got a spuntload of xp and I lost a whole mess of san.

Won a prize for that one. Then the Tscimisce and I went and got drunk. The end!
posted by Jilder at 7:12 PM on May 30, 2010 [2 favorites]

Well, there was the time my wife broke the World of Darkness.

Setup:
Venice, IIRC, with vampires doing their usual vampire things. The caveat was some sort of menace was supposed to pop up and wreak havoc on the traditional vampire pastime of fiddling while Rome burns. My wife and I were playing Chris and Leslie, a pair of co-dependent vamps with weird power dynamic issues. Our buddy Dan tagged along and joined our Covenant so he'd know the people he'd interact with the most. We were the only members of the Ordo Dracul in the game.

(For those who aren't pathetic nerds: the Ordo Dracul are a group of vamps who think that vampirism can be conquered and cured, or even empowered, through the use of various magi-science techniques and alchemy. They're basically the A/V geeks of the vampire world, mostly sitting in their towers and libraries tinkering with science experiments and letting the rest of the city go hang for all they care.)

Part of Chris and Leslie's backstory involved a powerful sire leaving them a secret alchemical recipe and a secret enemy. (We like to give LARP organizers ways to punch our characters in the gonads.) The LARP organizers decided that the recipe - which was supposed to let us transcend the vampiric state and basically become Twilight vamps, with all of the bonuses and none of the traditional weaknesses - was actually a way to summon a demon/djinn thing. Our characters knew none of this. Meanwhile, giant squid started eating the rest of the city, and we Ordo members skulked around trading favors for potion ingredients.

(Minor fun side story: We were given a severed tentacle at one point and told to find its weaknesses in our lab, so we put our alchemy aside and started testing various acids and poisons on cultures of tentacle cell, working closely with the Storyteller who handled most of our plot. Another Storyteller came over, apparently with the job of launching random squid attacks. He asks our group where we are. We tell him we're in a basement. He says, "Okay, a giant tentacle bursts through the floor and attacks." He pulls a card (the randomizer for attacking) and gets a fumble. "Uh, it misses all of you and smashes the table behind you."

In unison, and completely without any rehearsal (how were we to even predict such a scenario?), all three of us shouted, "NO! THE SCIENCE!" The Storyteller controlling the tentacle blinked a bit, taken aback; he thought he was being nice.

Then we basically went into a frenzy on the poor thing and poured a few thousand dollars of corrosive chemicals over it until it melted.)

Anyway, we completed the alchemical recipe and got a djinn, which was not what we were expecting. Dan wished for "wisdom" and got his mental stats boosted way up high for at least the rest of the LARP. Ang and I banked our character's wishes for later.

Then, when the other Covenants were running out of options and answers for dealing with the squid attacks, we quietly walked up to the Prince and announced that we had an answer. We demanded hefty boons in return, and then my character used his wish (secretly) to send all the squid away. We were the heroes! Then the Momma Squid attacked and there was a mass combat.

We weren't combat characters, and anyway mass combat is boring, so we sat and roleplayed with each other for a while. (Our favorite part of gaming is just talking in-character and improving a new-to-us relationship dynamic.) Then, at the end, with the vampires victorious and the LARP about to wrap up, Ang handed her wish to the Storyteller folded up in a little note. He read it, coughed, snorted, then said, "Yeah, it's the end of the night anyway. Let's go for it."

And that's why, as the Prince was climbing into his vehicle and about three separate assassination plots went off simultaneously, suddenly every vampire in the city felt their undead hearts lurch back into life as their vampirism faded away. Chris and Leslie, the only two vampires left in the world, retreated with their mountains of loot to some secret fastness to maybe one day unleash the curse back on the world again. Or maybe not; they were pretty deeply wrapped up in each other.

And that's how the World of Darkness ended and vampires disappeared. Because a co-dependent agoraphobe alchemy geek made a wish on a magic genie.
posted by Scattercat at 8:02 PM on May 30, 2010 [7 favorites]

Here's a plate of larb for you to overthink.
posted by zippy at 8:06 PM on May 30, 2010

I just got back from LARPing for the first time ever! I'm still covered in dirt actually.

My roommate's boyfriend is into this thing called 'Dagorhir' and I think, ok, why not check it out? I'm a nerd. Let's do this.

So we go, and someone's friend owns this big chunk of woods where they have set up these amazing freaking campsites with like giant woven fences and a stage and tables and shit, and multiple 'camps' with winding trails in between. I have to choose a fake name. We go to my friend's sweet-ass tent and change into pretty dresses. Then we spend the weekend camping and drinking and smoking hookah and the two of us don't even actually fight, we just hang out in the woods all day wearing dresses. I brought my hula hoops and made drunk old men dance around bonfires with them.

What I observed was that, really, 95% of what they are doing is NOT fighting. It's playing house. They work so hard on the outfits and the campsites and the weapons- it is exactly the same thing as boys running off into the woods to build a tree fort. Sure it's nerdy, and sure a lot of them have delusions about how effective they would be in an apocalypse scenario, but really it's an excuse to dress up and go camping. And I like camping! Essentially I would say the atmosphere was just like an anime convention but in the woods, making it immediately a thousand times better (I did not like my one anime convention...)

HOWEVER I am not sure I would do it again, and this is why:

I should note that, based on what I've seen, if you're a woman of any sort (or a particularly pretty form of young boy), you're just as likely to get hit on every five minutes at a LARP as you are at a club. Also, the people hitting on you at the LARP are often the sort who can't manage to do so without being super-creepy.

JESUS CHRIST THERE WERE SO MANY CREEPERS
posted by showbiz_liz at 8:32 PM on May 30, 2010 [5 favorites]

Historical reenactors, SCA, LARPers, taken all together the "wear a fictional and/or historical costume and stomp about and/or fight" hobby seems to have been around a long time. Did it all start in the 60s, I wonder, or was any of this around earlier?

Around earlier.

See for instance the Eglinton Tournament of 1839. It inspired more tournaments in the U.S. in the 19th century.
posted by Jahaza at 9:52 PM on May 30, 2010

OMG 120 BPM UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ

Aw, why'd you stop?
posted by ArmyOfKittens at 4:57 AM on May 31, 2010

I'm going to start a 90s raver LARP group... Top one, nice one, get sorted. Veras check, salmon check... now where's me glowsticks?
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 5:12 AM on May 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

Nerf E's can cause quite a spot of bother if confused with the real thing.
posted by Artw at 7:29 AM on May 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

Could get you a nasty nerfcapping in fact.
posted by Artw at 7:43 AM on May 31, 2010

dude ...I am the Nerf.


let me rub your strong barbarian shoulders
posted by The Whelk at 7:44 AM on May 31, 2010

Clubbing is uber-dumb. This is one of those common douchebag pursuits that looks no better on women than it does on men, unless the club in question is like a Goth club or something, in which case the guys usually look stupid beyond comprehension and the women often look cool as hell, but even then I do not see why you would do yourself up in latex and/or a corset and/or PVC and then dance to repetitive music in a setting where it's impossible to have conversation, when you could just take your awesome self and run around pretending to be the undead hellprincess of the Eternal Night or whatever, and rule that shit. I don't look down on clubbing so much as I really, truly do not understand it at all.
posted by Cookiebastard at 8:20 AM on May 31, 2010 [2 favorites]

aeschenkarnos, I want to play a LARP like you described. It sounds like everything I wanted from the 'How to Host a Murder' parties, and didn't get.
posted by Faust Gray at 9:07 AM on May 31, 2010

kittens for breakfast is so much more superior than people who LARP, their words of protest doth enrage him so.

What a dick this guy is.

Cavalier, do please look at the bottom of your screen:

Note: Help maintain a healthy, respectful discussion by focusing comments on the issues, topics, and facts at hand—not at other members of the site.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 9:08 AM on May 31, 2010

Main thing I am getting from this thread is that LARPers are a bunch of overly touchy dicks and bores.
posted by Artw at 9:09 AM on May 31, 2010

They're certainly not as cool as we are, man!

*attempts high-five, misses due to lack of coordination, falls and shatters glasses*
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:32 AM on May 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

I was sipping Lillet Rouge with a twist yesterday evening, preparing herbes de Provence from our yard, and whipping up a hollandaise sauce for the saumon when it occurred to me that I was in some kind of French Bittman-Pollan LARP. Hélas.
posted by everichon at 9:50 AM on May 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

LARP documentary "darkon", on hulu.
posted by idiopath at 11:09 AM on May 31, 2010

Hélas

Indeed! I, for one, was going to have Avery bring the Bentley 'round and go off to the club for Singapore Slings and whist when I thought, no, here's an opportunity for a rare jape: I'll spend the day pretending to be one of those fellows who engages strangers in arguments on the inter-net! Tally-ho!
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:35 AM on May 31, 2010

Everytime I host a cocktail party, I LARP the idle rich.
posted by thivaia at 11:44 AM on May 31, 2010 [2 favorites]

Society: The Game

If Nouevu Riche - LARP Old Money: 3rd Edition

If Old Money (4th or above edition) - LARP Bohemian 2nd Edition

If Bohemian (any edition) - LARP Bohemian

If Working Class or Poor - LARP A Universe In Which You Won't Die of Renal Failure In the Back Of a Denny's Doing Dishes.
posted by The Whelk at 12:01 PM on May 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm ill and on an Achewood bender so there
posted by The Whelk at 12:01 PM on May 31, 2010

>Dude, I could honestly give a fuck about a person who "identifies as a LARPer," no kidding. You're right, if you guys need to say anything else to me about this, memail me, seriously.

Identifying as a member of a hobby group is a rather common practice. It helps a lot when you're trying to find others who are interested in your hobby: if, when people talk about you in the third-person, they can describe you as (in this instance) "a LARPer," it quickly, efficiently communicates that if I'm interested in LARPing, I could talk to you about it.

It's a bad idea to discriminate against people based on how they identify themselves. The label "LARPer" doesn't tell you anything about a person apart from the fact that they're into LARPing. So when you say you don't care about anyone who identifies as a LARPer, you're dismissing them for a very superficial reason.

People get offended when you do this to them. If you want to participate in a discussion and stay on topic, it would be a good idea to avoid offending people; even if their feelings genuinely aren't your problem, you'll still look better if you avoid offending people, and you'll have a better shot at a good conversation.
posted by LogicalDash at 12:10 PM on May 31, 2010

A person who "identifies as a LARPer" sounds to me a lot like someone who takes their LARPing way too seriously, and no, I don't want to engage them on that level. Like, I can accept that this is someone's idea of a good time, but I'm not really into addressing it as a super-serious lifestyle choice. My bad for not making the exact nature of that objection clear.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 12:26 PM on May 31, 2010

Identifying as X does not imply that X is the most important thing in your life.
posted by LogicalDash at 12:35 PM on May 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm into all kinds of stuff that would be kind of nerdy and stupid sounding to outsiders, and I would never dreamof saying I "identify" as any of them. That's the kind of thing that comes from too people who spend to much time on circle-jerky niche areas of the interwebs. "I identify as X" where X is something obscure ALWAYS acts as a precussor to a long winded lecture from someone who takes themselves far too seriously and who are usually quite silly without the redeeming factor of being fun.

Not that I'd want anyone to stop LARPingor any other freak passtime if they are enjoying it, but, you know, take a trip to the pub with the straights every so often or something. Get some persepctive.

This is all my fault of course. I linked to something that was on livejournal, I should have known the consequences.
posted by Artw at 12:44 PM on May 31, 2010

>A person who "identifies as a LARPer" sounds to me a lot like someone who takes their LARPing way too seriously, and no, I don't want to engage them on that level.

That's fine.

Next time a LARPer corners you and bloviates about his hobby, tell him to fuck off.

What you did in this case that has people getting offended is: You saw a thread on MetaFilter about LARPing. A reasonable guess is that there will be a lot of LARPers reading and posting in that thread. Meaning that, if you post something in the thread that seems demeaning to LARPers, they will have cause to get offended, regardless of your intentions. They can't see your intentions; they can only see the words >Part of me thinks LARPers exist to make normal nerds feel better about themselves. Another part of me thinks that LARPers have it over normal nerds because they play outside. A third part thinks that doesn't matter, because they look ridiculous and hit each other with Nerf and stuff. Mostly, though, I think gaming is dumb, and LARPing is uber-dumb. The problem is not that you don't see the appeal of LARPing; nor that it seems dumb to you; but that you are going into a thread full of people who like it and calling it dumb.

Much as you don't want to hear about LARPing, the people in this thread don't want to hear about your distaste for their hobby. The fact that you think these things is not a problem; the fact that you are metaphorically cornering someone and bloviating at them, about a subject they obviously don't want to hear of, is.
posted by LogicalDash at 12:47 PM on May 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

You don't have to actually say "I identify as X" in order to identify as X. Most people use "I am an X" instead. Sure, the former phrasing sounds pretentious. So it would probably be more used by pretentious people. But people identify as things all the time.
posted by LogicalDash at 12:50 PM on May 31, 2010

bitter-girl.com, please look at the rest of the comments in this thread before you think I"m the one bringing the noise. To wit, kittens and I even memailed after the fact!
posted by cavalier at 1:01 PM on May 31, 2010

I self-identify as a mefite!
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:01 PM on May 31, 2010 [4 favorites]

If you say "I am X" or "I identify as X" or whatever, than you are obviously trying to convey some kind of import to X. Apropos or not.
And I'm no FBI profiler but I do think you can deduce one or two things about a person based on their hobbies.
posted by P.o.B. at 1:09 PM on May 31, 2010

Much as you don't want to hear about LARPing, the people in this thread don't want to hear about your distaste for their hobby. The fact that you think these things is not a problem; the fact that you are metaphorically cornering someone and bloviating at them, about a subject they obviously don't want to hear of, is.

Well, I mean, you're bloviating at me right now; we're typing back and forth at each other, which is kind of the whole deal with this site. I'm sorry I didn't tell you something you wanted to hear, but I don't think I'm obligated to do that. Others seemed okay with hearing it. LARP enthusiasts are not the only people in the thread, and they are certainly not the only people on the site. If I went to a LARP message board and randomly started posting about how I think LARPing sucks or whatever, then I think that would be different. I would obviously be antagonizing people at that point. But I was posting in response to a comic that basically made fun of LARPing on a site that has nothing to do with LARPing. I would have been perfectly willing to talk about LARPing with LARP enthusiasts, but it quickly became a matter of people feeling embattled on the basis of, frankly, two posts that were not exactly meant to be read as me speaking iron-clad fact that resulted from my years of scientific study on the subject of LARPers.

Some people wrote very well and entertainingly about their own experiences LARPing, and to be honest those have me thinking I have judged the whole matter too harshly. Others directly called me out and were pretty much total jerks about it. I say this because they took so incredibly personally my mocking disparagement of their hobby. I admit to having done that, but I do not believe personally that it's really that big a deal, because it's a fucking hobby. If it's that central to anyone's identity, something really is wrong. There's nothing wrong with LARPing, but there is something wrong with someone whose self-concept is that wound up in LARPing, or anything so relatively trivial (see also football, your favorite TV show, your favorite band, your high school alma mater, et cetera).

You don't have to actually say "I identify as X" in order to identify as X. Most people use "I am an X" instead. Sure, the former phrasing sounds pretentious. So it would probably be more used by pretentious people.

That was my point, yeah.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 1:12 PM on May 31, 2010

Oh holy Christ, kittens, you are looking like such an ass right now. You have no idea.

Look, pretty much everything anybody can possibly be interested in looks stupid to pretty much everybody else. I spent a month one summer living and writing alongside a bunch of gifted young writers, and we spent our time drawing comics about adverbs and arguing whether poets were still allowed to write poems that referenced the month of April. I live with an actor who has friends over and they spend an hour trying to be, as wholly as possible, people they are not. I was at a rave last month and kept thinking how raves are basically excuses for people who aren't explicitly dorks to be dorks anyway. The floaty glowy yo-yos, the bizarre costumes... I was dressed in all black and felt like a freak because of how comparatively ordinary my clothing was.

I felt that same dorkiness at frat parties with people chugging beer through a funnel. Or attending antiwar protests and then playing drinking games over the Communist Manifesto. Or sneaking a joint late at night in high school, outside so my friend's parents couldn't smell it. Or attending shows of any kind, whether it's cheesy Broadway or classy opera or small ska shows or punk moshpits. If you ever stop to look at yourself at any point during your life, you'll realize what a dork you are to any other segment of the population that's not immediately around you.

What's not a dorky way to spend a lifetime? Working in a cubicle? Or working in an office in a business suit? Or doing whatever those geeks over at Wall Street do? If you're not concerned with being successful in life you're a dork; if you are concerned with success you're even more of a dork, because what does success get you? Fancy toys. Maybe laid. All the things that dorks care about. Only they don't work sixty hours a week to get those fancy toys. Maybe you'd argue that the point of success is raising a family, but honestly, parents are major dorks.

I LARPed once in high school. I'd like to think I'll LARP again at some point in my life. There were people dressed like cats, and I got to wear chainmail, and there was a creepy guy with a studded leather mask who I'm pretty sure was planning on killing somebody, but he played chess with me and that was all right. There was a big feast, and two enormous Irish wolfhounds. Then I tried to fight somebody and I don't think I understood the rules at all but nobody really cared. After way too many times getting stabbed I flopped over and died, so no harm done, right?

The awesome thing about it was the same thing that's awesome about raves. It's the complete lack of self-consciousness. Either you're dancing around like an idiot with a big goofy grin on your face, or you're wearing chainmail and calling yourself Zamiel with a big goofy grin on your face. Same kind of fun. No worries about people judging you behind your back. Just a lot of fun with a bunch of dorky people. And whether those dorky people are chubby bespectacled geeks who know an awkward lot about various types of knives or thin twentysomethings wearing awkwardly small bits of clothing doesn't matter. It's a lot of fun.

I'd never self-identify as a LARPer, or as a raver. I enjoy too many things in life to tie myself down to one specific passion. But some of my favorite people self-identify as one or the other or as a number of stranger things — fashion designer, dancer, screenwriter, economic theorist — and most of them are even aware that their self-identification is kind of dweeby. I like people who're geeks, and I fully support the idea that you can be a geek in a weird, unfathomable way and still be a completely ordinary joyous human being.

So right now you're coming in here just completely shitting on somebody's idea of a fun time. Your snide little sneers. Your constant bewilderment that people might not like the fact that you're lurking here doing nothing but trying to make other people feel like they're not worthy of your respect. And you can't understand why maybe that's bugging some people?

I'll tell you what. Let me know what you do on your weekends. Tell me what puts a smile on your face. I'll bet you I can find ways to twist your interests around and phrase them in a way that makes you look like a stupid nerdy turd who nobody loves and nobody could ever love. I'm good at being an asshole too! I'm probably better at it than you are. It's easy to be an asshole. All you have to do is stop yourself from thinking that maybe people don't like it when you make them feel bad. So let me know what you think is so much better than LARPing, you big ole dumb fat waste of life, tell me what's so much more important than fighting the ghouls and demons who are at this moment threatening to destroy you and everybody you love, and I'll tell you why it's better to be a paladin in your free time or a viking when you sleep.
posted by Rory Marinich at 1:35 PM on May 31, 2010 [4 favorites]

People get offended when you say offensive things. It does not matter whether or not you say them with authority, nor if you intend to act on them, nor if you frame it as a judgment. People will respond to your words just the same.

That you didn't present yourself as an authority on the subject changes nothing. It means the stakes are low, but...this is true of every hobby, yet people get emotionally involved anyway. If we didn't, the hobby wouldn't be much fun. Some people take MeFi arguments seriously. If they didn't, the site would be vapid and meaningless.
posted by LogicalDash at 1:38 PM on May 31, 2010

Woah, just re-read my comment and needed to clarify that it was addressing me as the source of the noise, not thinking it, as I wouldn't dream of telling other people how to think ;).

Also, this thread keeps going round and round and round and round and round. If it helps gather perspective on his more or less thread shitting, take a look at a handful of his comments in other threads. I honestly think kitten's intent here is not to simply smite or belittle LARPers or what have you, not in and of itself atleast. There's a pattern (too lazy to link) of him joining threads simply to express his distaste for him. I'd wager his notion, a perfectly valid one I'd think, is that discussion doesn't always have to be "This is so cool!", and rather, "This is so lame!" is something that he feels should be discussed too.

Now, how he went about it in this thread.... meh! But, you know, I kind of believe him when he stops and says "Geez! I'm not specifically trying to attack someone for doing this, I just think it's dumb as hell." Tone deaf? Maybe. Empathy death? Perhaps. But I figure now, after reading here and his memail, that he's just looking to have an opinion, man.
posted by cavalier at 1:53 PM on May 31, 2010

distaste for THEM. Agh. That's it, off the keyboard with me. Toodles.
posted by cavalier at 1:54 PM on May 31, 2010

kittens, if you really enjoy expressing your distaste for things, there are forums for that. Something Awful is the canonical one, but they troll harder than you'd probably like, so maybe Reddit.
posted by LogicalDash at 1:56 PM on May 31, 2010

kittens, if you really enjoy expressing your distaste for things, there are forums for that. Something Awful is the canonical one, but they troll harder than you'd probably like, so maybe Reddit.

Oh please. Like this is suddenly the sunshine and unicorns site. I'm afraid I have to ignore this, because we've both been here long enough to know better, but Rory:

I'll tell you what. Let me know what you do on your weekends. Tell me what puts a smile on your face. I'll bet you I can find ways to twist your interests around and phrase them in a way that makes you look like a stupid nerdy turd who nobody loves and nobody could ever love.

See, here is my whole thing: I in no way set out to make anyone feel that way, and while I feel bad about having done that, and I do mean that absolutely, I will suggest again that if you are cut so deeply by someone suggesting that your favorite hobby sucks, that there is a bigger problem happening than someone saying et cetera. To be very honest with you, I do not recall so visceral a reaction to anyone snarking on any other subject here that did not involve class, race, gender, or...um...obese people. It would not have occurred to me that even people who love LARPing would be this catastrophically offended by the concept that they look silly. Honestly? I kind of thought that might be the appeal. So while I apologize again for making you guys feel this bad, because I seriously had no idea it was even a possibility and would have done something else had I thought so, I do suggest a little bit of perspective, for real.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 2:16 PM on May 31, 2010

I'm not hurt. I've LARPed once in my life. But dude, do you not get why "I'm sorry you guys don't have any perspective and feel bad when I tell you you look silly" isn't exactly making things better?
posted by Rory Marinich at 2:19 PM on May 31, 2010

To be very honest with you, I do not recall so visceral a reaction to anyone snarking on any other subject here that did not involve class, race, gender, or...um...obese people.

LARPers are basically the nerds that even other nerds think it's fun to shit on, there's not really any good reason for that, and frankly, it gets. fucking. old.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:19 PM on May 31, 2010

But dude, do you not get why "I'm sorry you guys don't have any perspective and feel bad when I tell you you look silly" isn't exactly making things better?

Well...no. I'm sorry, but I don't. LARP is a game. I had no idea, and am actually a little freaked out by it, that people took it so seriously. I take having hurt people's feelings seriously, but because I cannot begin to take a game anything like that seriously, I at once feel bad for having inflicted injury and feel like it's ridiculous that what I said was that injurious. I don't think it should have been, and I think that if you read what I wrote and concluded that I believe you are unlovable that you need to take a step back and think about things. If that doesn't make matters any better, then okay, but for the love of God, please take a step back and think about things anyway.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 2:25 PM on May 31, 2010

Hmm.

I'm an incredibly lame dork. I ran around in the woods in a cape in high school not as a part of a role-playing or LARP group because my friends and I had an imaginary kingdom in the woods (at fifteen!). When I did role-play, it involved dragons and girls with sparkly, Mary Sue-esque eyes. Last year, I had my friends over before the release of the new Star Trek movie. I wore Starfleet regalia (I had to swap out my badge because the uniform came with a command badge but was engineering blue. Trek fail!) and Vulcan ears, and we drank "Romulan ale" which is blue kool-aid and everclear. I write long, bloated things in my blog about television. My drunkest experiences have been on mead, at Renaissance Festivals. I'm writing a book about a merman.

All of this stuff is incredibly dorky. Not just subjectively dorky--objectively dorky and geeky and nerdy, by just about any metric. If someone were to say to me that it's incredibly lame to self-identify as a Trekkie (which I do--don't you dare call me a Trekker!), what could I possibly do except agree with them? If someone were to say that it seems dumb to them to be into that shit, why would I even bother arguing with them about that? I'm self-aware enough to realize that these are habits and tastes which are looked down on by most of society (seriously, those fantasy football dudes are mostly square non-dorks, even if we want to comfort ourselves by saying that what they do is dorky). I'm also socially aware enough to be able to say "Yeah, eugh, mermen, I know"--while still rocking it.

Because you can be an incredibly huge dork and still have fun, and I intend to. But if you're dead-set on convincing people that your dorky habits are not, in fact, dorky, you're fighting an uphill battle, and are just going to come out looking even more out-of-touch with "normal" society than you would otherwise.

Anyway, metafilter is, without a doubt, the dorkiest thing that I do.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 2:28 PM on May 31, 2010 [3 favorites]

How offended people get has little to do with the import of the subject and much more to do with the content. That LARPing is trivial makes it no less offensive to hear that the hobby is "uber-dumb". You're insulting LARPers. It makes no difference how little a thing it is. You are still issuing obvious, blatant insults to a group of people. That is what matters. That is what determines how people will react to you.

And as for your inability to comprehend how people can take it seriously. If you are ever surprised that people are serious about something you can't be serious about, you've got a very narrow-minded view of human experience. People can find meaning in their lives by doing just about anything. Dedicating huge amounts of effort to a game of pretend is about as useless as dedicating huge amounts of effort to hitting balls with sticks, but for some reason people don't get surprised when the best baseball players in the world make millions of dollars doing what they do.
posted by LogicalDash at 3:44 PM on May 31, 2010

This is like watching one person try to dig himself out by digging deeper and a bunch of other people busily shoveling the dirt back in hole to try bury him.
posted by P.o.B. at 3:49 PM on May 31, 2010 [4 favorites]

I do not see why you would do yourself up in latex and/or a corset and/or PVC and then run around not pretending to be the undead hellprincess of the Eternal Night or whatever when you could just take your awesome self to hang out in the woods with your best friends and rule that shit. I don't look down on clubbing so much as I really, truly do not understand it at all.
posted by shakespeherian at 4:10 PM on May 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

No discussion of LARPing is complete without someone crossing their arms in front of their body and yelling, "OBFUSCATE!"

i'm not explaining that; all the right people will get it.
posted by the_bone at 5:48 PM on May 31, 2010 [3 favorites]

No discussion of LARPing is complete without someone crossing their arms in front of their body and yelling, "OBFUSCATE!"

Auspex, sorry.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:54 PM on May 31, 2010 [5 favorites]

So it's exactly what I thought it was. How stunningly dishonest.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:55 PM on May 31, 2010

I don't think we gave it a name, but when I was barely fifteen ('85) and living in Trinity County, California (i.e. Butt-Fuck Nowhere in the Forest), we'd cordon* off with "danger" tape a largish area of the forest, make armor & weapons out of card-board and duct tape, drop awesome acid (BFNitF had gooooood drugs), and spend the next couple of days camping and role playing. But it wasn't the nerds doing it - it was the punks and the other freaks.

All the nerd-haters were too afraid of US to do jack-shit! No one would say a word to us. (They may have all just been glad we were out of the little pretty picture perfect Weaverville for the weekend, instead of frightening the tourists.)

*To keep the trippers from getting lost.
posted by _paegan_ at 7:25 PM on May 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

I self-gratify as a MeFite.

I have said too much.
posted by everichon at 7:33 PM on May 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

*You don't have to actually say "I identify as X" in order to identify as X. Most people use "I am an X" instead. Sure, the former phrasing sounds pretentious. So it would probably be more used by pretentious people. But people identify as things all the time.

Well, yes, I am, as I readily admit, a pretentious blowhard. I intended "who identify as LARPers" to refer to people who say, "I'm a LARPer!" not to people who say, "My identity is that of a LARPer." Frankly, I wasn't aware people would interpret it any other way, which probably says more about me than about other people.

Carry on, by all means.
posted by Scattercat at 8:10 PM on May 31, 2010

This thread has some over-involvement by people who apparently a) don't LARP, b) aren't interested in LARPing, and c) aren't interested in hearing about other people's good and bad LARPing experiences (because nothing rolls out the red carpet for storytelling like the phrase 'uber-dumb'). So if this describes you, maybe take it to metatalk? Because I don't LARP but I like hearing people talk about it and, to smash a couple of metaphors together, your continuing to beat this drum is kinda sucking up all the oxygen.
posted by Ritchie at 1:10 AM on June 1, 2010

This thread has some over-involvement by people who apparently . . .

Actually, it looks like the pile on kittens is what really derailed it; for every comment he made, there are three or four rebutting him (including suggestions to comb through previous posts on other topics). At this point, looks like he's not even here. So maybe, if you guys want to talk LARP, you should just talk LARP at this point . . . ?
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 5:20 AM on June 1, 2010

Hello. This is my first post, so please excuse me if I do something that is a bit iffy.

I am an ex-LARPer. I gave it up because, well I just stopped enjoying it. I still have loads of friends that are involved. I only played in the UK so I have no idea what things are like in the rest of the world. Here are my thoughts on it.

Good things about LARP:
It's amazing exercise.
An extended fight in chainmail or plate will exhaust you in ways you couldn't even imagine. I can row 2000m in 7 minutes, but fighting knocks me for six. I have never been fitter than when I was playing every weekend. Some battles can last hours. Yes that's right, hours of fighting. The weapons may be fake but just waving your arms around for hours is exhausting.

It can be thrilling
Once you suspend disbelief (which is easier when you are at a festival with 5000 people doing the same thing) you will get to experience stuff that you can't get anywhere else. Breaking into temples to steal things from angry monsters, fighting back to back with your friends to save something you care about. Creeping about in the woods at night with 'werewolves/vampires/something fighty' hunting you. Talking your way out of being mugged, mugging people for their 'gold'.

It's rarely perfect, but on the good days, it's was like being in an episode of Doctor Who. Running around, solving puzzles and fighting. WIN.

Also there aren't many other situations in life where you can line up in a field against 2500 people who want to 'kill' you, have a huge battle and then walk away afterwards.

It makes shy people brave
I saw lots of shy nerds/geeks/other get transformed by LARPing. The sort of people who would have trouble striking up a conversation with a stranger would learn to be a bit more brave, bold and even cocky. I could go on about management training but it was seeing people come out of their shells that was the most impressive.

It makes people creative
It's easy to find the bad examples of LARP costumes online but with a bit of hunting you can find some amazing ones, not just BIG WOW ones but also consistent, convincing ones. Whole groups who have a co-ordinated look. Also people were constantly learning how to make their own gear and that was interesting. So ancient skills were being rediscovered. Also weapons have got better, in the UK they are made from latex and foam to look more convincing - like something out of Xena/Legend of the Seeker

It's inclusive
You can turn up on you own with minimal kit and people will welcome you. You'll leave the event with a load of new friends and some anecdotes that none of your normal friends will understand.

In the UK girls do it, and grown-ups too
I think the Lord of the Rings films are to blame for this, but after them LOADS of girls (well women) started going. It's still more men than women but it's getting better. Also people who started doing it at university now have jobs and children. The character of it is changing. Because people are growing up they are expecting more (and in some cases paying more) so the events have become more impressive.

Not so Good things about LARP:
It can take over your free time, and more
It's so absorbing that people sometimes get a bit over absorbed in it, and can become a bit boring. This can be a dangerous side effect of enjoying it too much. Free time is taken up by making chainmail or tunics.

It doesn't always bring out the best in people
Petty power struggles, nepotism, people getting drunk on a tiny amount of power, basically everything that annoys you about working in an office can happen in LARP. On the plus side you can stab them (in the game) so that helps.

Outsiders won't understand
They just won't until they do it, no matter how hard you try.

One day you might lose your love for it.
Which means you will be left with a very strange wardrobe of clothes and far too much leather. Still it means you can ROCK fancy dress parties at a moments notice.

FIN
posted by danceswithmustelids at 7:02 AM on June 1, 2010 [11 favorites]

(seriously, those fantasy football dudes are mostly square non-dorks, even if we want to comfort ourselves by saying that what they do is dorky)

Fantasy football is Dungeons & Dragons for dudes who used to beat up dudes for playing Dungeons & Dragons.
posted by brand-gnu at 7:36 AM on June 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

[few comments sort of retroactively removed - don't shit on threads. don't holler at people who shit on threads for it is often mistaken for thread-shitting, thanks. ]
posted by jessamyn at 8:35 AM on June 1, 2010

Fantasy football is Dungeons & Dragons for dudes who used to beat up dudes for playing Dungeons & Dragons.

My husband and most of the men in his family are hardcore into fantasy football. They're what I'd think of as socially acceptable nerds--the type of people who are hardcore into stuff that usually passes under the social radar or is accepted as normal. Like, variously, a dude who is really into trains, a bunch of guys who quote movies obsessively, some computer programmer/engineering types, and a photo equipment salesmen who does "glamor photography" in his spare time. And my husband, who played D&D and Magic: The Gathering in high school. (Oh, and one year, me, though it was too labor intensive to keep my interest more than a season) None of them are jocks, even if they are football fans. None of them even played sports in high school, to my knowledge. If they're nerds, they're white collar nerds.

But they're definitely not the dudes who used to beat up dudes for playing dungeons and dragons.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 3:17 PM on June 1, 2010

Second, insecure people can sometimes find it easier to be someone else than themselves.

I think it takes a bit more sense of inner security to LARP, because you have to forget about looking silly to people outside the game (or even in it). I'm not a LARPer, but part of the reason is I'm embarrassed, so these guys have more courage than I do.
posted by krinklyfig at 3:31 PM on June 1, 2010

But it wasn't the nerds doing it - it was the punks and the other freaks

Uh ... hate to break it to you, but punks and freaks are just nerds who use drugs and listen to crazy music.
posted by krinklyfig at 4:01 PM on June 1, 2010 [3 favorites]

After reading this thread, now I totally want to LARP. If you know about LARPing in Minnesota, send me a memail, yo.
posted by TheClonusHorror at 5:41 PM on June 1, 2010

I think it takes a bit more sense of inner security to LARP, because you have to forget about looking silly to people outside the game (or even in it).

For a couple weeks, across the street from one of the game stores, we would periodically see these guys in an apartment or office or something about two floors up, watching us with binoculars. We waved to them a couple times, but they never waved back or did anything other than keep looking. We couldn't really figure it out: why would these same guys be at a window for hours in the middle of the night, just watching us, every week?

Then we realized, oh. They're cops.

After that, we waved to them every time we went outside for a smoke or a scene, and made sure that periodically one of the dudes wearing cloaks would do a little dance outside for them or something. I do kind of wonder at what point they realized there was nothing to see, and how much longer after that they still had to watch us play extremely heated games of rock-paper-scissors.

That was by no means my only run-in with the cops while running this game, but I do enjoy that they staked out a Vampire game. If only they'd known, it could have been puns for everyone.
posted by Errant at 6:51 PM on June 1, 2010 [2 favorites]

Uh ... hate to break it to you, but punks and freaks are just nerds who use drugs and listen to crazy music.

Shhhhhhh.... someone might hear you!
posted by _paegan_ at 10:00 PM on June 1, 2010

just finished reading neal stephenson's the big u, written in 1984 (speaking of dystopias ;) that has some pretty good descriptions of LARPing!
posted by kliuless at 8:00 AM on June 10, 2010