LARP What is it and why should you be doing it
Posted: Friday, November 21, 2008
by Mark Roberts
Otherways
This article is all about live action role-playing, more commonly known as larp. It tells you what larp is and it discusses why people do it. It also describes the various genres and a short history of larp.
Larp
LARP is an acronym for Live Action Role Playing. It is also referred to as larping live role playing or lrp. Larp is all about becoming another person or identity for the duration of a live game and taking part in said game. There is no pre written script it is all improvisation done by the participants on each event. Most of all it is about having fun.
The larp game is usually written by referees who will come up with a scenario suitable for the genre that the larp game is set in. A good example of this would be a murder mystery where everyone plays a guest at a dinner party and then someone is killed and the players have to discover who the murderer is. Many people will have already done something like this in their lives and not even realised they were live action role playing.
A short Larp history
Many hobbies actually fall under the broad definition of LARP and have existed for at least a century; LARP gained in popularity during the seventies mainly due to table-top role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. The first professional larp started in the early eighties and was called treasure trap. Treasure trap ran 3 hour larping m edieval fantasy adventures at a place called peckforton castle in Cheshire in the UK . Nowadays there are hundreds of clubs all over the world, type larp in to any modern day search engine on the World Wide Web and there will be more links than you could possibly view.
The various Larp Genres
Larp covers many genres, here are just a few; Medieval, Fantasy, WW1, WW2, Napoleonic, Dark ages, Celtic, Viking, English Civil war, American Civil War, Vampire, 17 th Century, 1920s. You will notice that many of the above cover periods of war and conflict, this is because many larp systems, although not all, include some form of in game combat.
Larp rules
Almost all the larp clubs and businesses have a rules system which cover everything from how to start a character to rules for wearing armour, fighting with larp safe weapons, how to role play and even learning and casting of magic spells. Every group will have its own way of doing things and it is up to the individual to try out the various different types of live action role playing until they find the one that they like the best.
So why Larp
Taking on another identity for an evening a weekend or even a week can be great fun. Larp is probably the most social activity available in the modern day world; it is suitable for all ages and equally accepts all races creeds colour class etc. Because many larp games have missions to be completed and set the players against adversaries it creates an amazing team spirit and brings out the most inventive and clever parts of people. It can also be quite physical which in this modern day world of everyone sat at computers is a much better and more fun way of doing exercise than going to a gym. Larp is fun, get on the internet, search for your local larp games and give them a try, I am sure you wont be sorry.
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)Don't we do this everyday in our day to day real life experiences?Yes many people do pretend to be someone that isnt really them particularly in the workplace. However often that isnt for fun reasons and is usually because they are trying to get ahead.The reason to do this as a hobby is all about choice.
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