How LARP Works

How LARP Works

It’s a Saturday afternoon. I’m standing in line at the grocery store, and something seems a little out of place. I realize that the teenager in front of me is wearing a long, green tabard with gold trim, and he has a wide, leather belt around his waist. He’s buying lots of bottled water and Gatorade.

On my way out of the parking lot, I see him cross the street toward the park. There, two lines of similarly dressed combatants, some with brightly painted shields, face off against each other. They’re armed with puffy, slightly oversized mock weapons that are covered in duct tape.

The people in the park are playing a live-action role playing game, or LARP. A LARP is a grown-up version of playing make-believe, and each LARP has its own rules and invented history. The game in the park is a battle game, one that focuses more on active combat than on an unfolding story.

To learn more about LARP, we interviewed Laurie Zolkosky, who has years of experience with live-action games and even started her own. In this article, you’ll learn all about LARPing, including how the games work, why people play and what it takes to start a new game.

As Zolkosky describes it, a LARP is:

In other words, a LARP is an extended interaction between three things – a world, its rules and the people in it.

Long before the game begins, someone invents an imaginary world in which the action will take place. In the case of King’s Gate, Zolkosky spent about a year and a half designing the game world, which is similar in some ways to the early European Renaissance. However, it’s also a post-cataclysmic world filled with magic, monsters and non-human, intelligent races.

The process of designing a game world is lengthy because its creator has to address virtually everything that appears in the real world. For example, the world of King’s Gate has an extensive recorded history as well as documented fighting styles, races and monsters. The description of the game world also includes what its people, technology and cultures are like. The people of King’s Gate have a very basic understanding of astronomy and mathematics. There’s no electricity, and the lower classes do not know how to read or write. The world’s most complex weapons are crossbows and siege weapons. Players have access to pages of details about what the world they’ll be playing in is like.

The next part of the equation is the game’s rules. Game designers have the option of creating an entirely new rule system to address combat, magic, death and characters’ skills. Or, they can use an existing rule system. For King’s Gate, Zolkosky leased a rule system from Chimera Interactive.

The final component of a LARP is people. You can separate the people involved in a LARP into three categories:

This interaction between a world, its rules and its people takes place within the context of a game session or campaign. It’s a lot like a story or a little piece of the world’s history. A game session can last anywhere from a few hours to a few days, and a campaign can go on for months. During that time, players will congregate at the game site, often a campground or a park, on a regular schedule. While the game is in progress, the players pretend to be their characters – they walk, talk and act the way their characters would.

Thanks to Laurie Zolkosky for her assistance with this article. Zolkosky has been playing live-action games for 15 years and launched a LARP called King’s Gate in 2001. King’s Gate is now owned by Red Button Productions, and Zolkosky is its creative director.

Some people classify reenactments as LARPs. Others feel like these events have a different purpose than LARPs do. Reenactments often serve to re-create a specific period or real historical event, while LARPs generally incorporate fantasy or science fiction elements. In addition, a reenactment is usually a representation of a particular occurrence rather than a game.

Exactly how a campaign plays out depends on the type of LARP that people are playing. There are three primary ways in which games unfold.

Two groups of opponents face each other on a battlefield. They’re dressed in period clothing, including armor, and armed with padded, duct-tape covered weapons called boffers. Someone gives a signal, and the battle begins – the combatants rush at each other, attacking with their boffers until a clear winner emerges. Sometimes, the battle ends when members of only one team are left standing. This is a live-combat or battle game. Dagorhir is a battle game based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Another battle game, Darkon, has been the subject of an award-winning documentary.

A group of people congregate in a room, and a storyteller distributes a card describing a character to each of them. The storyteller describes a scene, and the players use the information from their character cards to decide how to respond to the scenario. They act out their characters’ decisions, but they don’t engage in any kind of combat. If there’s a need to fight, they play “rock, paper, scissors,” pull cards from a deck, roll dice or use some other method to determine the outcome. This is a theatrical or non-combat game. White Wolf’s “Mind’s Eye Theater” games are theatrical LARPs.

Many people arrive at a campground, where they’ll be staying for the weekend. These players have either created their own characters and submitted them to a GM or received cards describing the characters they will play. The GM or NPCs give characters information about what’s happening in the story and players act out. For example, an NPC might tell the players that a powerful vampire has been terrorizing the village. The players, based on their characters’ skills and abilities, decide how to find and attack the vampire, using boffers to simulate the battle. This is a role-playing or role-playing combat game. King’s Gate falls into this category. The most well-known role-playing combat game is called NERO.

Regardless of which style the game follows, its rule system provides the framework for all of the GM, PC and NPC decisions. Rules cover all the details of game play, including:

Most games have a system for keeping track of all this information. A character’s history, skills and attributes are written on a character sheet. In many games, players carry a life ring, a key ring that holds disposable tags that represent spells, hit points, armor points and abilities. The ring may also include a life tag that simply indicates whether a character is alive or dead. When characters cast spells or take damage, they remove the corresponding tags from their rings. Some battle games also have scorekeepers whose only role is to keep track of players’ damage and armor.

A boffer is basically a piece of PVC pipe or bamboo that’s heavily padded, coated with duct tape and shaped to look like a weapon. Players can hit one another with boffers without causing injury. Different games have their own rules governing boffer construction and use, but you can learn more about them at Lukrain’s Guide to Boffers.

Rule systems also specify how players must specify when they are out of play – present at the game site but not participating in the game. Anyone who is out of play cannot interact in any way with the people who are in play. Most game organizers encourage players to remain in play whenever possible, but some designate out-of-play areas for players to take breaks or socialize.

A variety of people, both male and female, like to LARP. “Most of them are very imaginative people,” says Zolkosky. “Most of them have a taste for genre fiction, most are highly intelligent…and are in some sense usually a little bit different socially.” Social differences often bring players together, and the LARP beings to provide a social group. “I’ve seen it bring a lot of people out of their shell,” Zolkosky says. “I’ve seen introverts who have lived in their heads for much of their lives, when they find…a LARP, they discover that there are other people who have been living the same stories in their head. And they begin to come out of their shell and form a social circle based on the LARP.”

Just as there are different styles of games, there are also different types of players. People like different game aspects or types depending on their interests and temperaments. Zolkosky explains:

But even though players can have some basic traits in common, they can have different reasons for how they play and why they enjoy the game. Petter Bockman’s essay “The Three Way Model,” from “As Larp Grows Up: Theory and Methods in Larp,” describes these types of people as the dramatist, the gamist, and the immersionist.

Most players are a blend of these three types. “Different players like different things,” says Zolkosky. “There are people who want to just fight all weekend and win a lot of fights. That’s cool, too. A lot of this has to do with your style of what it is you’re looking for in a game.”

These types also apply to people who create and run LARPs. Dramatists like writing the stories. Gamists like taking care of the details and setting up puzzles for the players to discover. Immersionists like creating a completely real, absorbing world. In addition to creating a world and running sessions, staff must find venues for the games, take care of licenses and insurance where applicable and publicize the game, among other administrative tasks.

For these reasons, creating and running a game is a group effort, rather than the effort of a single person. Zolkosky explains:

Then, once the game gets off the ground, the staff has to be prepared for the unexpected. “The number of things that can go wrong is insane,” says Zolkosky.” That’s why part of the skill of doing this is being able to cope with anything that happens.”

It’s difficult to pin down exactly when LARP made its debut. However, most sources cite two dates – 1966, with the creation of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and 1974, with the publication of the first Dungeons & Dragons rulebook. Most agree that the game grew from a love of science fiction and fantasy books and movies.

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