Live-Action Roleplay (LARP)

What it is

Live-action roleplay, LARP or larp, is a roleplaying game in which participants physically become their characters. Instead of saying "my ranger draws her bow," you draw the bow, a foam-padded prop, in a real forest. Instead of describing a tense negotiation, you conduct it in character, face to face, for as long as it takes. Games can last a few hours in a living room or several days on a battlefield with thousands of players camped in rival factions.

The structure echoes the tabletop RPG, but with key changes. Game masters write the setting and rules and facilitate play, yet unlike a tabletop GM they rarely see everything at once, because dozens of scenes unfold simultaneously. Volunteer crew play the non-player characters, from innkeepers to monsters. Rules may call for boffer weapons, which let hits land physically and safely; or they may resolve conflict abstractly, with cards, calls or rock-paper-scissors; or they may do without rules and rely on players' sense of drama. Above all, a LARP has no audience. The players play for one another.

Origins

LARP has no single inventor. Groups in North America, Europe and Australia arrived at it independently in the years after Dungeons & Dragons (1974), drawing on make-believe, improvised theater, military simulation and costumed hobbies such as the Society for Creative Anachronism, founded at a Berkeley backyard tournament on May Day 1966, and the Renaissance Faires that began in 1963.

The earliest recorded LARP group is Dagorhir, founded in 1977 in the Washington, D.C., area by Bryan Wiese, who wanted to capture the adventure of Tolkien with sword and bow and advertised for players on the radio. After the film Logan's Run (1976), fans also staged rudimentary live games at science-fiction conventions. In 1981 the International Fantasy Gaming Society took its name and inspiration from the novel Dream Park, which imagined future LARPs, and in 1982 the Society for Interactive Literature formed as the first recorded theater-style LARP group in the United States. In April of that year Treasure Trap opened at Peckforton Castle in Cheshire, the first recorded British LARP, with player guilds that worked like classes. Australia's first recorded LARP, in 1983, used the science-fiction setting of Traveller.

Evolution

The hobby spread through the 1980s as tabletop gaming boomed, drawing suspicion along the way. The 1982 TV film Mazes and Monsters, starring a young Tom Hanks, dramatized fears that acting out fantasy games could unhinge players, one strand of the wider Satanic Panic. In 1993 White Wolf published Mind's Eye Theatre, a live-action version of Vampire: The Masquerade built on social intrigue rather than combat; it became the most commercially successful published LARP and brought vampire courts to conventions and clubs worldwide.

Europe developed the largest events. German fantasy LARP grew rapidly after its first events in the early 1990s, and since 2001 two annual German festivals have each drawn between 3,000 and 7,000 players. In Finland and Scandinavia during the 1990s a different tradition, Nordic larp, emerged: unobtrusive rules, "playing to lose" for the sake of the story, and serious, emotionally demanding themes. Its community has met annually at the Knutepunkt conference since 1997 and published books of larp theory since 2001. Its community wrestled early and openly with keeping players safe during intense play, a concern shared by the safety tools now common at tabletop games. LARP has also been used in education, in politics and in research, and in China the scripted murder-mystery form called jubensha became a commercial phenomenon from the mid-2010s, popularized by celebrity reality shows.

How to tell it apart

LARP vs tabletop RPG. Tabletop players describe what their characters do and let dice and a GM narrate the result; LARPers do it. Tabletop time can leap forward a week in a sentence; LARP time usually runs as real time. And where tabletop players are presumed to be speaking as themselves unless they say otherwise, LARP presumes the opposite.

LARP vs historical reenactment. Reenactors recreate real battles and daily life, and success means historical accuracy. LARPers play fictional characters whose choices change an unwritten outcome.

LARP vs the SCA. The Society for Creative Anachronism recreates the Middle Ages "as they ought to have been," with personas, crafts, courts and armored combat, but it is a living-history society, not a story game with plots and GMs. It is one of the roots LARP grew from, not a form of it.

LARP vs improv theater and Renaissance faires. Improv and faire performers play for an audience. In LARP, everyone present is a participant and nobody is watching.

LARP vs battle games. Boffer combat leagues such as Dagorhir sit on the border between LARP and sport; many members prefer to call what they do a battle game.

Where to start

• Dagorhir: the oldest recorded LARP group and a forerunner of North American foam-weapon battle games.
• Mind's Eye Theatre (1993): the classic theater-style LARP, all intrigue and no swords.
• The Knutepunkt books: the collections of Nordic larp theory and practice published alongside the conference since 2001, the best way into the art-form tradition.
• Nordic Larp (nordiclarp.org): articles and documentation of Nordic games and their design.
• A local weekend fantasy campaign: most regions have one, and a first event as crew is the traditional way in.