So You Want to Play…

Over the course of the next month, and hopefully hopping up back to it from time to time for years to come, I will be writing about playing different types of characters, not about playing a certain class or race, but the actual heart of a character, the role playing archetypes, and how to make them your own.

Why a Role Play Guide Series?

Part of me finds the need for a role play guide to be counter intuitive to the experience of playing a LARP. The fun of it comes from stepping into the shoes of someone you are not, or someone you want to be. The most important thing you can do for your own enjoyment and fulfillment is make your character your own, unique to you.

I’m just hoping I can help you figure out what that means, and maybe find some cool stuff you can add to your kit to go with it. There is a bit of general advice that you can take away from it all, though, a handful of concepts you can start thinking about to make improvements to your character on your own right now, regardless of what your character is.

The idea of this series is to help people take their character from being just another face in the crowd to being something truly unique and special.

Your Character’s Profession

Generally, when you ask someone about themselves, the first thing they tell you is about what they do for a living or what they do for their hobbies. Most Role Players, even in the LARP environment, tend to ignore the more mundane aspects of their characters, preferring to answer with their class. I think you lose something when you neglect the day to day details of your character’s life. It leaves it two-dimensional and incomplete.

Besides, there is a lot more to LARP than just going out in the woods, pretending to be an elf and hitting your friends with foam swords. There are crafts and skills that people fall in love with as they play the game. Other hobbies spring up from involvement in LARPing, and many of them can translate into game and add more depth to your character.

Accessories make the Character

There are a few things that pretty much every LARP player should have in their kit, things like a belt pouch, weapons and the like. Then there are things that just make a character stand out from the pack, turning the player from just another fighter on the field into something special. Everyone wants to stand out and be memorable, and the accoutrements you carry really can make an big impact on how big an impression you make.

Make it Your Own

Fantasy as a genre is full of archetypes. Those of us who grew up gaming and reading epic stories all have an image in our head of what we want to be. For some of us, it is the shining armored paladin, for others it could be the sneaky cutpurse. The pitfall that we have to avoid as role players is not trying to emulate our favorite characters too closely, otherwise you end up at an event with a half dozen fallen kings living the life of a woodsman or a smattering of redeemed drow.

We don’t want to abandon the archetypes, though. They are what brought us into all this, it is what we enjoy. The idea is to take that concept and build on it, bring your own voice to the character instead of just playing another clone of the kid who’s parents were murdered by orcs.

Hopefully over the next few weeks, we can get there together.

Your Input Matters

One last thing. LARP is about community, and without it, nothing really ever gets done. If you don’t have any friends to role play with, you’re just a crazy guy dressing funny in the park and swinging pvc pipe at the air. The same goes for this blog. Over the last ten years of LARPing, I’ve come up with a pretty good idea of the types of questions that players have and the information that they really desire, but I’ve probably missed some, too.

If you have a particular niche, profession or character concept you’d like to discuss, please feel free to leave comments.

Everything is better when we work together to figure these things out.

Body by Boffer - LARP for Health

I am a large man. I’ve always been a large man. There isn’t going to be much outside of spending hours in the gym that is probably going to change that. I am also in fairly decent shape for a guy my size, and I have one thing to attribute to that, my biggest hobby: boffer fighting.

Personal Experience

I took a couple of years off of fighting, and in that time, I gained a lot of weight. A lot. Without realizing it, I had let my self swell from being a big man to being dangerously obese, and I knew it would take work to get back into any semblance of shape. That’s where boffer came in.

I did a little digging around on Google looking for information about exercise and diet, searching for an activity that I could and would do because I enjoy it. While looking at a list of the average calories per hour burned by various things (ranging from driving a car to brushing your teeth), I learned that fencing actually burns a lot of calories, between 500 and 1000 calories per hour.

All those years of sword fighting really had kept me healthy.

I got back into boffer pretty heavily last year. I had been fighting off and on at events before that again, but I hadn’t been attending practices or really trying to keep up. I changed that last November, really throwing myself back into it full force.

I’m proud to say I’m down about 45 pounds.

No Mistake it IS Exercise - Don’t Hurt Yourself

It’s important to remember that not only is boffer fighting a great form of exercise, it can be a very intensive, high-impact workout. Make sure that when you are out there fighting you are taking care of yourself, and make sure to follow a few important tips:

• Be sure to stretch, especially your legs and shoulders.
• Keep hydrated, fight hard, sweat hard!
• Warm Up, Cool Down - don’t just jump into full beat down mode, work your way through some one-on-one fighting first.
• Take a Break - Give your body some rest as the day goes on, especially at events.

Make it a Regular Thing

Like any good workout, you need to do it often to get a benefit from it. Since you also get better as a fighter the more you do it, you’ll be getting a double benefit from making sure you get out at every chance you get to fight. The more, the better.

Trust me, you’ll thank yourself later.

Getting It Handed To You - How to Loose with Grace

“But how do you stop somone from cheating?”

“We count on their honor.”

“Does it work?”

“No comment.”

This past weekend, I went and fought in Eldaraenth’s biggest annual Tournament. I’ve been boffer fighting now for about 12 years. I practice less often than I should, but I think I’ve managed to maintain a modicum of skill. I never expected to do extremely well in the tournament, after all my body just can’t keep up with some of the younger guys anymore. I also didn’t expect to get what I got.

I got beat like a pell.

Boffer combat is a big part of a lot of LARP games. It is the cornerstone of conflict resolution, and there are multiple players out there that only come to events to beat on each other with foam swords. It is an aspect of play that I encourage people to get into for a dozen reasons ranging from looking like a badass to the health benefits. It can also be the aspect of the game that is the most frustrating.

We Aren’t All Bad Asses

Dragons, Feared-Men, Billy Badass. Call them by a dozen different names, and you still have the same thing, the guys on the field that you know are going to hand you, your friends, and your friends’ grandmother their ass. Sometimes we dread fighting them. Sometimes we seek them out on the field so that we can test our metal against them. No matter what, everyone at your game knows who they are and knows those are the guys to fight.

Most of us aren’t one of those guys.

Nobody likes to loose, though. It sucks to be rolled over by an unstoppable juggernaut of foam combat, and it can be even worse if you used to be that guy but your age and apathy towards training have moved you to the sideline.

Add that frustration into the adrenaline and passion of the moment, and it’s easy to let yourself slide into throwing swings that are too wild, or ignoring shots that you know you should have taken.

We’ve all been there.

It’s important to remember, though, that when we’re down in the dirt, getting kicked around by a guy that is ten years (or more) our junior and feeling like we’re absolute pieces of garbage, all we have left is the most important thing to any boffer fighter.

Our Honor.

So, I’ve decided that I am going to make a conscious effort to shift gears in my boffer fighting. I intend to fully keep training myself, pushing myself to get back to where I was in my prime ten years ago, but I’m no longer going to worry about winning or loosing. I swing foam swords because I love doing it. It is fun.

I can have just as much fun with loosing as I can have by smacking a guy down.

I just need to get better at my melodramatic deaths. It seams to me that screaming in agony and writing in pain on the ground before finally succumbing to my wounds will be a great way for me to remind myself that I need to make sure I’m not taking it all too seriously.

When you take it too seriously, that’s when you start to jeopardize your honor.

In the grand scheme of things is one boffer fight, one match in a tournament, really worth loosing that?

I don’t think so.

Hidden Resources - Instructables

There are a lot of great websites out there to find out how to make the things you want to have for an awesome LARP experience. You can generally find anything you’re looking for with a quick search on Google, but sometimes you can find too many awesome things when you’re just use general search terms.

Whenever I want to learn how to make something, I start with one great resource, Instructables.Com.

If you’re not familiar with Instructables, it is a website for crafty and creative types. Most of the site is made up of tutorials that cover just about anything.

Spend some time on there surfing around and I’m sure you’ll find a thousand projects you want to knock out.

Here are some great LARP Instructables that can get you started:

How to Apply Elf Ears - Latex ears are the most common Phys Rep (physical representation) you’ll see in a LARP game, and just as common is seeing them fall off, so it’s nice to know how to do them right.

Tattoo Tights - Tattoos are a great way to show off how awesomely unique your character is, and this instructable is a great way to make sure your tattoo is always the same. It beats the crap out of drawing them on your skin each event with make up, or worse, a sharpie.

Steampunk - One of my favorite things about Instructables is there e-books section, which is a collection of related topics put together. The Steampunk book is one I visit often for my mad sciences.

Chain Maille - A great instructable on how to weave chain maille. If this one doesn’t suit your fancy, there are several dozen other patterns and techniques on the site.

Those are just some of my favorites. I have spent hours pouring over the site, finding amazing things that range in difficulty from projects that kids can do to projects that make professional engineers quiver in fear, but I always find something I want to tinker with.

I’m sure you’ll find what you need there, but if you can’t, they also have a pretty great forum you can turn to for help and tips.

So, head over to Instructables.Com and impress your friends at your next big event with your awesomeness.