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.