The year 2015 is a threshold year for me with respect to Live-Action Role-Playing. This year, I’ve been away from LARPing for as many years as I was involved in the hobby.
Tag: larp
Knights of Badassdom – an annoyed review
As a grade-B horror comedy with well-known actors, maybe I should cut this film some slack. As someone who LARPed for 12 years, I can’t.
The story of Knights of Badassdom may be new to the general public, but it’s overly familiar to any LARPer, RPG gamer, or SF fan: what if a group of role-players actually met a fantasy creature?
The film has the standard ingredients of low-end horror films: buckets of blood, characters that exist to be slaughtered, protagonists that behave with incredible stupidity. If you’re a fan of the kind of film satirized by The Cabin in the Woods you’ll be on familiar ground.
What annoyed me was the film’s depiction of live-action role-playing. It’s a comedy, and perhaps I should allow them some license. But I’m annoyed that every single LARPer in the film fits the standard negative stereotypes: a mix of dysfunctional personalities, poor role-playing, and bad sportsmanship, set in a LARP with with a terrible (and inconsistent) rules system.
Mild spoiler: In the end, the only protagonists who turn out to be effective are the ones who reject the idea of LARPing from the start.
This film was locked in a dispute over distribution rights for two years. I looked forward to its release in the hope that it might be a film that showed LARPing in a positive light, or at least encouraged LARP acceptance. By the end of the film, I was not amused, scared, or entertained. I was disappointed.
Maybe someday there’ll be a film in which the hobby of LARPing isn’t treated as a joke. Knights of Badassdom is not it.
Originally published at Argothald. You can comment here or there.
You never really leave LARPing
Last night, I had a powerful dream: I was writing a module for Mystic Realms. I felt proud of creating a good story with lots of action, but requiring only one NPC.
Of course, I didn’t write it down when I woke up. Now the perfect MR module is lost forever.
Not that it matters, since I haven’t played in a LARP for 8 years. In fact, I’ve now been away from Mystic Realms longer than the time I played in the game.
I can’t go back: I’m not physically up to it, I don’t have the time, life has changed.
But MR still haunts my dreams.
Re-discovering an old love
From the title, you probably think this post is going to be about romance and candlelight and kisses. Nope!
