A Live Action Sceptic Speaks

LARPers These LARPers are, um, kinda dorky. . These LARPers are bone-thin or grossly overweight, and they're almost all pre-pubescent. I'm no Brad Pitt, but there's a picture of a 15-year-old weasel with glasses holding a PVC sword twice as large as he is. Hmmm. Well, that's okay, I guess. I've got glasses, and I'm pretty narrow-framed. And I game each week around a table pretending to be someone I'm not. Yeah, that's okay. Why make a big deal out of something like that, eh? I'll just move on to the pictures of the cities. I mean, the description above was pretty cool. The town has dark streets and taverns and people wandering around. Hmmm, these towns are more like open forests. Lemee see here, there's a castle. I think it's a giant cardboard box that's been propped up on stilts and painted to look like a castle, except it's too small for anyone to fit inside. That's kind of bizarre. Oh... here's a tavern. Yeah, this is the tavern. The caption says here that this is a cabin near the "city" in the woods. It seems like a pretty cool log cabin. Everyone is dressed in garb and they seem to be revelling. Wait... what is that? A stereo? They're revelling to a stereo atop the table? Nobody had a stereo back then! Allright, I'm pretty confused by this whole LARP thing. These combat pictures had better look damn good or I'm through with this stuff for good. Okay, yeah, they're out in the same forest (aka, the city), and they've got seven people lined up on the left, and eight lined up across the field. Yeah, they're rushing toward the middle. PVC swords are a swingin', spellcasters are tossing their little bean bags, archers are shooting their foam-covered arrows. Well, that all looks pretty fun. Yeah, I could do-- Wait what's going on? The "dead" ones are getting up, and everyone's lining up on their side... again? Huh? Wait, that nerdy-lookin weasel was dead. I saw him get hit five pictures ago! I scan ahead to the next set of pictures and, sure enough, the two sides battle each other AGAIN and AGAIN, until the sun goes down. I quickly close my web browser and never look into LARPs again. Can anyone explain to me the following: 1) How it is that the DESCRIPTION of what happens while LARPing is so much more exciting than the pictures? Shouldn't it be the other way around? 2) How can a LARP possibly go on for more than one afternoon? Most of the LARPs I saw on the web had less than 20 members - TOTAL. Do the players and NPCs switch off every few hours? Do the orcs change out of costume and become barkeeps the next day? 3) How likely am I to believe I'm in a city when the only buildings around are trees? I'm all for imagination, but please... 4) How likely am I to believe I'm in a city when I keep running into the same twelve people wherever I go? 5) If I'm a warrior, and I keep whacking people with a fake sword from sunup until sundown, how am I different from any ol' member of the Society for Creative Anachronisms (SCA)? Damn. I knew it was too good to be true.

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