I would love to be on your next episode Miles. AIM of Skype, I don’t care, but if you’re atlaking about LARPing I can give you some insite.
While WoW may be the biggest fantasy game people are aware of LARPing has been around for a long time. I’m not even talking about rennaissance faires either, but live action versions of table top role-playing.
The Society for Creative Anachronism is one of the oldest organizations I can think of that do something akin to LARP. Technically they are not LARPers, but games LARPing has its routes from this group.
http://www.sca.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Creative_Anachronism
Back in the day my friends and I were looking for something new to do with role playing and we found a group called Sword Tag that sold home-made foam weapons to use in live action scenarios. We never ordered anything because we were poor, but we did find new uses for toilet paper rolls and paper towel rolls. Fun times.
In Berkeley I can’t help but bump into people who play a LARP version of Vampire: the Masquerade. I sarcastically cross my hands to put palms on my shoulders and flail out my fingers. This is game-speak for Obfuscate 10, which means in-game they can’t see me and would have to be very powerful to notice me. Yes, that makes me equally nerdy for knowing that, but at the same time it is insulting enough to them they leave me alone. I am not a fan of the vampire, goth or emo scene and don’t want to get in it with them. Ugh. Needless to say Vampire: the Masquerade has been around since 1991 and even though it is a table top game people wanted to play dress-up even back then. Of course White Wolf got smart and published LARP rules for Vampire and their other World of Darkness games in the 90’s.
For years now WotC has been putting on a Live Dungeon game at GenCon. Hopefully The Chiz and Freddy tried that out. Wil Wheaton wrote about how much fun it was to play while back and I’m kicking myself for not trying it out when I was at GenCon in 2003. You have to sign a waiver before you can play because there is supposed to be real interactions and simulations. For example a door could be trapped with a lightning attack and apparently they rig a door knob so it will in fact zap you if your grab it without disarming it first.
Wow, this was a long-winded way of saying the WoW reference, while I understand why it’s there, is misleading in explaining or marketing who Monster Camp is for. It must be a markers attempt at getting WoW players out of the house.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_live_action_role-playing_games
