Every Game I Play is a Larp

Some Thoughts on Romanticizing TTRPGs

Every game I play is a Larp. I’m sitting on the floor of my living room, three of my friends are gathered around my glass-topped coffee table and we’re about to start my first larp. One of three “Space Larps” by Jason Morningstar, a playtest. I mention this, that this is my first larp. And my friend laughs and says, “You play every game like it’s a larp.” And I know this is true.

I mention this while I playtest another game, “I Named My Baby Goku,” by Kurt Refling. He is hosting the playtest, and I tell him: “I’m sorry, it’s not the fault of the mechanics, they’re great. But I just want to tell the story. Can we sort out the mechanical implications after I say my idea?” And he tells me I can. And I feel free. I tell my story. We sort out the mechanical implications. We have a great session.

I don’t mind mechanics. I understand that’s how games work, more often than not. We love levers and things that tell us what to do and the consequences of those things. At times, we seem to revere randomness. To let it seed into our stories moments of tragedy and triumph, fearful that our power fantasy fun may prevent us from doing so, this tendency to want to succeed.

Really this post isn’t about that. It’s about how I’ve been reading authors that make me want to romanticize the TTRPG experience. That I’ve been reading theory, and actual play accounts, and talking about those two things, and wanting to dissect and understand and assign a sociological term to everything that happens at my table, in my head, deep in my stomach in a way I can’t always name and quantify (not until I sit down and parse it into frames, into stances, into positioning).

Because I read people talking about the fun they have at the table, and they use !!!! and !!111!!! and they make me feel happy, when I read that, when people share their passion and enthusiasm at the fiction and the way it makes them feel. Its capacity to just do that. Because I read people who talk about their game experiences and dissect it and ask, “How do I make this better? How do I make the game better? How do I play better?” And I have been both of those. I have written and read things like that. But I haven’t gotten to read anything like this:

It’s the day after the space larp. A Saturday. I am saturated. Filled to the brim with socialization and yet I know there is more to come. The idea of it swells inside of me and I feel lethargic, content, reminded how much I like the way the carpet presses against the side of my legs when I sit cross-legged on it and watch my friends exist. They want to play Mausritter, but I don’t know if I can do another game, and three people is enough anyway. They’re mice fighting bees. I sit off to the side.

In my hands are felt gnome hats I spent all day yesterday making, that my friends cut when I got overwhelmed because the pattern didn’t specify things just right for my brain or my instincts and I wanted to be just like my mom, crafty and able and willing. Instead I found that as much as I’ve learned flexibility, I still need instructions, down to the last T, or to be told that instructions aren’t important. That you can be flexible. My mother would’ve gotten it first try. I learn that my friends help fill in the parts of myself that I wish I had. They’re my extended mind, an extension of my abilities, they’re smart and clever and I should be more willing to ask for help.

I hot glue ribbon and buttons and sew charms onto the hats as they fight the bees to get the honey they need to save their father from whisker rot, or something similar, I’m half listening, half soaking it all in. I stop them at one point to tell them a fact about bees, that my father kept them when I was kid, that you smoke a hive to get the bees out. They become afraid that a fire is approaching, might swallow their home whole, so they gorge themselves on honey until they become sluggish, no longer dashing about, but moving their legs with deliberate purpose, hopefully, towards safety.

I am christened the Bee-GM. The Bee Game Master. The BGM. The Backup Game Master. I am content. I break solidified hot glue off the dispenser and wish I had a craft table like my mother. Just a place to play. And I see it in front of me, instead, being used to tell a story. But if I think about it too hard, I know I wouldn’t put my hot glue on the glass. I wouldn’t scratch it. They roll dice on a piece of green felt I got when I hyper-fixated on blackjack. Their pencils scratch out numbers on printed sheets of paper, delicately cut and stamped for this game. There is care nestled in everything that happens.

Sure, my friends are discussing the difficulty of stabbing a knife into a bee when you’re a mouse with a small sword. Sure, I’m making felt gnome hats for a game where we will spend hours talking about what to do with a human who has fallen into our domain; we will consult an ancient gnome who will ask us, “What are humans?” Sure, we are silly. But I still feel the same way about these moments that I do about any other ones I get to share with people I love and care about.

I’m crying as I tell my friend that sometimes I think about, and get overwhelmed with, the image of the two of us standing on a hill overlooking one of the most beautiful sections of the Desolation Wilderness, a day of climbing and laughing and talking shit ahead of us, and when I look over to him, and I feel the breeze on me and the sun is beaming at us from behind the clouds, I feel joy at a magnitude that, when I am feeling it, feels like it is the entirety of me, as if I am a vessel of feeling that is overflowing. I do not fear I will never feel that again.

We have a foot of a five and a half foot hand-printed scroll unrolled on my dining room table and my brain is churning as my hands move in a trained, calculated way, making friendship bracelets for the people at the table. I can listen better when my hands have a task, when I don’t have to worry about occupying every little piece of my frantic, attention-hungry mind. We are crafting a story together. We are sitting around a fire and telling ghost stories together. There’s something so deep and fulfilling about this act of social connection.

My newest friend makes a bespoke piece of the world, a new part of the game, and we all marvel at it. In our hands is something just for us. Something made because of us, something concrete and just ours. We huddle around it like it’s a hierophany, a symbol of our collective belief in something, of how special and real and intimate our time together is. That our time spent around my dining room table, scroll unfurled, is something in and of itself, whole and right and special.

When my last friend leaves, and I am sitting on my couch in my apartment, filled just half an hour ago with people I shared something special with, I sob into my hands I am so overwhelmed, so tired, so spent, so full. It’s a joy and a sadness that I haven’t ever confronted before, that I haven’t ever gotten to experience before. It’s something akin to the way I felt after weekend retreats with my Youth Group, sans the guilt and shame and confusion. This idea of having done something that produced nothing but experiences, and maybe some gnome hats.

I want to look back on this and know what I felt, more than how I felt in the games that I played—I’ve already documented that—because I know these feelings can fade away, slip through my fingers if I’m not deliberate about cementing them. The sensation of felt on fingers, of laughing and saying, “Stoooop,” dragging out the o’s into an ah as I’m holding up my hand, trying to recover from the joke someone just told, trying to hold it all together and wanting to capture the moment, to slow it down until it’s all I feel, and I am content, spent, full.

---

Thanks for reading my romanticization of my weekend house con with friends. I hope I get to do it again. I wouldn’t trade that weekend for anything in the world, and I consider myself painfully lucky to have friends who want to do it with me, and who are really good at playing games. I hope more people romanticize their TTRPG experiences, and their time with their friends. There’s a lot to be said on the mechanical side of TTRPGs, the same for the experiences they produce, but for me I want to highlight the hum of human connection that happens even over and outside of play, and while play is happening and you stop and you take a moment to think, “I love these silly lil guys that I get to be friends with. I love playing games.”