 Howdy, how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy, and today I want to talk about my favorite thing, role-playing. On the table, or in public, the act of playing make-believe is a pastime for many a nerd in the era of niche things becoming public, and for this video, I want to take two of my favorite avenues for creative expression and smash them into each other like M&M's until one of them cracks and the other is fit for consumption. As always, keep in mind that the majority of this is just my opinion, so if you're unusually defensive about your specific brand of free time, feel free to play your games however you want, but with that out of the way, let's begin. Concept. D&D is sitting down at a table and pretending that things that don't exist are actually things that do exist. LARPING is that standing up. I'm going to be using D&D as a catch-all term for TTRPGs as a whole genre, because LARPING is a genre, not a specific game, but unlike D&D, it is a lot harder to constantly say TTRPG. In concept, the goal of both hobbies is to party up with your friends and go on magical adventures that will make such great tales that one day when you're old and gray, you can tell them to the next generation of gamers who will not give the simplest shit about your war stories. COMMUNITY. The community aspect of both games is more nuanced than you'd expect. With D&D, you've got a solid group of four-ish buddies who all have the common goal of giving the DM a headache. It's secluded, but that seclusion means intimacy between the players, because you get to know each other and end up forming everlasting bonds of friendship. However, that bond is like a Prince Rupert's drop. If there's a falling out between players, the game suffers for it. If someone has to stop playing, the game suffers. If God forbid the DM is out of the picture, the entire game disintegrates. It's possible to roll with the punches and get past it all, but if you're a D&D player, your history is probably troubled with some broken groups and half-finished adventures. As for LARPING, I'm gonna be totally biased, but I found community beyond my wildest dreams by going to a tiny game in a swamp five years ago. Every LARP I go to, I make a whole new, huge community of friends. And if I end up not liking somebody, who gives a shit, I just ignore them. It's not four or five people, it's dozens who are all the exact same kind of nerd who used to never think that LARPING could be something they'd get into, but then one game changed their mind. Getting off my soapbox on a practical level, LARPING removes the responsibility to show up from everybody but you. The game is never canceled due to falling out, sir, because a couple people can't make it. And if you miss a game, you just get filled in on what happened next month. It's still possible to have such a major falling out that the LARP no longer works for you, but my experience is that you either reject a LARP right away, or after three games, a part of your soul will always belong to that spot in the woods. Genre! Medieval fantasy is the first thing that comes to mind for both LARPING and tabletop games, but the genre of your game is only restricted to what's available to you. Most DMs know 5e, and that's it, and most LARPers just want to play Lord of the Rings, but if you dig a little deeper, you'll find Call of Cthulhu, City of Mist, Vampire the Masquerade, all TTRPGs that have a much more modern bent for people who are tired of pretending that guns didn't exist in the Middle Ages. As for LARPING, one of the biggest organized LARPs in the US is a post-apocalyptic zombie LARP, and another one of the biggest organizations is literally just Vampire the Masquerade, but now you're standing up. There's no one genre to rule them all, and both games are equally diverse. It's just that fantasy has such a stranglehold on the market that most people don't bother reaching out, and that's a shame. D&D can be whatever it wants to be, but I'd argue that LARPING is actually more suited to alternative genres, since modern games mean modern clothes, and nobody wants to spend $200 on an old blouse. But wait! If clothing apparel is your barrier against the fantastical world of LARP, luck has found you, friend, and you can look no further than Bug Schneider, the medieval apparel store that's been supplying LARPers since good old 1990s something. With the power of Bug Schneider, you too can dress like the British are invading with the finest threads this side of the century, and if you use my discount code CHAP, you can save 15% out of all purchases made using the online store. If this appealing jargon of letters is way too difficult to type, I've left a link in the description, or you can click this fancy annotation to finally wear the adventurer you were born to be. Bug Schneider. If it's good enough for Gandalf, it's good enough for me. Accessibility! D&D will always be way more accessible than LARPING, not just in the fact that you can play D&D in your basement where nobody can see you but your closest friends, but once you go to a LARP, you actually have to, you know, be there. You have to physically do things, and depending on the type of LARP, that ranges from walking and talking to Ninja Warrior courses while John Wick is chasing after you. A lot of LARPs are trying to be more inclusive towards people with disabilities, who just can't be physically active in general but still want to act out their forest fantasies, but the operative word is TRYING. There's no centralized organization to LARPING. While some games go out of the way to provide non-combat experiences, others just tell you to get fucked and then walk away with their legs that work. Granted, there is something to be said about focus. I have ADHD and I've played a lot of D&D, but my hardest struggle is keeping track of what's going on. When I'm at a physical table, I basically just sink into my chair until it's my turn, because without a visualizer, I don't know what I'm doing or where I am. All I know is that I must dice. Virtual tabletops are better because the DM can put a screen up and I can walk around on a little map, but LARPING will always be the best option for me because I can physically be there, no guessing or keeping track required. I still think that D&D as a whole is a more accessible game, but this is a small caveat where I actually think that LARPING might be better. Immersion! This is an easy one for LARPs. Not that you can't absolutely get immersed in the story that you're telling with your friends at a table, but like I just said, it's on a completely different level when, instead of picturing yourself there, you are there. I don't roll dice to drop my Warhammer on a goblin. I DO drop it, and then I miss because I SUCK! If I'm under attack, I actually feel the adrenaline and my will to survive kicks in, and in this fight, combat doesn't take three hours. Actually, that's not totally true. I once fought through an underground mining tunnel for like three hours straight, and it was some of the most intense gameplay I've ever had, but it was also the end of an event that was kicking off New Season, so they wanted the whole town to be there. That was special. To be fair, D&D has a similar advantage over LARPs as books do to movies, that being that I can describe a mighty dragon at my table, and then plop a figurine down, job finished. But if I want to fight a dragon at a LARP, someone has to figure out how the hell to make a real-life dragon animatronic. I know where to start. But while I can't travel misty mountains in real life, I also can't actually do it in D&D. I'm just at a table hallucinating. LARPs recognize their limitations and play within them, making unique monsters based on the practical effects at their disposal that can get so shockingly realistic that you'll forget that you haven't seen a dragon in a while. Bleed. Bleed is the dark side of immersion. What happens when you forget that you're a character and start to take things personally? Just how LARPing generates stronger immersion? It also generates stronger emotion, which makes getting shot down or shouted out by a make-believe character a legitimate problem, especially since being stuck in the fantasy world gives no option to stand from the table and walk out. Once again, LARPs are doing their best to provide safety tools to the experience so that players who get too riled up can 86 themselves out of a conversation and take a moment to recuperate, but given the unglued nature of LARPing, that's not always guaranteed. Luckily, due to the amount of people at a LARP, having a panic attack doesn't impact the entire game. Not that other people should be your first concern, but once you're feeling better, you can go find a group with people that you weren't just interacting with and they'll be none the wiser that anything even happened. IMPORTANCE. What is importance? Well, your importance to the story is how much the story revolves around you. In Dungeons & Dragons, you and your four friends are literally the reason the world exists. Everything the DM does is in service to your entertainment, specifically you. They may pay lip service to the idea that you're just a small adventurer in a living, breathing world, but that world stops moving when you guys order pizza. LARPing is a completely different beast. It's not just lip service anymore. When you walk into that game, you're stepping into a world that existed before you and will exist long after you're gone. Your best option is to make your mark on it, but it will one day forget you. A good LARP goes out of its way to make new players feel welcome, and it'll give them some quests and plotlines to help them start making a name for themselves for a few games, and those plotlines have turned into full-blown plot hooks that have established the character as a bona fide force in town. A bad LARP will forget that you're there and just focus on the same dozen friends of the story staff, leaving you to cast Firebolt at Butterflies all day. If you've ever been interested in a West March D&D game, LARPing is that concept made grand. Some people will find it frustrating to not be the center of attention, others will find the decentralized story too more enticing because you can jump between all the different stories that are going on at once, and if a story doesn't gel with you, you can just ignore it. It's higher stakes because you aren't guaranteed to be the hero or even win at the end, so when you succeed, you know it's because it was you. Devotion! LARPing is a trip you take. It's three days of dedication to one experience, like an endless escape room where every door leads to a new side quest. It's a completely different league than D&D, which only takes up three to six hours over at a friend's house or a game store, and you never have to touch grass. D&D is predominantly a weekly experience, sometimes monthly, but the point is that you can schedule around your own time, whereas LARPs are almost always played on weekends and they have set dates that you can't control, so if something comes up, oops. Granted, that means that going to a LARP means three full days of non-stop gaming, but it's also travel plans, the price of admission, and everything else more complicated than just asking your friends to come over for an afternoon. I like it because of escapism. I get to lock myself into the world, but it's best to think of it as a fun little vacation that you get to go to once a month for being such a good little wage slave. Popularity! D&D has been on Stranger Things. Vin Diesel plays it. The last time that LARPing was in the mainstream, it was Hawkeye, and they somehow couldn't get the LARPer of the MCU to give a shit about LARPing, because the image that LARPing gets now is the same as what D&D was getting 10 years ago. That idea of outcasts throwing pencils at each other and shouting spell names. In the nowadays, D&D has gotten a facelift. It's so popular that Rick and Morty play it. But the first and only time that LARPing has been given positive representation was Anthony Padilla's dissertation where he revealed LARPing's biggest secret. We fuck. I think that the biggest reason why LARPing hasn't gotten the attention it should is because there's no recognizable brand name. It's just LARPing. War games have Warhammer. Tabletop games have D&D. Whether you like it or not. Video games have abusive worker conditions, but if you asked anybody what a LARP was, they'd blue screen, and they definitely wouldn't know the secret lore of where to find one. Without an obvious example, people like me are reliant on making dozens of YouTube videos to frantically explain the difference between latex and boffers. Hopefully this video will move the needle somewhat, and hopefully someday soon, LARP gang will rise up and become the next hit thing that famous celebrities like to do to make all the normies go, What? But he's hot! But then I'm out to it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Comment below with your comparisons between games of playing pretend and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can LARP about having a real job. But yeah! Davie out.