Why I'm a Questing/Role-Playing Caster
first heard about the game from friends. They told stories about the things that they’d done and told me it was like a table-top game except you actually get out and DO all the cool parts. I’d been playing table top games for a while now and hell if LARPing didn’t sound like an amazing thing to go do! I sat down with the rule book and got completely overwhelmed. I borrowed a sword and hit a practice, convinced that it was going to be as awesome as I was told. Boy was I wrong… Due to my own physical limitation and the ease in which other people tore up the field with their fighting, I was completely put off. There wasn’t a whole lot of support at the time for newer people at the practice. I went back a few times with the same results and convinced myself LARPing was completely not for me. Combat was in every aspect of the rulebook. While the stories were cool, what fun is there in being killed all the time?
Sometime later another friend convinced me to actually go to an event. “It’s not like fight practice”, he promised. Since I wasn’t doing anything else that weekend, I figured I’d give it a shot. I re-read the rule book and tried to come up with a plan to be useful. I wasn’t a great fighter. Maybe if I picked up a path of spells people would help me and I wouldn’t die so much? That was my plan. I don’t remember much about my first event. I kept my head down and avoided most everyone that day. The weather didn’t help at all. The next weekend, with one spell under my belt, I was determined to be useful! It was dark, at least fifty people were there, and the one person I knew dropped me off and said “see you after the event” as he went to go NPC. Some players noticed that I looked completely lost and took pity on me and made sure I had people to hang out with for the evening. We did some small quests, talked to a bunch of people I had never met, and ran screaming away from something that was trying to eat us. I even killed something! I didn’t need a spell or my swords to be useful. Talking to people, learning, and problem solving was something I could do and that was pretty darn fun.
I kept learning a path of spells, just enough to help my friends and dip my toes into the world of interacting with NPCs. Finally, I was starting to see what my friend had said about how LARPing was more like a table-top game. I threw myself at the story, interacted with a host of NPCs and PC, and fell in love with the incredible variety of lore and tales of events past. I saw the way some of the other people interacted with the game, and taking combat so seriously to the detriment of some of the other players was a huge turn off. I kept to a healthy mix of combat and spells. I picked up some armor, learned how to shoot a bow, and kept trying to figure out what was right for me. In the end, after a few interactions, I found it. I fell in awe of the depth and character of one of the other players. The way she interacted with people as a PC and NPC was immersive. She role-played. She did a bit of combat. I wanted to be like her. So I watched and followed where she went, and there were other people, men and women how found that mix of role-playing and fighting that made the game fun. And of the stories!
I fell in love with the stories and got to see them first hand from their start to their end. The tears, the speeches, the love, the laughter, those were the things that made the game so sweet. This is what I wanted to do. So I threw myself at it and never looked back.
I got a bit older and combat seemed like an afterthought to me. There were others that were more suited to it so I focused on the things I felt I was good at. I was told that there was a difference between being a spellcaster and someone who cast spells. I wanted to be the best I could be with the resources I had. I used my spells, now numbering more than I thought I’d have, as a way to facilitate quests. I healed the wounded, I picked up a weapon and stabbed the bad guys, and I stayed behind to help the poor named NPC find their lost widget. All of that made the world feel more alive, it made my character feel more like its own person, and it was better than any table-top game because I was actually living it.
For me, casting spells can solve problems and it’s what I’m good at. It also helps me meet people. Role-playing lets me know them and form lasting relationships. I found my niche in spellcasting and role-playing and used it to suck other people into my adventures. All of that put together makes one hell of a story.