One of the many things I lost after my bad weekend LARP experience was my willingness to slip into character. For as long as I’ve been gaming, I’ve been able to just kind of relax while thinking about my character for a game, and then I’m thinking -as- that character. No joke I could have dreams -as- my character, not just about them. I used to love doing that. Getting into character was never a problem before.
The ability theoretically persists even now, but I can’t relax. I’m too scared to because when I do fall into character like that, I lose my you ability to steer a story. I can only conceive of acting the way my character would. Getting into character is easy. Getting out is hard/borderline impossible for me. This is particularly unfortunate when I’m offering a version of the character that other people don’t pick up and engage with. I don’t have the ability to course correct and reinvent part or all of how the character presents or what they care about most in order to meet people where they are actually at.
A separate, but related problem is bleed. Some of you may have heard me say in the past year that I can’t play angry characters. This is why. I get in their head, and they get in mine, and then I bleed. And let’s just say that angry me never ends well.
I feel that to continue to indulge in either, now that I’ve recognized them as problematic behaviors, but before I find and establish appropriate safeguards, would make me an irresponsible gamer.
Unfortunately, I’ve been looking for such safeguards for over a year, with minimal success. It is overwhelming to try to address the bleed, the anger, maintaining ability to steer even when immersed, and ability to unpack a character out of my head all at once. Lots of people recommend just not immersing. I can do that, maintaining a tabletop like distance from my character, but immersion is what I really loved about LARPing. I miss being able to immerse. I keep trying grounding rituals and similar to try to maintain kind of a dual persona of myself alongside my character. It’s hard. I suck at it. That’s discouraging. I keep thinking it won’t help. But i don’t have anything else to try. So I keep trying. If anyone has other suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
But in the mean time, I’ve been dealing with these problems primarily by avoiding the situations. Never relaxing into character, not playing characters who could get angry, etc. I feel cut off from gaming. Everything feels stilted and unnatural. Better to be that than to be a danger to my fellow players. But at some point I start to wonder if it’s worth continuing to try, or if I should just give LARPing up as a lost cause for me.
So all of this to say, it was a great surprise to me when I had an in-character dream this week. Just a snippet, and about a character that doesn’t exist yet, but I almost cried when I woke up. I miss these dreams. Often the same scene over and over, micro adjusting the character each time, testing out how they talk, how they walk, how they react to things, people, situations. If anyone knows NWM who can keep “but that can’t happen/ isn’t realistic/ wouldn’t work for x reason” to themselves, I’d love to share the dream with someone.
Musings of a Larping Cat 