Leaving Mundania (17 page)

Derrick is famous for running dark elf plots in the game. I fondly remember NPCing for him at night in the rain once. He led a herd of us, dressed in and painted black, toward a clearing where we would ambush the town. He held a boffer shield over his head to block the rain. I was soaked and shivering on that autumn night and not exactly looking forward to hitting people. I needed a pep talk. Before we arrived at the clearing, Derrick turned around and said something like, “OK people, it's the weekend, and we're all out here in black face paint in the woods. We're all big dorks. Now let's go have fun.”

After eleven years playing this game, he knows what he's talking about.

Derrick's not the only larper who doesn't want to be discovered. Meet “Brian,” a police detective in his mid-forties who is slight of
build and full of fear. Brian is terrified that his coworkers might discover his weekend hobby and asked that I withhold his real name and the city where he works to help maintain his anonymity. For the last three and a half years, he's been attending a larp with one of his sons.

Like many larpers, Brian played Dungeons & Dragons throughout high school and college. After college, he began attending area gaming conventions, and in 1997, at one of these conventions, he tried out a vampire larp, in which, at random, he was cast as a police detective investigating the occult. Brian enjoyed the game so much that when the GMs decided to run it on a long-term basis, he kept attending. The game, part of White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade franchise, relied on the premise that vampires keep up the “masquerade” by concealing their presence from humans. The game that Brian attended met in public places, from bars to go-go nightclubs, with the idea that if a player attracted the attention of the general public he or she could be penalized for revealing the masquerade. No one ever noticed Brian's group. Brian became fast friends with some of his fellow players, who recommended that he try out the game he now attends regularly.

At first, Brian attended this game at the behest of his middle child, and he's continued going with his younger son, “Peter” (not his real name), who is currently a tween. Brian credits the game with helping Peter break out of his shell. When they first started attending, Peter didn't feel comfortable talking to high-level characters. Now he's not only comfortable talking to high-levels, he's also started making friends of his own. As a father-son activity, Brian says the game has deepened his relationship with Peter, that it has provided the opportunity for father-son talks, that his son is now comfortable asking him questions about how to flirt, for example. Brian also seems to enjoy the game for its own sake and spoke to me fondly about leveling up his character and practicing his improvisational skills. Sometimes, he even attends the game when Peter can't come.

The way Brian describes it, a police department is gossipier than a supermarket tabloid. When they're transferred, officers are checked out on and off the job, and if you're involved in any controversy, it follows you from post to post. I met Brian a few blocks from his office, and we walked in the opposite direction to get a coffee. As a police
truck drove by, he mentioned that this single sighting might open him up to gossip that he'd been seen with a strange woman in the city. Much as Derrick described the confines of what it means to be a black man, Brian described the confines of being a police detective. Officers are supposed to be all business all the time, whether they're on or off duty. They're supposed to be serious, sober people with serious, sober hobbies. Certain games, like card games, fantasy football, and family board games are acceptable, but nothing weird would be. And “weird” is a pretty large category for police detectives. As Brian put it to me in an e-mail, “There are coworkers who play computer games and even
they
are considered geeks, so you can imagine what a larper would be called. Psychotic comes to mind.” Larp is at odds with the machismo of police culture, a machismo that manifests itself through endless teasing. In Brian's office, for example, if someone found an old yearbook photo of Brian with a mullet, they might tack it up on his desk. And if Brian removed that photo, he would have lost the challenge—to remove such a thing would be to prove that it had gotten to him. To this culture, the idea of a grown man “frolicking in the woods playing dress up” as Brian put it, would be downright preposterous, a trace of blood in the water to the circling sharks. If Brian's hobby was ever discovered, it would spread around the office rapidly, and he'd never be able to live the jokes down. As he wrote to me, “In police subculture, one is only known for his last screw-up. Meaning that no matter one's reputation, a cop will be known for a foul up, either on duty or off duty. I could not deflect any razzing I got related to larping. It would follow me FOREVER! All of my good arrests would be forgotten. Think of grade school bullying of a nasty variety and you may get the idea.”

While Brian's extended family is well aware that he's a larper, only two people at his office know. One is a computer geek who understands, Brian says, because he's a computer geek. The other person who knows was surprised at first but calmed down after Brian explained the hobby in detail. He's not as sure of her silence, though, and worries that if she gets angry with him she might let it slip one night after too many drinks. That's just how Brian's department catches criminals.

James Dallas Egbert and Irving Pulling, through their suicides, enshrined the idea that gaming was geeky, dangerous, and bizarre in American culture, and it's kept men like Derrick and Brian firmly closeted at work and home and ensured that scores of others hide where they're going on the weekends behind such euphemisms as “camping” and “family time.” In doing so, the stigma against larp forces some gamers to adopt secret identities, forces them to compartmentalize their personalities in order to live up to the real-life roles thrust upon them by circumstance. All this raises the question: when is a closeted larper not larping? Is Derrick more himself in real life, where he is forced to hide his love of fantasy because it doesn't conform to some role that society has scripted for him, the role of the strong black man? Is Brian any less of a detective or any less of a man because he enjoys harmless dress-up? The societal pressure to fulfill a certain role at the expense of any other desire ensures that the only place where a closeted gamer can be emotionally whole is that place where his or her personality and profession are both accepted: namely, at the game.

T
o say that the land of Travance has problems is a drastic under-statement. Mummies! Deadly plagues! Malevolent floating eyes! Heroes have managed to quell all these evils with swords, spells, and cunning, and yet, they have not been able to defeat one insidious foe, so inhuman and barbarous that even the greatest minds of our generation have struggled to subdue it: inflation. Even fantasy is subject to the laws of economics and, as it turns out, to modern political sensibilities, sexism, and the unknowable rules that govern the real emotions of players.

Travance suffers inflation because players have too much money and too little to spend it on, according to Matt White, a long-time staff member at Knight Realms who is deeply interested in the in-game economy. Matt likened Travance to a gold rush town, except instead of mining gold, its inhabitants kill monsters, loot them, and find hidden
treasure vaults. This labor doesn't produce anything concrete, just heroism; characters are simply foraging for gold and introducing piles of previously uncirculated money into the game economy. The supply of monsters is inexhaustible, and while the monsters occasionally have problems with cash flow—sometimes there's no gold in the game kitty so they leave Logistics empty handed—still the adventurers who hunt them can't help but become wildly rich.

When the Knight Realms staff introduced Market Faire, it gave form to Travance's inflation, Matt theorizes. Market Faire takes place in the inn on Saturdays. Characters sell pickles, knitted scarves, hand-blended tea, candy, and much more—it provides a marketplace where loot may be spent. In addition, it's something to do on a Saturday afternoon during a natural lull in the game, and a player who has forgotten to bring food can purchase actual lunch with fake coin. However, the idea of selling real food for the fake money intoxicates some players—on both ends of the transaction—making prices exorbitant. A basic sword may cost one to two gold coins to purchase in-game, but at Market Faire that will hardly buy a steak sandwich. Of course, a poor character won't go hungry—most everyone is generous with their food, whether a character is paying for it in-game or not; the transaction simply makes it seem more realistic.

The formal trade system was a failed attempt to provide an additional set of potential purchases to players. The system is essentially a game within a game—the aim of which is to collect a full set of commodity cards and earn an extra point of build. Here's how it works: players may spend build to acquire a skill called “trade.” Trades come with a specialty, so for example, Portia has Trade: Picklemonger on her character card, while other players have anything from Trade: Taxidermist to Trade: Cobbler to Trade: Winemaker. Each trade produces one type of commodity—wearables, durables, consumables, or luxuries—symbolically represented by commodity cards given to players with the requisite skill at check-in. Players may learn up to two trades and can spend extra build to pick up trade proficiencies—essentially advanced merchanting skills—which increases the total number of commodity cards received at check-in. Portia is a pickle maker and a soap maker. Her pickles are classed as consumables,
while her soap is classed as a luxury, so at check-in I get a set of commodity cards emblazoned with “consumable” and a set emblazoned “luxury.” A character with a trade such as tailor or cobbler would get “wearable” cards, while a character with a trade such as wheelwright or carpenter would get “durable” cards. Spend build on trade proficiency +1, and you get a larger quantity of cards. Though it is not required, many players choose to represent their trades in-game by selling real-life items for gold at Market Faire. So in addition to the symbolic pickles and soap (the consumable and luxury cards) I carry around with me, I also sell real pickles at Market Faire for gold coin, which enhances my ability to role-play Portia. The aim of this game-within-a-game is to collect a full set of commodity cards (one of everything, but three luxuries, for low-levels, double that for high-levels) by trading or paying other merchants. So, for example, Portia produces all the consumables and luxuries she needs, but she swaps her extras to other merchants in exchange for the commodities she needs—durables and wearables. Turn in a full set of cards to James, and you gain an extra build.

The idea was that some players, generally noncombat characters, would want to pick up trades and produce commodities, while adventuring types would use their gold to pay for the cards in cash to get that free build point. Plus, according to Geoff Schaller, the trade system enhances the realism of the game, because realistically, adventuring is an impractical occupation for so many people to have. It's much more reasonable to think that the battling bard is really a cobbler during most of his waking hours—the ability to acquire a profession provides an opportunity to fill in a character's backstory. The cost of acquiring the cards also simulates real expenses that a character would have each month, the expenses of food, clothing, and shelter. As a role-play tool, the system is successful, although it doesn't serve its intended purpose of creating an additional market where gold is spent; players who have commodities mostly wheel and deal among themselves, using the cards as currency, while players without trades move on with their weekend.

The staff partially controls inflation through price-fixing. For example, according to the rules, one minute of smithing costs one
silver. It takes five minutes to make a basic dagger and ten to make a basic sword, so the costs of these items are five silver and one gold (equivalent to ten silver) respectively. There are similar regulations for the cost of sorcery. These checks are in place so that new players without much coinage can afford to have equipment fixed and created.

However, price-fixing isn't universally successful because black markets arise. Certain spell ingredients and materials needed to forge weapons and armor are very rare in-game. Take mithril, a nearly indestructible metal (borrowed from fantasy literature, most notably, J. R. R. Tolkien's work) that enhances the ability of armor to protect the wearer. Mithril armor is immune to destructive attacks and cannot be pierced by attacks that would normally bypass armor. In addition, it enhances the “soak” of a piece of armor. A soak rating basically allows the wearer to take less damage—if you're hit for five and have a soak of four, then you take only one damage. Thus, at Knight Realms, where long-term, continuous protection is rare, mithril is incredibly valuable. A character who wants mithril armor has to find a bar of mithril and pay a smith to turn it into armor. Although the laws of the barony fix the price of a bar of mithril at twenty gold, scarcity combined with a glut of currency has more than doubled the material's street value. To help alleviate the problem of scarce materials, players are now able to purchase them with service points.