This is a direct quote from the article entitled ‘Hail Caesar! Hail Augusta!’ on Roman re-enactment in New Zealand.
“The Legion is one of about 30 historical re-enactment clubs in New Zealand, which are not to be confused with live-action role-playing groups, which aren’t based on reality but instead improvise stories based on fantasy games such as Dungeons and Dragons. “The role players fight with foam-rubber weapons,” said one re-enactor scornfully.”
It’s publicity for sure but I do think they could have worded it better.
It’s a bit rude to print people’s “scoffs” verbatim and reinforce “scorn”, so I’m surprised this got published. That said, it’s a pop reference to LARPing in a well read magazine, so it indicates we’ve got a considerable presence in society now. Whether the conceptions are right or not, we have to consider it nice to be known.
That’s quite a superficial way of differentiating the two interest groups, even though it’s a fair rule-of-thumb for telling medieval-ish larp apart from reenactors in NZ.
You can have a larp that is entirely historically based and uses blunt steel weapons.
I think that the difference between reenactment and larp (if there is one, and sometimes there isn’t) is not the equipment used or the setting but the purpose. In reenactment the purpose is to experience or demonstrate aspects of “history”. In larp the purpose is to experience a fictional reality by taking on the role of a character in the fiction.
Of course, it’s possible to have activities that meet both of these purposes, like the historically-based larps I mentioned above. Reenactors sometimes play in a way that’s indistinguishable from larp. Larpers sometimes have reenactment purposes. It’s a very fuzzy line, or intersecting circles, or something.
May I point out that many re-enactors certainly don’t have this attitude. I’m one of them, and I know many at Sword & Shield, the Argent Lords, and the Legio II Augusta who enjoy both LARPing and re-enactment for their different merits.
I don’t think the person who commented about foam weapons was necessarily being that harsh about larp, it might have just been macho humour about how much harder they are than larpers ''cos we use real weapons"… or they might have really thought it matters, in which case I’m happy for them to stay in their hobby.
The first person mentioning D&D wasn’t being critical at all, they were just using a stereotype that readers would be most likely to recognise to help differentiate themselves from larp. Fair play, I thought.
I was commenting on the inaccuracy. Not the attitude, which doesn’t bother me.
