The surprising life lessons of LARPing
Christopher Melville leads the Fanwar LARP League at Sebastopol's Libby Park every Thursday from 1-7 p.m.
Every Thursday afternoon at Libby Park, dozens of kids ages nine and up gather for Sebastopol’s Fanwar League, a live-action role play (LARP) series created by Sebastopol resident Christopher Melville.
Since those who are not LARP participants often have a hard time grasping just what exactly is going on, Melville likes to use analogies to explain.
He tells me that LARP, among other things, is like baseball in that each game features several rounds—or innings—where the players are instructed to handle a range of scenarios that correspond with their assigned character. Rather than being a shortstop or in right field, players are samurais or knights; rather than holding a baseball glove, players hold a combination of swords and shields; rather than scoring runs to increase their chances of winning, players must solve complex problems that involve thieves, ghosts and other creatures.
As the season progresses, each player has the opportunity to advance levels, find items and gain abilities. Perhaps they will even become cursed or access some deep part of the plot.
“Each character discovers individual things,” Melville says, “but mostly it’s a team sport because even though each person is playing a character, you go on missions as a team. There's like 15 or 20 of you at a time on a quest, and you're all helping each other out.”
While to an observer the games may seem chaotic and confusing, Melville tells me that each storyline is designed to force the players to consider decisions that are relevant to a real life scenario—whether or not the kids are aware of this.
For example, many of the special powers that are granted to the characters intentionally come with flaws. It is up to each player’s imagination to figure out how best to use their character’s abilities in the context of a given mission, as it is for any human being to know their strengths and weaknesses as they make their way through the ups and downs of life.
Melville also sets up the game so that each character is allowed to die only twice before a new character must be created.
“I've designed into the game a sense of needing to be able to create something, enjoy it, celebrate it and then let it go,” Melville says. “Let it be something that you enjoyed and now is gone. We can look back at it and be like, wasn’t that cool? But you know, we don’t get to just be on the top of the food chain forever, right?”
Growing up in Mendocino County, Christopher Melville would often LARP with his brothers out in the woods. As a college student at Sonoma State, Melville started to take some of his friends out LARPing, which he continued to do with his students as a public Montessori school teacher.
That Montessori background gives Melville a critical understanding of neurodivergent youth, many of whom, he says, misbehave because they are placed in inappropriate learning environments.
When kids are accused of misbehaving due to an incorrect reason, it only makes their behavior worse. Thus, Melville incorporates into the game valuable lessons on how children can try to understand what is wrong with their experience in order to make it better.
He uses the concepts of haunts and evil goblins to illustrate.
“In the game haunts turn up and they can't be killed,” Melville says. “You can kill them but they'll just get worse, and they are hard to talk to because they don't usually make much noise. All the kids know the best thing to do with a haunt is to solve it or to figure out how it died. So the closer you get to naming what it is that's troubling them or bothering them, the calmer they'll become, the more focused on you they'll become, and the easier they'll become to read. The more you keep saying things that are not what is actually bothering them, the more confrontational they'll become.”
“The kids are also often in policing roles, where they have to be dealing with someone who has broken a law and is being violent,” Melville continues. “They need to ask themselves: ‘How do I handle it? Is violence necessary with this person? Or am I aggravating the situation? Did I just cause the situation to get way worse because I just ran in there and killed everyone thinking that would solve the problem?’”
While Melville’s storylines deal with serious and open-ended situations, he ensures that his players stay safe and engaged by touting three simple rules.
“My procedures revolve around what I call the three rules of life,” Melville says. “You take care of the people: you never do anything that hurts anyone, which includes emotions. You take care of the things: you never do anything that harms anything, whether it's the trees, the grass, the stuff that we use or someone's clothing. The last one is you make it work: follow the procedures that we've set up because that's what's letting us all have a good time. These are really solid because they never are not true.”
Melville’s games have over the years become popular enough so that he can lead leagues around the Bay Area full-time. As it stands, Melville also has leagues in Cotati and Palo Alto.
More information on Melville’s Sebastopol league can be found here. And here’s a link to Fanwar’s website for more information on the rules of the game and local events (fanwar.com) along with a couple of videos below of Melville discussing his LARP philosophy.