The LARP Dictionary

By Larpmaxx teamUpdated

This dictionary defines the terms used in live-action role-play and the internet slang that grew up around larpmaxxing.

The two halves are genuinely different vocabularies, so they are listed separately. The first is the language of a hobby that has been running since the late 1970s, used by people at events, and it means what it has always meant. The second is internet slang, most of it recent, some of it barely documented. Where a term’s origin is not established, the entry says so rather than guessing.

LARP terms

The working vocabulary of live-action role-play: the roles, the states a player moves between, the equipment, and the mechanics that keep a game safe. Every entry is about the hobby, not the slang sense of the word.

bleed
Bleed is what happens when a player’s real feelings and their character’s feelings run into each other during or after a game.
boffer
A boffer is a padded mock weapon built so that LARP participants can strike each other in combat without injury.
game master (GM)
A game master is the person who runs a role-playing game: setting the story, applying the rules and playing the world around the players.
IC / OOC
IC means in character and OOC means out of character: the two states a LARP participant moves between during an event.
larper
A larper is someone who takes part in live-action role-play, physically acting out a character at an event.
metagaming
Metagaming is acting on knowledge your character does not have, using what you know as a player instead.
NPC
An NPC is a non-player character run by the game’s organisers; online, calling a person an NPC means they seem to act without independent thought.
PC (player character)
A PC, or player character, is the character a participant plays as themselves in a role-playing game.
phys rep
A phys rep, short for physical representation, is a real object that stands in for something in the game’s fiction.
safety calls
Safety calls are agreed words or gestures that let anyone in a LARP pause, slow down or stop play immediately.

Larpmaxxing slang

The words that turn up around larpmaxxing: the suffix it is built from, the neighbouring -maxxing coinages, and the vocabulary people use to accuse each other of performing. Several of these are new enough that nobody can say who used them first.

aura farming
Aura farming is deliberately doing things that make you look effortlessly cool, to build up a reputation for presence.
clout chasing
Clout chasing is doing something mainly to get attention online rather than because you meant it.
fake flex
A fake flex is showing off something you do not actually have, staged to look like a genuine brag.
kayfabe
Kayfabe is professional wrestling’s convention of presenting staged events as real, and staying in character to keep it up.
looksmaxxing
Looksmaxxing means trying to maximise your physical attractiveness, usually through grooming, fitness, style or cosmetic procedures.
-maxxing
The suffix -maxxing means pushing one thing as far as it will go, and attaches to whatever is being maximised.

Terms that live on their pillar

These six have no entry of their own, on purpose. Each is a word form or a spelling of one of the two pillar terms, and splitting them into separate pages would produce six thin pages competing with the two thorough ones. Each link goes to the section that defines it.

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