What Does “PC (player character)” Mean?

A PC, or player character, is the character a participant plays as themselves in a role-playing game.

Part of speech

noun

Category

LARP terminology

Meaning in context

The distinction the word marks is narrow, and it is about control rather than importance. Your PC is the one character at an event whose decisions are yours: nobody writes its lines, nobody hands you a script for it, and what it does next is whatever you decide to do while you are standing there in costume. The guards, the innkeeper, the thing in the woods and everything else in the fiction belong to the people running the game, and those are NPCs.

That makes it a word for organisers as much as for the fiction. A game that splits its participants into players and crew uses it to keep the two straight, and the crew are given far more of the setting than the players are, on purpose: a PC is meant to walk in knowing only what the character knows, and acting on the rest is metagaming.

It is also the default state of a weekend. At a LARP the working assumption is that anyone you meet is talking as their character unless they signal otherwise, which is the reverse of the tabletop habit of speaking as yourself and dropping into voice for a line. So the phrase “my PC” tends to show up exactly when someone has gone OOC and needs to be clear about which of the two of them they are describing.

Where it comes from

Nobody can point to a first use. The reference works that define player character say what it means and stop there: no coiner, no year, no first printing to cite. The honest answer to who came up with it is that it is not recorded.

The other half of the pair is dated slightly better. Merriam-Webster puts the first known use of NPC at 1977, and the non-player side is described as having started in tabletop role-playing, where one game master ran everything the players did not. Even there, no source names a person. A date on which a word was already in print is not a coinage story, and neither term has one.

Examples

• My PC is a nervous harbour clerk who has never held a sword, so I spent the whole battle behind a barrel.
• Are you asking me or asking my PC? Because my PC has no idea what a radio is.
• The event write-up had thirty PC slots and twelve crew slots, so I signed up as a player before the character places went.

How it connects to larpmaxxing

This is one of the few hobby terms that survives the trip across intact. A larpmaxxing persona is a PC in the sense that matters: you choose it, you run it, and it exists because you keep turning up as it. What does not survive is the sign-up sheet. Everyone at a LARP has agreed in advance to be inside the fiction, and online that agreement is something you have to build, which is why the guide spends as long on keeping an audience in on the bit as it does on the character.

More from the dictionary

This entry is part of the LARP dictionary, which covers the vocabulary of live-action role-play and the internet slang that grew up around it. The two pillar pages are what LARP is and what larpmaxxing means.