What Does “phys rep” Mean?

A phys rep, short for physical representation, is a real object that stands in for something in the game’s fiction.

Part of speech

noun, also used as a verb

Category

LARP terminology

Meaning in context

The narrow sense is the object in your hands. The wider one, which a British larp wiki gives, treats physical representation as a technique: the way a live-action game marks out which objects are present in the fiction and what they are like, with props, markers and padded weapons listed as parts of it. Read that way, a phys rep is less a thing than an agreement that this thing counts as that thing.

Nothing in the idea requires a resemblance. The cheapest standard example is rope. The same wiki describes blue rope as a low-cost way of showing where the playable space ends, and also as a way of marking changes inside that space that go past that edge: a barrier a character cannot cross or see through, magical or otherwise. Rope looks nothing like a ward. It works because everybody heard the same sentence about it at the briefing. Legibility beats fidelity, which is the difference between a prop built to be handled and a costume built to be looked at.

As a verb it means supplying that object: you phys rep the ledger, the poison bottle, the severed hand. The word earns its place where the technique runs out. One British club’s glossary describes its in-game calls as the way to signal an effect that cannot otherwise be phys-repped, and keeps them apart from its out-of-character instruction to stop the game, which is a safety call and no part of the fiction. You can carry a sword. You cannot carry a curse. A boffer is the demanding end of the same job, since it has to stand for a blade and be safe to hit a person with.

Where it comes from

Nobody can say who shortened physical representation, when, or which scene did it first. No reference work records it, which is unsurprising for an abbreviation this plain and is a better answer than a plausible date.

Where it is written down can be shown. A university larp club’s glossary defines it as a physical representation of an object and notes that theatre would call the same thing a prop; a British larp wiki gives the technique definition. Both are British, so treat the phrase as documented larp English rather than vocabulary the whole hobby shares.

Examples

• Her grimoire is a secondhand hardback with a reworked cover, and it is a better phys rep than anything I could have ordered.
• The ruleset only wants a phys rep for items that change hands, so the wrecked ship stays a description on a card.
• Somebody moved the rope in the night, and by breakfast the phys rep for the ward ran straight through the kitchen doorway.

How it connects to larpmaxxing

This is the piece of larp craft that larpmaxxing borrows almost unchanged, with the object moved onto a screen: a balance, an order alert, a number standing in for a life the character is supposed to be living. A prop stays a prop while the audience can find the edge of it, which is what running one of these as a bit depends on. Hand the same invented figure to a landlord weighing a lease or somebody deciding whether to invest and it represents nothing. It is a claim about money that does not exist, made to one person with no way to check.

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.