How to Larpmaxx

To larpmaxx, pick a persona, build an aesthetic around it, stage your scenes deliberately, and keep the joke visible to everyone watching.

The steps below are in the order they actually happen. Most people start at step four, the screens, and it is why their bit falls apart: a screenshot is a prop, and a prop with no character around it is just a picture of a number. Decide who you are first and the rest follows from it.

One thing before you start. Larpmaxxing works because the audience is in on it. Step seven is not a disclaimer bolted onto the end of a guide; it is the thing that separates a bit from a crime, and it is worth reading before step one.

1. Pick the persona

Be specific. “Rich” is not a persona and it is why most attempts read as generic. “A guy who moved to Lisbon in 2021 and has not shut up about it since” is a persona: it tells you what he wears, what he photographs, what time he posts and what he is smug about.

The test is whether the persona generates decisions for you. If you have to think hard about what your character would do with a Tuesday afternoon, the persona is too thin. Narrow it until the answer is obvious.

Pick something adjacent to your real life, too. A persona you have to research every time you post is a persona you will abandon in a fortnight, and consistency is most of what makes this land.

2. Build the aesthetic

Three things carry a persona visually, and they are not equally important.

The setting does most of the work. A plain wall says nothing. A specific room says a great deal, and viewers read the background far more carefully than the subject. Our Lisbon guy shoots from a balcony, in hard afternoon light, with a tiled building behind him. That is the whole costume.

The fit is a uniform, not an outfit. Pick three or four items and repeat them. Repetition is what turns clothes into a character: the audience learns the silhouette and starts recognising you from it.

Props should be boring and specific. A particular brand of sparkling water, always the same one. A laptop with one sticker. Small, repeated, unremarkable details read as real in a way that expensive-looking objects never do, because nobody stages a bottle of water.

3. Stage the scenes

Shoot the scene as though it were really happening, then stop shooting. The most common failure here is over-shooting: forty seconds of a persona is a character, four minutes of it is a performance, and the audience can feel the difference.

Plan a small number of recurring scene types and rotate them: the morning one, the working one, the going-out one. Recurring scenes do the same job repetition does for clothes: they let the audience recognise a format and enjoy the variation inside it.

Shoot more setup than payoff. A clip that spends twenty seconds establishing an ordinary afternoon and two seconds on the absurd bit is funnier than one that opens on the absurd bit, because the ordinary part is what the joke is measured against.

4. Set up the screens

This is where the tools come in, and it is step four rather than step one on purpose.

Cryptomaxx is a fictional crypto wallet: you set the balances, choose which tokens appear and in what order, name the wallet, and install it to your home screen so it opens like any other app. Choose numbers that fit the character. An implausibly enormous balance reads as a joke about balances; a specific, slightly awkward one reads as a person.

Notimaxx sends order notifications to your own phone on a timer you set. Your store name, your currency, your prices, arriving as often as you choose. It is the ambient version of the same idea: rather than showing someone a screenshot, your phone simply does something in the background while you are filming something else.

Both are fictional. Nothing in Cryptomaxx touches a real blockchain, and Notimaxx notifies only the device it is running on.

5. Write captions that keep the wink

The caption is where the audience is told, without being told, that this is a bit. The best ones are in character and slightly too committed. The over-commitment is the signal.

“Another quiet morning in the Algarve” under a photograph of a radiator does the job. “This is fake lol” also does the job, but it does it by ending the bit, which is a waste of the four steps you just did.

Where the content could plausibly be mistaken for a genuine claim about money, drop the wink and say it plainly. Ambiguity is funny about a persona and is not funny about a balance.

6. Post, and stay in character

Reply in character. Most of the value of a persona accrues in the comments, where the audience tests it, and a character that answers questions consistently is far more entertaining than one that only exists in the post.

Stay consistent across posts, too. A persona that changes cities every week is a series of jokes; one that stays in the same fictional life for months becomes something people follow. Consistency is cheaper than escalation and works better.

Break character when someone genuinely does not realise. It happens, and it is the moment where the whole thing is decided: a bit that breaks character to reassure someone stays a bit.

7. Know the line

There is one rule and it is not complicated. Never use any of this to get money, trust or access from a real person who does not know it is a performance.

That means no fake payment confirmations sent to someone waiting on a payment. No fabricated income or balances shown to a landlord, a lender, an investor or a partner. No impersonating a bank, an exchange or any real company. No using a fictional screen as proof of anything, to anyone, ever.

The distinction is not about how convincing the screen is. It is about who is in the room: a persona performed to an audience that understands it is a persona is theatre, and the same screen shown to one person as evidence is fraud. The first is what this is for. The second is a crime in most places, and no framing of it as a bit changes that.

If you are unsure which side something falls on, there is a reliable test: would you be comfortable if the person seeing it knew exactly how it was made? If yes, it is a bit. If no, do not do it.

Where to go next

If you came here without reading the explainer, start with what larpmaxxing means. The word has several senses and the guide above assumes the persona one. If you are more interested in the original hobby the word borrowed from, LARP is a real and much older thing, and the dictionary covers the vocabulary both sides use.