After a LARP Event

May 13, 2025

After a LARP event, it always takes a bit of time to settle back into your daily routine. In this blog, I'll explain what possible struggles can arise and give you a few options for how to deal with them. Make sure to remind yourself that a wistful feeling after a LARP event is completely normal, and proves that you've had a good and enjoyable event!

After LARP dip

After you've lived in a grand, gripping, epic story for an evening, weekend, or perhaps even longer, your daily life can suddenly feel incredibly small and disappointing. You no longer need to constantly be ready to solve big problems and engage in combat, but instead find yourself confronted with the more mundane tasks of everyday life, like housework, grocery shopping, and your (home)work. Moreover, at a LARP event you're often supported by a large group that shares the same goals you're trying to achieve. This group of people supports you mentally, physically, and emotionally when you need it (sometimes even before you realize you need it yourself). When you get home after the event, all of that disappears. This can sometimes cause a few days where you feel down and lonely. LARPers often call this the after LARP dip. You're physically tired because you've pushed your body hard, but don't underestimate the mental and emotional exhaustion either. Usually the after LARP dip sticks around for a few days to a week, after which you'll feel significantly better.

An after LARP dip can be quite intense if it catches you off guard. For physical tiredness, it's pretty straightforward what you should do: keep moving gently to keep your muscles warm, and make sure you get plenty of sleep, as you probably have some catching up to do. Also, make sure to eat well with plenty of variety and vitamins. What can help counteract the mental and emotional setback is not immediately cutting off contact with the LARP group after the event. Often there are Discord groups where you can continue the fun digitally. Sometimes other participants live near you, and you can meet up in the weeks after an event to discuss what happened at the event and what it meant for your character, but also for you personally. This way you can gradually readjust to life outside the LARP group. Additionally, sometimes events are organized between the official events. These are usually arranged by a small group of participants rather than by the game masters and organizers, and might revolve around a special occurrence that there's less time for during the overarching story, and thus during the official events. Such a special, as it's often called, can also be seen as a one shot in Dungeons and Dragons and usually doesn't last as long as an official event. By participating in this, or perhaps organizing something yourself, provided your LARP's organization allows it, you have the opportunity to bring your LARP character to life again if you feel like you have to wait too long for an event. Be aware though: if there's no game master present at these specials, the events are often not included in the official LARP storyline. If you want your one shot to have an effect on the entire LARP, then invite at least one member of the game master team.

Character bleed

Another interesting phenomenon that can happen after a LARP event is character bleed. This means you adopt certain traits from your character into your daily life. For example, if you play a character with a strong accent that differs from how you normally speak, it can be difficult to speak with your normal accent for the first few days after an event. Or if your character is very paranoid and reaches for a weapon at the slightest provocation, you might catch yourself reaching for a weapon that's no longer there. This phenomenon is often considered funny rather than annoying, so not everyone will make a huge effort to reduce character bleed, especially if you have a lot of other LARPers in your immediate surroundings.

However, it's not possible or desirable for everyone to adopt too many character traits from their LARP character, because for example you might have to go back to work or school right after an event, and you don't want to stand out for the wrong reasons. Character bleed of course has to do with adjustment. If you immerse yourself completely in your daily life, your LARP traits will quickly fade. So if you want to get rid of your character bleed as quickly as possible, seek out a lot of social interaction with people who have nothing to do with the LARP world and keep reminding yourself that your character is not the same as your LARP persona. Don't be too hard on yourself about this: your surroundings will understand that it takes a few days before you're completely back to your old self, especially if you explain why you might be reacting differently than you normally would.

Evaluation after a LARP event

After an event it's important to evaluate how you experienced it. You can do this purely for yourself, but it's also good to do it as a group, so that others know how your experience was, and vice versa you also know this about others. In an evaluation you can discuss things like story elements you were happy with, or less happy with, or situations where you had trouble during the event but couldn't discuss it right away, or situations that you really enjoyed and that you want to emphasize again. You can also assess for yourself what type of game you enjoy, and whether your character is on track to achieve their goals, or whether you might need to make changes to the skills you have, or how you use them. When you make this clear to yourself, but especially when you share your feelings and experiences with others, you can ensure that during future events better consideration can be given to what you need. Furthermore, it can be very nice for your fellow participants to hear when they've contributed something positive to your LARP experience. This lets them know when something they tried has worked out well, which gives them a good feeling and can lead to them being more daring next time. Within the previously mentioned Discord groups, there's often a special place for this, where you can share all the beautiful, special, and funny moments from a LARP event. You can also mention the specific players, NPCs, or game masters who contributed to a good event for you.

The organization and game masters of the LARP also always appreciate hearing all the feedback. Often you're asked to check out your character. This can happen on the spot at the end of the event, but you might also be asked to do it via email. I recommend making sure to take advantage of this, because the more the storytellers know about your character, but also your OOC experiences and wishes, the more they can take that into account when writing for the next event. Besides your checkout email, there's a possibility that you'll receive an evaluation form a few days after the event ends. On this you can indicate what the positive, neutral, and negative points of the event were for you, so that the organization also knows what needs to be adjusted, and what should happen more often. You can also use this to evaluate what made certain points stand out for you, how they came about, and how to improve any negative aspects, and also how you can contribute to this yourself.

Planning for the future

Once you've finished your evaluation of the event, and have also heard the evaluations of the other participants, it's time to turn this into plans for the future. You can think about what your character's long-term goals are, and what you'd like to achieve in the short term, and also how you want to go about it. You can also assess for yourself as a player, NPC, or game master what OOC changes you can make for the future. This can range from something really simple like bringing more socks or snacks or making sure you drink enough, to more elaborate plans, like learning certain skills IC, diving deeper into certain types of smaller or larger gameplay, adjusting your costume (possibly for IC reasons), to grand sweeping decisions that can affect the entire LARP, such as IC accepting a position of power within the world, planning a war, or perhaps even having to decide to create a new character. Once you've mapped out these kinds of future plans for yourself, you can start again from the top with preparing for a LARP event.

In the next series of LARP blogs I'll dive deeper into the player side of the story. I'll take you through the steps of the creative process of creating a player character in a couple of blogs, mention a number of helpful tips for (beginning) players, and also devote a blog to creating gameplay for yourself when the game masters don't send much your way or when you can't connect with what they're doing.

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