They Were LARPing. They Just Didn’t Know It Yet.

So here’s a thing that’s been rattling around in my head for a while. LARP is not a new thing. The word is new, sure, and the foam weapons are new, and the organized events with parking and rulebooks and that one guy who always argues about hit points are definitely new. But the actual activity, dressing up, picking a role, hitting people with blunted weapons inside a set of agreed rules, that’s been going on for a long time. A really long time. Like someone-invented-Chess-as-a-war-simulation long time.

We tend to think of LARP as a 1970s and 80s thing, which is fair, Dagorhir started in 1977 and the Society for Creative Anachronism goes back to 1966. But zoom out far enough and you start seeing the same basic pattern repeating across basically every civilization that ever existed. People needed to play at war. To train for it, survive it mentally, celebrate it, or just do something with all that energy when there wasn’t an actual war happening. Every era had their version. None of them called it LARP. All of them were absolutely LARPing.

Chess Was a LARP and Nobody Talks About That

Chess was invented in 6th century India and it was not some abstract strategy game someone dreamed up for fun. It was a simulation of an actual war, the Kurukshetra War from the Mahabharata, with pieces representing real military roles. Rajas, cavalry, infantry, chariots, war elephants. You weren’t pushing tokens around a board, you were playing out a battle, making decisions as a general, with the pieces representing actual things that existed in actual warfare.

RPG designer John Wick has made the argument that Chess becomes a roleplaying game the moment you give your pieces names and start making decisions based on their motivations rather than pure strategy. Which is a thing children have been doing with Chess sets forever without anyone handing them a rulebook or telling them it counted as anything.

Chess also matters because it’s the ancestor of all Western wargaming, which is the ancestor of the hobby that eventually produced LARP. There is a direct line from 6th century India to the foam sword in your garage. That’s kind of a lot.

The Romans Flooded Arenas to Reenact Battles and That’s Completely Normal

The Romans get credit for a lot of things. Plumbing, roads, the concept of a legal system. They should also get credit for early large-scale reenactment culture because they were very into it.

In the Colosseum and in arenas they actually flooded with water for the occasion, Romans staged full reenactments of famous historical and mythological battles. These weren’t small things, they were enormous public spectacles with costumes and assigned roles and dramatic narrative framing and real combat. Sometimes people died, which is a calibration issue that modern LARP has mostly resolved.

The Han Chinese were doing something similar, organizing events where participants pretended to be from earlier historical eras, primarily for entertainment. Which is just historical LARP. Put on the clothes, take on the role, inhabit a different time. The production values are different now but the impulse is identical. Humans apparently just do this. It’s a thing we do.

Medieval Tournaments Were Literally Just LARP With Horses

This is the one that really gets me. Because the more you actually read about medieval tournaments the harder it becomes to describe them as anything other than organized large-scale LARP with higher stakes and significantly better catering.

Tournaments started roughly in 9th and 10th century France as cavalry training exercises. Knights needed to practice for war so practice fights turned into formalized events with rules and referees and costumes and heraldic identities and spectators and elaborate social rituals around the whole thing. By the 12th and 13th centuries the tournament was one of the most culturally important institutions in European noble society.

Think about what a tournament actually was. Knights showed up in full heraldic regalia representing their character identity, their coat of arms, their house, their colors. Both sides paraded and called out their war cries before anything started. There were stands for spectators, banners everywhere, heralds announcing participants. Knights sometimes competed under alternate personas, pseudonymous identities they adopted just for events. There were events literally called Round Tables where everyone was essentially doing Arthurian roleplay combat. The entire social framework around tournaments was built on chivalric ideals that were themselves largely fictional narratives about what knights were supposed to be rather than what they actually were.

Blunted weapons. Rules. A referee. Prizes for winners. Losers went home after paying a ransom. If you described this to someone without using the word tournament they would say it sounds like a LARP event.

And here’s the part that gets glossed over. By the later medieval period tournaments had basically nothing to do with actual military training anymore. They were performance and pageantry and identity and community. Specialized tournament armor was developed that was completely useless in real warfare. Knights were practicing for the tournaments, not for battles. The whole thing had evolved from a training exercise into an immersive community event built around combat and character and shared fictional frameworks.

That is just LARP. That is LARP with horses and a much higher entry cost.

The Prussians Accidentally Invented the Game Master in 1824

In the early 19th century the Prussian military developed a training tool called Kriegsspiel, which is just German for wargame. It used scale terrain maps and miniature unit counters and dice for random chance, and it had a neutral human referee whose entire job was to adjudicate outcomes impartially and narrate the results to both sides.

That’s a GM. The Prussian army invented the GM.

Prince Wilhelm saw a demonstration and endorsed it and eventually every regiment had a copy and officers were forming Kriegsspiel clubs and playing obsessively. Military historians credit the widespread adoption of Kriegsspiel as a significant factor in Prussia decisively defeating France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, because Prussian officers had spent years rehearsing battlefield scenarios in a structured roleplay environment with a game master calling the results.

Military LARP changed the outcome of a European war. The roleplay was the point. That’s not a metaphor, that’s just what happened.

H.G. Wells, who was not a military officer but was absolutely a nerd, took the same ideas and turned them into a civilian hobby with his 1913 book Little Wars, tabletop miniature battles for regular people. That goes to Dungeons and Dragons, which goes to LARP. The lineage is right there.

The SCA Was Founded at a Party

The Society for Creative Anachronism started in 1966 in Berkeley, California. Someone threw a backyard medieval tournament party, people showed up in armor and hit each other with rattan weapons, and somehow that turned into a global organization with hundreds of thousands of members.

The SCA sits in that interesting space between historical reenactment and LARP where both communities have been arguing about which one it actually is for decades, and honestly that argument is probably more entertaining than resolving it. But the founding spirit is pure LARP. We want to live in this world, not just read about it.

It was also founded right in the middle of the Vietnam War era, which is probably not a coincidence. People reaching for an idealized rule-governed world of honorable combat at the exact moment real war was being broadcast into living rooms in a way it never had been before. That’s the same thing Roman spectators were doing at reenactment events. The same thing Prussian officers were doing in their Kriegsspiel clubs. The same thing medieval knights were doing when they put on their tournament personas and paraded past the stands.

Humans play at war. When real war is close, they play harder. This appears to be consistent across all of recorded history and probably before that.

So Here’s the Thing

The word LARP showed up in the 1970s and 80s. The activity it describes has been going on for at least 1,500 years and probably longer depending on how loose you want to be with the definition. What changed isn’t the behavior, it’s the cultural packaging around it.

What stayed the same across all of it, the tournament, the Kriegsspiel club, the flooded Roman arena, the SCA backyard party, is the core of the thing. People put on a different identity. They stepped into a shared fictional frame with agreed rules. They did the thing inside that frame. Then they went home.

A knight riding home after a tournament was doing the same psychological work a modern LARPer does walking back to their car after an event. The armor comes off. The character stays at the event. You carry the community and the story and maybe a bruise home with you, but the line between the game and the world holds.

We didn’t invent LARP. We just named it, wrote the rules down, and stopped requiring horses, mostly.