A Good Excuse to Get in Costume

So what is a LARPer to do with those old costumes? As it turns out, ordinary people have a yearly occasion to dress up, too. It’s called Halloween. Apparently you can even win prizes for having one of the best costumes. Sure, it’s only once a year, but it’s probably the only chance we get to don our LARPing apparel amongst the normal folk without seeming completely off our rockers. That you can win prizes for it is just an added bonus.

Why do I mention this? Because I managed to tie for second place in my office’s costume party, of course. It took a little explaining, though. “A hobbit?” was perhaps the closest guess I got out of my non-roleplaying coworkers. Other misguided guesses included Friar Tuck and a Jedi. Oh well, you can’t blame them for trying. Honestly, I was a little flattered that they thought I looked like a Jedi.

Those with a bit of inside knowledge would not have hesitated to identify me as an elf (the ears are a dead giveaway). Perhaps if I could have pulled off a better Orlando Bloom, it wouldn’t have been so confusing to the non-geeks. Of course, a real geek would have pointed out that I must have been a half-elf, because of course elves can’t grow facial hair. It would be a fair assessment, and I wouldn’t have minded, especially considering I wasn’t about to shave my mustache off for that full elf look.

Some of you may remember that I was once arrested for wearing my geeky costume, so I would advise caution even during Halloween. Our kind, from the humble tabletop RPG geek to MMORPG geek to the full-blown LARPing geek, are misunderstood at best. If you give them too much geekiness at once, they might just give you a $25 gift certificate to Chili’s.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 8:38 am and is filed under LARP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.