Twilight: The Live Action Role Playing Game

Twilight is a series of books that are currently incredibly popular with teenage girls. The success of the books is a mystery to most adults, but some people put it down to the fact that the author, Stephanie Meyer, has all the literary ability of a thirteen year old, meaning that the readers find it easy to relate to her turgid prose. Indeed, Twilight is one of those rare instances when fan fiction and the book itself are of equal quality.

With a film raking in profits at the box office and several more on the way, the Twilight franchise is big-business, and the brand has seen many related spin offs, including a role-playing game, a breakfast cereal and a Broadway musical, entitled Fangs for the Music. A live action role playing game has also been developed, and I was invited to partake, so I partook.

Live action role playing (LARP) takes many of the elements of traditional RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, and lets you act them out in the real world. This was my first experience with LARP, so I needed some pointers and advice. Luckily the organisers (Twi-Hard RPG Inc) are very helpful, and my lack of confidence wasn’t a problem. Interestingly, lacking confidence is a pretty common trait amongst LARPGers.

I was given the role of a young male vampire, and the mission assigned to me was to make one of the female human characters fall in love with me. I could do this by raising my levels of mystery, charm and swoonability in the course of the game. Given that all players start with equal scores in these categories, I figured I had a pretty good chance of doing this. But I was wrong.

Given the ratio of males to females in LARPGs is somewhat skewed, there seemed to be a lot of male vampires vying for the attention of relatively few human females. The organisers tried to persuade some male gamers to take the role of girl characters, but this was deemed ‘too embarrassing, even for LARPGers’. So there were many of us, all trying to win the affection of a slim number of wannabe Bellas.

Being a first-timer, I had a lot to learn, far more than my more experienced fellow vampires. As much of the role-play wooing involved standing beneath a window and looking threatening, there were a lot of calls to the police from suspicious onlookers. I did not escape in time when a patrol car came by, and while I was explaining my actions to the disbelieving cops, I was losing the opportunity to earn valuable charm points.

It’s possible to do battle with other participants, using dice, which increases various statistics of your character. This element, while faithful to the traditional role playing game, seemed rather out of place in a shadowy world of romantic supernatural liaisons, but I guess the only alternative would be physical combat, and that could lead to costly lawsuits.

My first battle with a fellow RPGer ended badly, when Douglas, a werewolf, rolled a six to my three, scoring a Deadly Blow and escaping with Mandy, a girl who was about to give me some mystery points. I was sidelined for ten minutes (for ‘recovery’) and got chatting to another player who had also just lost a battle. Malcolm told me that he liked playing the Twilight LARPG because it gave him an opportunity to pretend to be a hundred years old.

The rest of my time in the game was short lived. I was killed by a guy dressed as Wesley Snipes from the Blade movies, which was a bit surprising given that this was a totally different film, but rules are rules, and I was forced to watch the game from the outside. In the end, the game was won by a girl who managed to get friendly with twenty five different vampires and werewolves. Someone else did score higher, but she was caught having sex with one of the players in the bushes, and according to the rules this results in an automatic disqualification.

I wouldn’t recommend Twilight: The Live Action Role Playing Game, because it’s not a lot of fun. Fans of the books may enjoy it, but it tends to take place long after their bedtimes, so they’ll probably miss out. In the meantime, I’ve heard that LARPGers who want proper supernatural romance role-playing fun should wait for the TSN Anita Blake Adults Only Game.