[Ed the Coastie]

I've posted this before elsewhere, but it's still kind of funny...

Several years ago, a good friend of mine was running a sword-and-sorcery LARP for a bunch of newbies and invited me to accompany them in order to give them a bit of heavy-duty magical assistance if need be. (I play a magic-user.) For all that they had obviously based their LARP characters on their favorite RPG characters, they were doing a good job; I spent much of the adventure just hanging back, enjoying the walk casting the occasional spell.

Eventually we came to the climactic battle, in which we had to fight our way past a horde of zombies. In order to simulate the seemingly-endless number of zombies, each zombie NPC would, upon being killed, rotate back to the rear of the pack. They would do this a total of six times each. Each zombie was individually rather easy to kill...but there were effectively something like 60 of them.

The newbies were in fine form, but this was why I had been brought along. I threw spell after spell until I ran out of mana, then drew a pair of shortswords and waded into the fray.

Just as the battle was wrapping up, we heard a thin voice call "Hold!" Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked around, wondering who had been hurt.

One of the newbie PCs stepped forward and pointed at me. He was a scrawny barbarian clad only in a fake-fur diaper and a plastic horned helmet that kept slipping down over his thick-lensed glasses. "Cairo's cheating!"

The referee looked at me, then back at the barbarian. "How do you mean?"

"He's fighting with swords. Everybody knows that magic-users can't use swords! He's supposed to have a staff, just like Arcanus here." He indicated one of his buddies, who was indeed playing a magic-user.

There was silence for a moment, before the referee replied, "Dude...this isn't D&D..."