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A woman is dancing to and having a good time at a night club, when she runs into a handsome stranger.
The stranger, with his wit and charm, will convince the woman to leave with him, perhaps for coffee.
Once outside of the club, the man will pull the woman into an alley, reveal his fanged teeth and feast on her blood.
This is a generalized feeding that can occur when a player needs to heal during a live action role-play, or LARP.
LARPing is when a group of people get together and physically act out actions taking place in a fictional world.
Players create characters to play out, giving them a history, a personality and becoming that character during the game.
The person responsibly for the fictional reality is Storyteller, who is in charge of the setting as well as what creatures the players will meet throughout the game.
Morgantown has its own community of LARPers, with a group that plays as vampires meeting every Saturday.
This group, called Before the Dawn, is based on White Wolf Inc.’s "World of Darkness" and features anywhere from around 10 players to 15 players.
There has been a LARP based on White Wolf Inc.’s stories in Morgantown since 1998.
The group meets weekly behind West Virginia University’s Woodburn Hall, where players take on their alternate personas and invade a fictional Ohio town.
The group used to meet inside Woodburn Hall until 2005 when the University changed the policy rules so that only official student organizations could use campus buildings.
Although the group is comprised mostly of students, it does not qualify as a student organization, though members would like to be officially recognized.
In the past, elaborate costumes have been used, but now that the group meets in public, members do not dress up in costumes for their characters.
Patrick, one of the Storytellers, said that while dressing up is allowed in the group, it is frowned upon "for the sake of not being harassed" by others out at night. Patrick want his full name used in the story.
Physical violence is against the rules, and if one player takes a swing at another, he or she is banned.
While the other groups have had LARPs based on the Victorian era as well, according to Patrick, most of the current LARPing is based "almost entirely modern."
However, they don’t LARP only as vampires.
The World of Darkness series allows for players to be other monstrous creatures of the night, such as werewolves or mages.
The Morgantown LARPers play through campaigns, switching to another species of monster when the story is over.
The current vampire campaign is expected to end in four weeks, and after that, Before the Dawn will switch to a storyline based on another mythical creature.
For "World of Darkness" LARPs, players build characters similar to other role-playing games with points being put into various modifiers called virtues, such as
courage or self-control, and attributes, such as strength or dexterity, which will decide what the character is able to do in game.
Players are also awarded experience points through what they achieve in game, such as role-playing characters well or defeating monsters.
Experience points can be used to purchase improvements of a character, such as increasing their attributes
or learning disciplines, which are a vampire’s special abilities like super strength or mind control.
When the characters fight something during the game, they use several special combat systems, such as the use of cards or rock-paper-scissors, depending on the system that is being used, to see if they will win or lose.
Andrew Nicholson, a senior WVU political science major, who has been a part of Morgantown’s LARPing community since his sophomore year of high school, started LARPing as an "outlet for (him) to be social."
Nicholson discussed how, unlike most role-playing games where characters can be resurrected, when a player’s character dies, they stay dead.
However, a player can create another character to continue playing the game. Saying that "life is cheap" is one of the game’s themes.
Lauren McDaniel, a freshman musical education major, just started playing with the group a few weeks ago and enjoys the White Wolf system.
McDaniel, who has LARPed before coming to WVU, prefers this system to others where foam weapons
were used for combat, saying those games were just an excuse to hit other people with blunt objects.
She also enjoys that she "gets to pretend to be a vampire."
And LARPing isn’t just for college years.
McDaniel sees LARPing as something she could still see herself doing on the weekends after she graduates.
And Nicholson plans to find people wherever he ends up to "keep role-playing."
For those interested in Morgantown’s LARP community, visit www.morgantownlarp.com for more information.
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