Consent and calibration

This page has safety advice that hasn't yet been checked by our safety reviewer. Treat it as general guidance, and follow your game's, venue's or product's own safety rules first.

An introduction to consent and calibration tools for new LARP players, explaining how to set limits and adjust scenes safely during play.

Consent and calibration tools are the signals and agreements that let every player at a LARP event steer away from content that is too intense, pause when something unexpected comes up, or simply let the people around them know that a scene needs to shift. They are not a sign of weakness or a way to avoid interesting story; they are the shared language that keeps the game enjoyable and genuinely safe for everyone at the table or in the field. The guidance here is general practice drawn from across the LARP community. It is not the safety policy of any single game, and your event's own briefing and rulebook are always the authority. Before the event begins, many games hold a conversation sometimes called a lines and veils discussion or a pre-game safety chat. Lines are subjects that will not appear in the game at all. Veils are topics that can exist in the story but will always happen off-screen, never acted out in front of other players. Taking a few minutes to be honest about your own lines and veils, and to hear those of the people you will be playing with, shapes a game that everyone can dive into confidently. During play, calibration signals let you make small real-time adjustments without breaking the story completely. A quiet word, a raised open hand, or a specific call your game uses can tell another player to ease up on the intensity of a scene, slow things down, or steer the fiction in a different direction. These micro-adjustments happen all the time at healthy events and are a normal part of collaborative storytelling. If you are ever unsure what signals your game uses, ask an organiser before play starts rather than guessing in the moment. When something more serious comes up, harder safety tools come into play. Common examples used across many communities include a word or gesture that freezes the scene so a real-world concern can be addressed, a signal that lets a player step away from the action entirely without explanation, and a tap-out, a physical signal such as two taps on a scene partner's arm, that lets you leave a scene at once. Because the exact calls and gestures vary between games, always learn the specific versions your event uses during the safety briefing. Younger players should have a trusted adult or organiser they can go to at any point if they feel uncertain about using a safety tool. After a scene or at the end of an event, a brief check-in with fellow players helps everyone decompress and leave the fiction behind. This is sometimes called a debrief or a de-role. It can be as simple as a short conversation out of character, confirming that everyone is doing well and that any intense moments in the story have been left in the game world where they belong. Building this habit makes for a kinder community and means players return to future events feeling looked after.