Mr. Tusk has invited the public (first-time LARPers included) to don their courtliest attire and participate in a run of “The Dance and the Dawn” on Sept. 12 at ARC Stages in Pleasantville. There are 13 roles: six ladies and seven lords. Before the players assemble, they will respond to a questionnaire to facilitate casting, and then be sent information including character and setting descriptions, details of game mechanics and suggestions for costuming (which is optional).

Image Bruce Lindsay as Mac the Nosferatu at World of Darkness’s Grand Masquerade event in New Orleans in 2011. Credit... Photo courtesy Bruce Lindsay

For those who prefer bloodier topics, “Vampire: The Masquerade” LARPers play monthly at Victor’s Bar & Grill in Hawthorne. The game is adapted from the tabletop version, with LARP rules by Mind’s Eye Theater. Players are members of Under the Rock, the local chapter of an international network of World of Darkness games called One World by Night, and newcomers are welcome.

LARPs are overseen by what some call “gamemasters,” others call “storytellers” and Mr. Tusk calls “orchestrators.” Between these coordinators’ proclamations of “Game on!” and “Game off!” players engage with one another in pursuit of their designated aims. Mr. Tusk had this advice for new LARPers: “Above all, take the game seriously and let yourself get into it. Don’t be afraid of people laughing at you. Just sink into the character and go from there.”

As a writer, Mr. Tusk considers LARP an artistic medium. “From an author’s perspective, one of the interesting features of LARP is that you are not allowed to come to a single answer,” he said in an interview. “You create multiple characters who believe different things and who are trying to accomplish different things, but unlike a playwright, you do not get to determine how it ends. You provide some constraints on your characters, but they make their own choices. What happens is in their hands.”

The value of a well-crafted LARP, Mr. Tusk feels, lies beyond its characters and content. Of LARP authors, he said: “We invent fake worlds full of fake people — that’s what literature is. And those things come to matter, not just because they might theoretically influence our real-world lives, but simply because they exist and they are beautiful.”

For enthusiasts, LARP can be a form of entertainment, a hobby, a means of social interaction or a source of intellectual and emotional engagement. For many, it offers a temporary sampling of an alternate identity. “It’s a nice way for me to get out of my own skin,” Mr. Isabella said. “I work at my job all week. I’m an introvert by nature. When I’m playing somebody else, in a sense I’m not myself for a while. I’m not as reserved. I push forward.”

Mr. Tusk suggested another view of the impact of LARP. “More than anything else,” he said in a later email, “LARP is really good at making people care. They are actually participating in a story, so they think harder about it. They end up caring about things that might not have meant as much to them before. Identification with their character is cranked up to the maximum that literature allows (at least with present technology), and that’s a powerful thing.”