file under “more awesome stuff I totally don’t deserve”

A blogger called Mr. Truth ("Mr. Truth’s love for the truth began at the age of three upon uncovering the Santa Conspiracy") read Just A Geek and was inspired to create a list called 10 Unknown Facts about Wil Wheaton. I think it’s really awesome and really hilarious, mostly because the geekier you are, the funnier it is. Here’s two of them:

5. Wil Wheaton started a real AADA, but had to disband it after simultaneously defeating all five other co-founders with nothing but a Radio Flyer wagon and a single flaming oil jet. To be fair to his competitors, I must point out that it was an HD flaming oil jet.

6. Accurately depicted in GURPS, Wil Wheaton as a character would cost 413 points.

Allow me to annotate, because nothing makes a joke funnier than over-explaining it: The AADA is the American Autoduel Association, publishers of Autoduel Quarterly from Steve Jackson’s Car Wars. It is one of my favorite hobby games ever, and is exactly what it sounds like: vehicular combat straight out of The Road Warrior. You can play on highways, in cities or towns, or in specially built arenas, because in the future we’ve taken the demolition derby to its natural conclusion.

You can play the game with pre-generated vehicles, or you can design
your own, using a money-based system that’s divided into divisions like
$5K, $10K, etc. When you build your own car, you can do sneaky tricks like putting 1 point of armor on your wheels, so it looks like you’ve spent a lot of money to protect them, when you’ve really invested most of your cash into buying HD ammo – that costs and weighs twice as much as regular ammo but does +1 damage. It’s especially fun to do this when you play with the same people for years and nobody ever thinks to target your tires to see if you put more than one point of armor over them.

In Car Wars, the flaming oil jet does some cool stuff, like eventually turning into a smokescreen, and acting as an oil slick that deals fire damage, but it doesn’t stack up well against a guy who has linked his turret-mounted missile launcher to dual front-mounted heavy machine guns. It’s a dropped weapon, so it only really works if you’re ahead of another car that’s close enough to you that the other driver can’t easily maneuver out of the way when you deploy it. Of course, that other driver has probably linked his turret-mounted missile launcher to dual front-mounted heavy machine guns, and is chewing up your rear armor like Galactus in a protoplanetary disk, so relying on the HFOJ to extract furious flaming justice on your enemies rarely ends well for you. And by you, I mean me. And by me, I mean, goddammit I really want to play this game.

If you’re interested in checking it out, I recommend going old school and picking up Car Wars Deluxe Edition. It’s out of print, but worth the effort.

GURPS is the Generic Universal Roleplaying System, so it was marketed in the 80s as a system that could be learned once and then applied to any setting, like fantasy, space, horror, and the always-popular Humanx. We didn’t care about its genericness, though. We played it because it didn’t have stupid fucking THAC0, or a million tables you had to memorize or constantly refer to while you were playing. (Seriously, kids, if you think grappling in 3.0 and 3.5 is lame and overly-complex, you should grab a 2nd edition AD&D book someday and ask yourselves how we ever did it.) Those of you 10th level geeks who are now trying to reconcile my disdain for complex charts with my slobbering love of Car Wars are welcome to join me in the back room for several games of Nuclear War and Nuclear Proliferation after lunch. Bring Dr. Pepper.

Anyway, one of the things we loved the most about GURPS was its character creation rules. GURPS gives you a pool of points to be spent on a character, and you build that character by spending them on stats, skills and advantages. You can go over your starting points by taking disadvantages, so if you take a 15 point Rapid Healing advantage, you can offset it by taking a 5 point Klutz and a 10 point Code of Honor disadvantage. (Note: the biggest criticism of GURPS is that this system leads to something geeks call "min/maxing", where gamers max out their points by taking unrealistic disadvantages to build overpowered characters. My response to this has been the same since I started playing in 1988: a good GM won’t allow min/maxing to happen, and a good GM will always force his players to actually roleplay the disadvantages, which should discourage someone from taking 20 points of Manic Depressive, if they know what’s good for them.)

Most GURPS characters in 4th edition start out costing 250 points, which is considerably higher than the 100 point characters we used to make, so if I cost 413 points, I would truly be a super-awesome fishbulb of extraordinary magnitude.

If you want to see what GURPS is all about, Steve Jackson has a free .pdf called GURPS Lite that serves as a nifty introduction to the system. It’s playable, even!

So this list that I mentioned before I got sidetracked into that massive nostalgic geek tangent was Farked yesterday, and Farkers started adding their own facts to the list. Some of them are really, really funny. I don’t feel right pulling a c-n-p on all of them, so here’s a few that cracked me up:

15. Wil wrote the original version of WORLD OF WARCRAFT over a weekend. On a yellow legal pad, while at the beach.

16. Wil called Chuck Norris a pussy, but apologized when he started to cry.

17. Wanting realism, Wil demanded the use of live ammunition during his death scene in "Toy Soldiers." The ricochets injured several crew members.

18. Wil has never had a dead hooker in his trunk. Once they know it’s him, they dispose of themselves.

19. Wil once shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but then brought him back to life.

27. Kirk beat the No Win Scenario by cheating, Wil beat it by sneezing.

29. Wil was offered the part of Young Captain Kirk in Trek XI. He turned it down because he was still busy consoling Chuck Norris (see #16).

I was reluctant to post this, because I don’t want this to be mistaken for me thinking that I wander around believing that I’m really fucking great or anything ridiculous like that. I know that I’m just a dude, trying real hard to abide in a world without the guy who says, "In a world . . ." but I thought this stuff was funny, and after decades of people who don’t know me hating on me (hate the character all you want, man, but why me, personally? And still? I’m 36, Sport, don’t you think it’s time to live in the now?) it’s pretty awesome that people who don’t know me are amusing themselves (and me) with stuff like this. So I thought I’d share, and finish the list with one of my own:

36. Every day, Wil Wheaton is afraid that he can’t live up to his reputation.

Discover more from WIL WHEATON dot NET

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

86 thoughts on “file under “more awesome stuff I totally don’t deserve””

  1. 37. Wil Wheaton’s blog has been known to cure cancer and is being tested as a solution to world hunger.
    Thank you for that very funny post. Surprisingly, the way you describe GURPS sounds like the Champions system I used to play in High School. It was the only RPG I ever played aside from World of Darkness so I didn’t know there was a similarity there.

  5. Best part is that he didn’t shy away from entries so obscure that you need to be a deep gamer geek to understand them all. He recognized you as being part of his tribe after reading your book and made a list that you could really appreciate – quite the compliment!
    Thanks for translating parts of it. I’m a geek, but tabletop RPG references are lost on me!

  6. Wow! Way to screw up a post, Jasmine. *rolls eyes* Should’ve deleted “that be” after thankful. GAH! Yes, I’m talking to myself in your blog. I can’t promise it won’t ever happen again. That is all.

  7. Someone says “Car Wars” and I instantly snap to a weekend in my friends’ basement, arguing over pronunciation of “Gauss”.
    “Gows!” “Gauze!”
    “Gows!” “Gauze!”
    “Gows!” “Gauze!”
    (fistfight, followed by afternoon of Clay-O-Rama)

  8. 37. Wil Wheaton /can/ resolve differences between Star Wars and Star Trek fans.
    38. And resolve the PC vs Console conflict. While porting Atari games to his VIC-20. In his sleep.
    Just remember, when Wil is the keynote speaker at both the Trek Wars Expo and the Every Platform Okay Con (cause meaningful acronyms rawk), you read it here first. :p

  10. This is a great post because not only is it quite funny, but the vulnerability shown in your addition to the list also shows every one of your readers just how human you really are. This is what sets you apart from so many other actors/writers/etc. We all get to see that, yes you are an actor and a writer, but deep down, you’re still one of us. (Ok, I’m sounding like kind of a pathetic sycophant now, so I’ll shut up.)

  11. The GURPS point cost comment was made from a 3rd ed mentality. I started a 4th ed game with my guys a little while ago, and they only got 100 points. Meh… if they’re worth their weight in dice, they’ll survive anyway.

  14. Those are AWESOME!
    Now the one about making Chuck Norris Cry … that made me cry!! WAY TOO FUNNY!!!!
    38. Wil Wheaton can count to infinity!

  15. Aw man Car Wars was my hands down favorite RPG. Along with Robotech. I never really got into the D&D stuff (my bro did.) I liked blowing up mechanical stuff with rocket launchers. I’ve wished for an electronic version for a while. Are they any?

  16. Ah yes, the good ol’ days of AD&D 2nd Edition. D&D 4th Edition is a cake walk comparatively…although they could do with clearer instructions on character creation.

  19. 39. Wil Wheaton picked a fight with the Legion of Super Heroes, but cut them some slack after they all started bleeding within the first 34 seconds.

  21. I saw that on Fark, and it was the first time I realized that they actually have a “Wheaton” tag. Awesome.
    I thought the vasectomy comment was strangely personal, and that you’d just ignore it. Your reply, however, killed me – I’m totally not supposed to be looking at Fark from work and I had to try to disguise my laughter as a coughing fit. I’m pretty sure I failed, but thanks for the laughs. 🙂

  22. I saw that on Fark, and it was the first time I realized that they actually have a “Wheaton” tag. Awesome.
    I thought the vasectomy comment was strangely personal, and that you’d just ignore it. Your reply, however, killed me – I’m totally not supposed to be looking at Fark from work and I had to try to disguise my laughter as a coughing fit. I’m pretty sure I failed, but thanks for the laughs. 🙂
    *I think the interweb ate my post, but if not I apologize for doubling this.

  23. Car Wars was so cool – and affordable. And I liked playing with the little cardboard car things.
    Just the other night my wife and I were cleaning and I found an old sketch book of mine. When she saw my highschool drawing of a van with heavy machine gun she was worried and I got to explain Car Wars to her.

  31. Hahah, that’s fantastic! I can’t wait until next time I’m playing World of Warcraft, instead of Chuck Norris jokes in Barrens chat, it’ll all be Wil jokes! I feel a trend coming on!

  37. A word of warning to those hoping to score a copy of Car Wars Deluxe Edition for the cheap: copies do not appear often, and when they do, expect to pay piles of dough for anything approaching good condition.
    I always get a great pang of nostalgia when Wil brings up Car Wars Deluxe Edition because my own much-loved copy is currently sitting in cold storage, and by no means within reach. I rue the day I ever relegated it to its resting place, especially since reawakening the tabletop board/strategy game monster in me in recent years. To my grief, whipping out the old checkbook and grabbing another copy has not proven to be easy.
    Darn you and your seemingly illimitable garage, Wheaton, where all the relics of your gaming past sit within ready reach! I envy you! I’m sure Top Men keep it nice and cataloged and safe from evildoers.
    I’m also led to wonder if the decidedly non-gaming memento you wrote about in one of the Just a Geek stories is still kept in the Car Wars box, Wil? I think it had a phone number on it, and maybe a whiff of feminine perfume?
    Drive offensively!

  38. Brilliant.
    I got all but number 9 though.
    Nice to know you have ULTRAVIOLET clearance. The Friendly Computer must have a lot of confidence in you, that or he’s the one who designed you as Three Laws Safe… in which case… watch out Troubleshooters

  40. I started watching TNG in the mid 90s. I was something like 10 years old, and I thought Wes was the coolest mofo ever. He was a kid, close to my age, that got to live in space and hang out with Picard, Data, LaForge, et al. Yeah, I was a Wes fan through and through, man. I still am because I feel like that 10 year old seeing Wes on the bridge for the first time and Picard trying his hardest not to destroy you with his +20 scowl of smiting. I was jealous of you that day, my friend.
    Anyway, the point of all this is you will always live up to your reputation, Wil. Don’t ever worry about failing your save on that.

  41. Fantastic!! I need a blog condenser in my brain so that I can mention these on air without going over my talk time. I can’t wait till my show tomorrow night where you will be mentioned as one of my geeky pleasures.

  42. @raphael: I went out to the garage today to get my Deluxe Edition, so I could fact-check my memory on the HFOJ (turns out I was right. Go me.) and when I got the box into the house, I set it on the floor of my office, carefully lifted the lid off, and put my face right down into it.
    I inhaled deeply, and found only old paper and dust.
    There were several copies of ADQ, with their protective mailing covers intact, though, which made everything okay.
    While I was out there, I found about a dozen GURPS books, including favorites Illuminati, Horror and The Prisoner. I also found my D&D Basic Rules Set, incuding both books (first printing) and B2 and X1.
    I’m in geek heaven today, and I haven’t even mentioned my green keep case version of Awful Green Things, my copies of Nuclear War and Nuclear Proliferation, and a keep case version of GEV that barely closes because it’s filled with OGRE maps and pieces.

  44. More awesomeness: Stand By Me just became the 99-Cent Movie of the Week on iTunes. Hopefully Wil doesn’t get less money than usual when there’s a price cut. It’ll probably be a top download!

  45. Hey Wil,
    I know how you feel about not wanting to come across as big-headed, but ‘allow yourself some awesome’.
    I don’t want to come across as a gushing fan, but after your books, blogging and your PAX keynote (The first time an online video made me shout ‘HELL YEAH! and ‘punch the air’ about fifty times)…you deserve it.
    There’s always be some gaping assholes who’ll only ever refer to you as an ‘ex-star trek actor’, but today you’re the Crown-Prince of Geek Culture…enjoy it.
    To paraphrase something I read on your blog…don’t worry about people ‘getting you’, just know the RIGHT people ‘get you’.
    PS, my personal favorite:
    “Contrary to popular belief, World War 2 was not ended by the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. Wil Wheaton called the Emperor of Japan and said ‘Don’t be a dick.'”

  46. 1. I pray three Hail Marys and six Glory To Wil Wheatons every night before I go to sleep.
    2. I never liked D&D because I’m not into complexity. I used to play Tunnels and Trolls! And boy did we get silly, sometimes.
    3. I have a somewhat older and unused (though opened) Car Wars in a box about the size of a Monopoly game box… somewhere in my kid’s closet. I never had the chance to play it. That wouldn’t be the Deluxe version, would it? Anyone want to start a bidding war?

Comments are closed.

Related Posts

Recent Posts