a woefully inadequate session report

I can’t go into specifics about yesterday’s D&D 4E session at Penny Arcade, and I won’t be able to say anything until after the podcasts are released . . . but I thought I’d collect the few tweets I sent while we were playing as sort of an oblique overview:

Remember when you were a kid, and you hardly slept on Christmas Eve, because you were so excited? That was me last n ight. D&D4E FTW! –7:51am

I am currently watching Mike and Scott design my character portrait. OMG this is awesome. – 9:04am

We’ve been playing for hours, and it doesn’t feel like it at all. This is even more fun than I thought it would be. – 12:14pm

Pizza has arrived. This shit just got REAL. – 1:02pm

Sharing parmesan and red peppers with @pvponline, tweeting about it before he can. – 1:12pm

One day, I will sing again The Ballad of Rudy the Undead Hound … – 4:14pm

Best. Gaming. Session. Ever. – 5:28pm

It turned out that my fears about messing up my character were unfounded. I did everything right, and over the course of our session it became clear that I hadn’t made any stupid mistakes in his creation . . . in fact, he was kind of a bad ass. Also, I’m really proud of myself for doing everything old school, with books and paper and a whole bunch of not using a character generator to do all the heavy lifting. Wheaton’s still got it, ladies. (Um. Not that most ladies I know, including my wife, care about this sort of thing or understand why [THING I CAN’T TALK ABOUT] and [OTHER THING I CAN’T TALK ABOUT] was so cool.)

If you listened to the first Penny Arcade Podcast and, like me, thought something like, “Man, I wish I could be part of that because it sounds like so much fun,” I can happily report that we were correct. It was awesome, and I think the podcasts are going to be tremendously entertaining.

at last, it can be revealed . . .

So this is why I got to spend the entire weekend making a D&D 4E character without feeling guilty about it at all:

For those of you who enjoyed the D&D Podcasts, we’re recording another session on Thursday. Jim Darkmagic (of the New Hampshire Darkmagics), Binwin Bronzebottom, and Omin Dran of Acquisitions Incorporated make their return to the table, while William “Wil” Wheaton joins as the new hire, playing an unreleased class. Yes, that’s correct: we have a celebrity guest. This is the big Goddamned Leagues, people.

I loved those D&D Podcasts, because it was like listening to me and my friends play in high school. I can’t wait to actually participate in one (I’ve written a backstory that fits into their campaign, even,) and watch Jim Darkmagic set Binwin on fire firsthand. I also can’t wait to find out who the celebrity guest is, because that’s going to be awesome.

I don’t have a character generator, or a subscription to D&D Insider, so I had to create [Awesome Character Name Redacted] the old school way: on the floor of my office, flipping between the PHB and Adventurer’s Vault to make sure I was investing my limited magic item budget in the wisest way, and then double checking to ensure I had applied the bonuses correctly. I hadn’t touched the 4th Edition character creation rules before last week, and I haven’t created a character from blank paper in over a decade, so I’m pretty sure that when I get over to the Penny Arcade Secret Headquarters of Doom to play tomorrow, there may be some serious pointing and laughing at me when I show off my character sheet and my errors are revealed for all to see. I hope they don’t do it in front of the mysterious celebrity guest, because I want to make a good impression.

The process of creating my character, who I guess I can tell you is an Eladrin (because I’ve always thought high elves were cool) and is a new, secret class out of the PHB 2, awakened all these slumbering memories of some of the happiest times I’ve ever had, and I can’t believe how lucky I am that I get to do this tomorrow. It feels too good to be true, you know?

Last night’s Child’s Play dinner raised over $200,000 and my harebrained idea to auction off “have a beer with Gabe and Wil and Kurtz and Khoo and The Other Mike at a bar around the corner after the auction’s over” went for $2900 and ended up being a ridiculously fun after party with Enforcers and Rock Band. Want to know how much beer I drank? One half a Double Bastard. Want to know why it was only one half? Because Sean from Harmonix bumped into me after the waiter put it into my hand and me and my friend Chris ended up wearing half of it. If anyone was wondering why I walked out of that bar, seriously soaked in and stinking like beer while staying completely sober, now you know. Goodtimes.

And check this out: because this week isn’t cool enough already, I’m going to Microsoft in about an hour to finally do a podcast with Major Nelson. OMGINORITE?!

This really is turning out to be the best week, ever, and I haven’t even disclosed the stuff that’s locked behind various NDAs.

I’m an incredibly lucky guy. I need to keep saying that so I don’t take any of this for granted.

The D&D Family Tree

Oh kids. Oh, oh kids.

This first chart keeps things simple by charting the origins of D&D and the evolution of D&D, AD&D, and the positioning of some other early developments, up to the debut of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition in 1989. Perhaps later I’ll take things from 2E through 4E, but the era presented is the real heart of the whole discussion, particularly the split between D&D and AD&D and the contributions of Gygax vs. Arneson.

(via Purple Pawn)

desert bus for hope 2008 begins

Hey Kids, it’s your old pal Wil Wheaton here, and this is a post about a whale.

WAIT! NO IT ISN’T! IT’S A POST ABOUT AWESOME PEOPLE WHO DO AWESOME THINGS THAT MAKE WITH THE HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY!

Ahem. Allow me to introduce a few things:

There’s this fantastic charity that my friends from Penny Arcade created, called Child’s Play:

Since 2003, over 100,000 gamers worldwide have banded together through Child’s Play, a community based charity grown and nurtured from the game culture and industry. Over 3.5 million dollars in donations of toys, games, books and cash for sick kids in children’s hospitals across North America and the world have been collected since our inception.

This year, we have continued expanding across the country and the globe. With around 60 partner hospitals and more arriving every month, you can be sure to find one from the map above that needs your help! You can choose to purchase requested items from their online retailer wish lists, or make a cash donation that helps out Child’s Play hospitals everywhere. Any items purchased through Amazon will be shipped directly to your hospital of choice, so please be sure to select their shipping address rather than your own.

When gamers give back, it makes a difference!

There’s are these guys up in Canadia called LoadingReadyRun. They’re really funny, and I did a sketch with them last year at the Child’s Play dinner in Seattle:

Inspired in name and appearance by the Commdore 64 Home Computer System, LRR is a site run by-and for-geeks. You have to be at least a bit of a geek to think writing, shooting and producing a new, original short sketch every week is feasible. But you have to be a giant geek to actually do it. Since LoadingReadyRun’s start in 2003, it has consistently updated with a new video, every week. Often more!
LRR videos have been featured in film festivals such as the Comic Con International Film Festival in San Diego, and shown on major TV networks, including G4 TechTV, The CW and even CNN.

There’s this horrible old game called Desert Bus, that’s really more of a cruel practical joke than an actual game:

The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45mph, a feat that would take the player 8 hours of continuous play to complete, as the game cannot be paused.

The bus contains no passengers, and there is no scenery or other cars on the road. The bus veers to the right slightly; as a result, it is impossible to tape down a button to go do something else and have the game end properly. If the bus veers off the road it will stall and be towed back to Tucson, also in real time. If the player makes it to Las Vegas, they will score exactly one point. The player then gets the option to make the return trip to Tucson—for another point (a decision they must make in a few seconds or the game ends).

So, if you put all this together, you will get the guys from LoadingReadyRun playing a marathon of Desert Bus to raise money for Child’s Play charity! It’s hilarious to watch them play it, especially as the hours go by, and this year it’s going to be even more entertaining as they will be joined by the cast of ‘The Guild’, Sean from Harmonix, the Joystiq Podcast’s Justin McElroy, John Davison of What They Play and 1Up Yours, Microsoft’s Major Nelson, Jeremy Baker of http://www.thezone.fm, and Sam Logan of Sam and Fuzzy.

They will also be joined by yours truly, sometime on Sunday afternoon (Pacific time). If you’ve got nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon (or evening, or whatever time it is where you live) and you want to hear me and some hilarious Canadian sketch comedy geeks – who will most likely be in Batcountry by the time I get there – engage in the high quality grabassery and shenanigans you’ve come to expect from us, watch my Twitter Tweet-o-thingy for the announcement.

Throughout the entire marathon, you can watch them play, via the driver or bus cam (links on the top of their webpage). There’s also a live chat where we can go encourage them and tell them how awesome they are. Of course, this entire thing is for charity, so if you can part with a couple of bucks, we could all join forces to make a real difference in the life of a child.

The Geek in Review Returns!

Hey guess what? I’m writing the Geek in Review for the Suicide Girls Newswire again. Instead of a weekly column, it’ll be monthly, and a new column will go up on the second Wednesday of every month.

Today’s column is called “… when the MCP was just a chess program.”

The earliest video games didn’t just encourage us to use our imaginations when we played them, they forced us to. Yar’s Revenge, the best-selling original title on the Atari 2600, has simple yet entertaining gameplay, but it was supported by an extraordinarily rich backstory, turning it into one chapter in an epic struggle for cosmic justice. When I was 9, I wasn’t just chipping away at the shield while I readied my Zorlon cannon; I was helping the Yar extract revenge on the Qotile for the destruction of their planet, Razak IV, as illustrated in the comic that came with the game.

When I was 10 or 11, I arranged a TV tray, a dining room chair, and a worn blanket to make a small tent in front of our 24-inch TV set. I carefully moved our Atari 400 onto the tray and plugged Star Raiders into the cartridge slot. I flipped the power on, picked up the joystick, and booted up my imagination as I sat in the command chair of my very own space ship. For the next hour, I was a member of the Atarian Starship Fleet. I was all that stood between the Zylon Empire and the destruction of humanity. Through my cockpit’s viewscreen (developed at great expense by the RCA corporation back on Earth) I blasted Zylon starships and Zylon basestars, and I would have defeated them all, if my meddling mother hadn’t made me stop and eat dinner!

When I was writing the GiR before, the powers that be at SG always made sure the newswire was SFW. As far as I know, they’re still doing that, but your corporate firewall probably doesn’t know or care, so consider yourself warned about reading at work.