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.
