Here are my plans for PAX

Posted on By Wil

Tomorrow, I'm heading up to Seattle for PAX Prime. This year, I hope to play a shitton of games, both of the Tabletop variety and the Video variety. To accomplish this noble goal, I'm not going to do a ton of signing like I've done in years past.

If you're planning to attend, and want to do things with me, or come see me do things, here's my schedule:

Friday Morning: Signing at Paul and Storm's table in Bandland.

Friday Afternoon: Playing Ticket To Ride in the Tabletop gaming area with Anne and the first five people who show up to play with us.

Saturday Morning: Signing at Paul and Storm's table in Bandland.

Saturday 3:30pm: Main Theater. Acquisitions, Incorporated. The Lost Episode. 

Sunday 11:30am: The Awesome Hour! Pegasus Theater. PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS HAS BEEN UPGRADED. THE AWESOME HOUR IS NOW THE DON'T FORGET TO BE AWESOME HOUR, WITH PAUL AND STORM, AND HANK GREEN. Also, I'll be there telling stories and answering questions.

Sunday 1pm: Signing at Paul and Storm's table in Bandland.

Important note about signings: I'm going to PAX this year primarly as an attendee, so I won't have my own table in bandland. Instead, I've convinced Paul and Storm to let me crash their table for roughly one hour each day. For specific times I'll be there, check my Twitter account, which I'll update throughout the weekend.

I'm also bringing fifty of these silly Wheaton Paper Dolls with me for sale. Hopefully, I won't have to schlep 45 of them back home.

on a long run, on a long run

Posted on By Wil

I've had this idea for a one-shot comic kicking around my head for close to a year. Until yesterday, I hadn't done anything with it.

Yesterday, I wrote out a page-by-page breakdown for the story*. Today, I wrote the first five pages, and stopped when I ran out of gas a few hours later. I'll pick it up tomorrow, and keep going until it's done. If I can do five pages a day, I'll have a first draft done before I go to PAX, which is great because I can just leave it alone and let the second draft start cooking in my head while I'm playing games.

I'm not going to discuss any details about the story until it's done, but I can say that I'm aiming for 22 pages in a 1970s indie style. At the moment, I have about 18 pages, and it's a little tight. I may be able to open it up a bit and spread some of the pages out to get to 22, or I may just keep it as-is and end up with four more pages of story when it's all done. Or maybe I'll do 18 pages, and have my friends make fake ads for the other four pages, like the books I loved from the 70s and 80s. I can do whatever I want, because this is my project for me! YAY!

This is the first purely creative writing I've done all year, and even though I don't even know if it'll be published, it feels so good to be writing, to not be hung up on making a perfect first draft, or to have my creative impulses drowned out by the Internal Critic. I'm writing. I'm creating. I'm telling a story! I'm looking into my head and scraping out what I find in there, and it feels really, really good.

 

* That's a trick I learned from Warren Ellis: I write down "PAGE ONE – BLAH HAPPENS PAGE TWO – THAT THING HAPPENS" and pretty soon I have the whole thing plotted out, so the writing is pretty much connecting the dots … or hanging meat on the skeleton, which is probably how Warren would put it.

New #Tabletop: Elder Sign (or, in which I have a tentacle party with Felicia Day)

Posted on By Wil

The newest Tabletop features a really fun dice game set in the Arkham Horror universe called Elder Sign.

Fantasy flight Games publishes an epic game called Arkham Horror that I just love. In the game, the players assume the role of Lovecraftian Pulp Investigators who are all working together to stop one of the Great Old Ones from devouring the world.

You know, like you do.

Arkham Horror is a complex, intricate, incredibly difficult, beautiful game. It's more like a guided role playing game where the board itself is the GM, and there really isn't another boardgame out there (that I can think of off the top of my head, anyway) that plays like it does. I would love to play it on Tabletop… but it takes a minimum of three hours, and if I put it on the show, I wouldn't do the game justice. There's just no way to edit a 3 or 4 or 5 hour game into 30 or even 45 minutes, while staying true to the heart and soul of the game.

Luckily for us, Fantasy Flight also publishes a cooperative dice game set in the Arkham Horror world called Elder Sign. Designed by Richard Launius and Kevin Wilson (who also designed Arkham Horror), it takes about an hour to play, and while it isn't a scary and complex as Arkham, it is still beautiful and challenging. It was perfect for my show.

Follow this link, if you don't see the embedded video above, to watch Elder Sign at YouTube.

While I have your attention: 

At GenCon last weekend, the most frequently asked question I got was "When do you start the second season of Tabletop?"

The next most frequently asked question was, "What are you going to play on the second season?"

My answer to both of these questions is: "I have no idea, because we don't know if YouTube is going to fund a second season."

What usually followed was a series of confused noises and some stammering before the final question was asked: "How do I help you get a second season?"

Here is the answer:

The best and most effective way to support Tabletop — in fact, the only way that Google even cares about — is to subscribe to the channel, like and comment on the episodes (if you, you know, actually like them) and encourage everyone you know to do the same thing.

Google cares about interactions like that on their Premium Channels (like G&S), and while we all know we're never going to get the same numbers as the longtime YouTubers who are getting five million views per video, I think that if we can stay up in the six digits, we'll get another season.

It's amusing to me that we're not dealing with a studio or a network, but we still have to hit certain numbers to get more funding (just like we would if we were on broadcast television.)

Finally, I'll leave you with this:

image from 25.media.tumblr.com

You'll have to watch Tabletop's Elder Sign episode for context. But beware… there are some Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.

Rest in peace, Neil Armstrong.

Posted on By Wil

I met Neil Armstrong once, at a dinner to honor Jimmy Doohan in the early 2000s.

He was not much taller than me, but he was a giant of a man. He was as kind as he was intimidating. 

I don’t remember what I said to him, or what he said to me, because all I could think the entire time was “This man has walked on the fucking moon.”

Rest in peace, Neil. Because of your bravery and your courage, an entire species will forever look into the night sky and see not a mystery, but a destination.

Answering a FAQ: “Why do you play so many evil characters lately?”

Posted on By Wil

Every actor has a particular type they can play well, for some reason or another. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with who we are in real life, but it's just what we do well.

Example: Travolta is amazing as the Lovable Loser. When he's in Welcome Back Kotter and Saturday Night Fever in the 70s, he is the biggest star in the world, because people can identify with him in a way they may not be consciously aware of.

Then, in the early 80s, the industry decides to make him The Leading Man. They put him in films like Perfect and Urban Cowboy, and his career tanks. Nobody can connect to those characters, because it's not the right type for him to play. He does those talking baby movies for awhile, and then he explodes back to the top of the A list when he plays a junkie hitman in Pulp Fiction. He's back to being the Lovable Loser, and audiences go crazy for him, because that's the type he's meant to play.

You can do this with just about every actor if you look hard enough and spend enough time on it. It's all about Jungian Archetypes and Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces.

So why do I play evil characters? When I was a kid, I played the sensitive, awkward kid full of self doubt who really wanted you to like him*. When I was in my 20s, I kept getting auditions for those roles and never booking them, because it's just not the type I'm meant to play. When Kim Evey cast me as a douchey agent in Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show, and Felicia wrote me into The Guild as douchey Fawkes, things started to turn around. I realized that I'd found my type, and I started looking for those roles.

It turns out that my type is the Villain You Love To Hate, so that's who I am in The Guild, Leverage, Eureka, and Big Bang Theory. I don't think it's a coincidence that, once I started playing these types of characters, my acting career began to come back to life, and I will be grateful for the rest of my life to Kim and Felicia for taking a chance on me.

I really don't know why this is my type, but whenever I try to figure it out, I start to feel like Lenny with the rabbit, and I really don't want to break something that's working out pretty well for me right now.

I do know this, though: the whole point of being an actor is to portray characters who are different from who you really are. The most important thing in the entire universe to me is kindness, so it's really fun to play characters who are antithetical to my personal ideals. Exactly why I seem to be so good at doing that, though? I'm not going behind that particular barn.

 

*Incidentally, that's pretty much who I've been in my real life since I can remember.