Wil Wheaton designed a cool shirt featuring various gaming dice in the model of an atom, and it’s up on was up for sale on shirt.woot! I was going to advertise the shirt here (like my site has any influence power at all, hah!) and encourage people to buy it . . . but it sold out. By 9:01 a.m. Central. Glad I bought mine late last night/early a.m. this morning.
So, I’ve met Wil Wheaton twice. The first time was at a Creation Star Trek convention in Midland, Texas, where he was a guest the guest and signed autographs. The con pretty much sucked a bit, a little because it was when Creation was first starting to take over and monopolize Star Trek cons, and mostly because it was in Midland.
The second time was at True Dungeon in GenCon SoCal the first year I was involved with True Dungeon. Wil ran through the dungeon with a group of his friends, and he was one of the best and most amusing Bards I saw that con. Less than halfway through the dungeon, Wil started having a really bad urge to pee. This resulted in some of the more amusing improv Bard Songs I’ve heard in all the time I’ve been involved with True Dungeon. I don’t remember the exact details, but one room with a giant spider he was singing something like “kill kill, kill the stupid spider” and worked in something about how he had to pee.
I was coming off shift just as Wil’s group started their dungeon run, and radio chatter started to the effect of, “OMG WIL WHEATON IS IN THE DUNGEON!” I was tired, and had honestly gotten a teensy bit jaded by seeing some of the Gaming Scene Bigwigs come through True Dungeon (we’d had Michael Stackpole run through the dungeon, a bunch of WOTC folks, including Ed Greenwood, the Hickmans, etc.) – I was like, “oh, that’s cool. I hope he enjoys it.” The radio chatter went on, with DMs and Blue Hands talking about how awesome a Bard he was. So, I wearily trudged back to spy on his group from behind the black curtains. One of our female DMs started begging to switch with a DM for the Spider Room (she ran it on the opposite shift). After it was ok’d, she then stated, flat out, “I’m going to kill Wesley!”
She did, of course. She was unfair, and had the giant spider repeatedly attack Wil’s Bard character. He was kind of justificably irritated by her picking on him like that – but he handled it with more grace than I would have then. I think he was more relieved to be able to get to a bathroom than mad.
I hope to see Wil at True Dungeon again. He was a lot of fun, he seemed to enjoy it, and we’ve made a lot of improvements with the experience.
