Free The Happiest Days of Our Lives by Wil Wheaton

Married Life. I began counting the days until I could introduce her children, who I was raising as if they were my own, to the wonderful world of gaming.
    After we’d spent about six years in each other’s lives, I began gradually to introduce the kids to some of the geekier things I like. By the time the Lord of the Rings movies came out, they were ready to take their first steps down a path that began in a tavern and ended in a dragon’s lair.
    February, 2004
    The boys and I spent a week or so creating characters and discussing the rules, building excitement for the adventure. I stayed up way too late each night after the kids went to bed, poring over websites and my rule books, simulating combats and creating NPCs. It was the first time I’d run an adventure since The Isle of Dread in sixth grade, when I scored a Total Party Kill during the first encounter. I never got to sit behind the screen again.
    I sat at the dining room table and reviewed cleric spells while the Two Towers soundtrack inspired my imagination. Ryan came out of his room and sat down across from me.
    “Whatcha doing?” he asked.
    “Just refreshing my memory. It’s been—” I paused. “Well, it’s been a really long time since I ran a campaign, and I want…” I want you to think I’m cool. I want to do something special for you. I want to share something with you that isn’t sports-related, so your dad can’t take it over and force me out of it.
    “I want to make sure you guys have a good time,” I said. “It’s important to me.”
    “I’m so excited!” he said.
    “Me too.”
    He absentmindedly rolled some d20s I’d scattered across the table.
    “Can I roll up an extra character, just for fun?” he asked.
    “Is your homework finished?”
    “Yeah. Everything’s done, and I worked ahead in Biology.”
    “Really?”
    He nodded.
    “Dude. That’s super-responsible. I’m proud of you.”
    He smiled. “So can I?”
    “Sure,” I said. “The dice bags are on my desk.”
    He walked over to my office. My desk, normally buried under computer books and writing journals, was covered with gaming books: GURPS , Mutants and Masterminds , Car Wars , too many Cheapass games to count, and—of course—a stack of D&D books ten feet tall.
    “It’s 4d6, right?” he called out.
    “Yep, 4d6. And you—”
    “—throw away the lowest roll,” we said in unison. “Ryan, I…”
    I love it when that happens.
    “I have an extra character sheet here that you can use.”
    “Okay.” I went back to my books. A moment later, four six-sided dice dropped from Ryan’s hand and rolled across the table. “Since you’re the DM, will you watch my rolls?”
    “You bet! This is…”
    This is something I’ll remember for the rest of my life.
    “This is really fun.”
    He picked up the dice and threw them: 2—4—5—1.
    “Eleven?! Oh man!” he said.
    “Eleven isn’t a bad roll at all.” I noticed something familiar about the dice. Two of them were black, with red numbers. There was a skull where the 1 would have been.
    “Hey, I have dice just like those in—”
    My heart stopped. I ran into my office.
    There it was, in the cool blue glow of my monitor, atop my Freedom City sourcebook: an open bag of dice. My bag of dice. The black one, with the red pyramid from the Bavarian Illuminati on it. A clear d10 and two brilliant blue d12s sat near its open top. Its drawstring was cast carelessly across the side of the book, dangerously close to my Zen fountain.
    Ryan slowly walked into the room.
    “Is something wrong?” he asked.
    “You…you touched my dice!” I felt a little woozy.
    “Well…yeah.”
    “No, Ryan, you…”
    You are about to see your stepdad as the old gamer geek he really is. The gamer geek I hope you’ll be one day…you know, this is actually kind of cool.
    “You can’t ever touch my dice,” I said, patiently.
    “Uhh…aren’t they all,” he made quote marks with his fingers, “‘your