A few interesting podcasts

...for your perusal.

The Games With Garfield podcast #6: Casual Randomness is an interesting discussion about randomness. And "rando-chess" makes an interesting point, too!

Penny Arcade has been recording and podcasting a few Dungeon and Dragons sessions, with the PvP guy, and Wil Wheaton as additional members of their adventuring party, with a WOTC guy DM-ing. I've linked to the first episode of their latest adventure here.

As you can expect, the actual battles with all the dice-rolling gets pretty tedious to listen to; however, when battles aren't going on (which is usually the first 3rd of the session, and a few breaks between the battles in the middle), it's usually pretty funny. It should also be noted that the DM is also really good at his job here; I've tried listening to other RPG podcasts just for comparison sake, and pretty much determined that he really knows his stuff (as you'd expect from a WOTC employee who I assume was helping develop the new edition of D&D).

What makes this session fun is the way it ends, and is definitely worth sitting through all eight segments for the climatic ending. Which isn't what you think; as the true hilarious capper of the session is caused when the player who is running Binwin the dwarf explains why his character can't die, and Wil Wheaton's response to it.