Webcomic / Full Frontal Nerdity

Full Frontal Nerdity is a weekly webcomic by Aaron Williams (also the creator of Nodwick and PS238). It focuses on the roleplaying sessions of four tabletop gaming friends, all of them typical nerds in bad need of a life. The characters are:

• Frank, the Game Master. Overweight and socially awkward.
• Lewis, gamer. Chronically unlucky and often dog-piled by the other players.
• Nelson, gamer. Rules Lawyer and power gamer.
• Shawn, gamer. Participates in the games via webcam from Alaska. Troll.
• Emma (full name Empusa Resipunus), demon. Introduced about a decade into the strip, only participates in the games tangentially, and enjoys Earth food (especially junk food) just a little too much.
• Game shop guy. Runs the local game shop "The Goblin Hole". Real name unknown.

Apart from tabletop gaming, the comic references various staples of the geek subculture, from collectible card games to SF series.

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Contains examples of:

• After the End: The gang run post-apocalyptic campaigns all the time. Often after they've destroyed the world in the previous campaign. Or when Frank feels the urge to replay Gamma World.
• Anchovies Are Abhorrent: When Shawn rejoins the table, remotely, via webcam, Lewis points out that the by-laws state everyone has to chip in on pizza, regardless of how little they eat. Shawn quickly counters by stating his preferred toppings are pineapple, anchovies and onions, and encourages them to chow down.
• And I Must Scream: Invoked by Nelson here.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking
  Frank: "Due to rampant thefts, field destruction, zombie cattle, poisoned wells, attempted murder, and a relatively mundane aphid problem, your town can expect to suffer fifty percent population loss."
• Attack Backfire: In the Halloween 2014 arc, a demon tried eating Lewis's soul, only to discover that he has such a large "soul debt" due to his contract with Emma that Lewis ended up sucking souls out of the demon!
• Badass Santa / An Ass-Kicking Christmas:
  • Check it out.
  • Much later on, they play a game where Shawn, Lewis, and Nelson are different would-be Santas with unique powers and paradigms competing to see who wins and determines the course of Christmas. The winner ended up being Shawn, playing a Heavy Metal Krampus version of Santa.
  Shawn: Shred the Halls, baby!
  • Ragnarok Klaus.
• Bait-and-Switch: One storyline begins when Frank, looking at Hello Kitty/Warhammer 40,000 dice in the Goblin Hole, also discovers some eldritch dice with strange symbols and Alien Geometries, which Emma explains as being the "weird code" of a machine built by Elder Gods. Shortly afterwards, a sign appears on the lawn saying "Return the Dice" and a figure in a hooded robe with glowing green eyes appears at the door. He turns out to be a Techpriest cosplayer who'd dropped the Hello Kitty dice so other Warhammer 40K fans wouldn't see him with them.
• Basement-Dweller: According to Nelson, everyone but him (although Shawn hadn't joined by then).
• Batman Gambit:
  • Frank runs a campaign featuring multiple factions interlocked in a power struggle for the throne, each of whom having their own plot hooks. Nelson and Lewis decide to accept as many plot hooks as they possibly can to maximize their XP and loot, thus ending up playing multiple factions against each other. They end up having to do a lot of political maneuvering, actual role-playing, and careful reading of the campaign notes to accomplish this without being detected and cut off from doing more adventuring... Which turns out to have been Frank's plan all along.
  • In an earlier strip, Frank decides that "Superman was always Superman", letting the players pick out overpowered spells and abilities... but at the cost of Power Incontinence. Hilarity Ensues.
• Bedlam House: One Call of Cthulhu campaign had the players as "responsible adults" running an asylum for the inevitable victims of cosmic horror, getting paid to treat and contain them. They immediately start abusing their patients and dealing opium for profit.
• Big Eater: Emma. At one point she says her favourite Supernatural character is Dean Winchester because he's a "pie-eating machine".
• Bland-Name Product: "Land Of Barysinister", a product with things like Shaolin mech pilots, ridiculously bad combat rules, and extremely clumsy Fantasy Kitchen Sink worldbuilding, is a pretty clear parody of the famously So Bad, It's Good (on a good day, anyway) World of Synnibarr.
• Boobs-and-Butt Pose: Poked fun at here.
• Born Unlucky: It's not just that Lewis is the target of everyone's jokes frequently. If there's bad fortune around, some of it is going to splash on him. There's a running gag about just how often he gets a critical failure when he rolls a d20. Naturally, when there is a cursed d20 that only rolls a 1, guess who owns it?
• Brain Bleach:
  • "Must... dump... Clorox... in... ears!"
  • And again regarding Dr. Octavius and Aunt May having a... "crossover event".
    Shawn: That's worth a universe reboot right there, people.
  • While playing Deadlands, Lewis is describing how his new "graft" will work, prompting Nelson to eat Ghost Rocks in the hopes that the voices in his head will drown out Lewis'.^note May double as Driven to Suicide, given that Deadlands isn't too kind to characters that consume Ghost Rock like that.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Emma is capable of warping space and time but just try and get her to use her powers for anyone else.
• Broad Strokes:
  • The first strip to mention a guy named Shawn who moved to Alaska says he's a guy at Lewis's work. Lewis barely knows him and the others have never met him. Two months later he's a former member of the group.
• Butt-Monkey: Lewis, to such a degree that he labels himself the God of Anti-Luck.
• Call-Back: One of Entropo's (offscreen) riddles is based on the very first comic.
• Catchphrase: Most of the comics begin with Frank's bemused and sarcastic "congratulations, you [insert heinous player crime here]" regarding his players' latest butchery of his game.
• Character Alignment: In-Universe, the source of endless complaints from Frank, who will point it out when the other three commit alignment violations. (The other three are almost always Evil, whatever their character sheet says.)
• Chekhov's Gun: In 2013 Emma mentioned something about a "Disputed covenant cumulative client soul darnation clause" in regards to Lewis' deal with her. It becomes plot-relevant in 2014.
• The Chris Carter Effect: In-Universe, the characters discuss ''Wheel of Time Syndrome, where any remaining fans become homicidal after fantasy comics based around The Quest fail to resolve the central conflict for long enough.
• Christmas Creep: After complaining about the Christmas creep, the boys decide to deal with it by combining Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas into a single holiday called Thanksmasoween. Its traditions promise to be interesting, as one of the characters carves the turkey with a chainsaw while wearing a hockey mask and Santa hat.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: If there's a game where the player group (or members thereof) haven't turned on each other or betrayed an outside group at least twice, it was a dull game.
• Comedic Sociopathy: Abounds during the game sessions (see above), but Lewis and Nelson prove that they're willing to take it into reality by over-analyzing WALL•E, tallying up how many little kids they make cry while doing so.
• Comic Book Death: Does not apply to all comic book characters.
• Convenience Store Gift Shopping: Nelson 're-gifts' presents from his office Christmas party (such as a hot cocoa sampler pack) to his fellow gamers.
• Conversational Troping: Indulged at multiple points, as Lewis, Nelson, and Shawn recognize the tropes used in Frank's games (particularly ones he repeatedly uses) and discuss how to deal with them. Exaggerated when they play a game set in an 80's detective show, they start noting just how many tropes come up, and Frank admits to cross-indexing a random plot device table to TV Tropes.
• Curse: Lewis's cursed die that rolled only 1 soon messed up every number in the world. They broke it by making a D&D edition where rolling 1 is changed from a Critical Failure into a Critical Hit.
• Crack is Cheaper: Many strips feature jokes about just how much money the guys spend on trading cards, D&D sourcebooks, collectable figurines, or other forms of nerd merch.
• Crazy-Prepared: Nelson plots betrayals three weeks in advance.
• Deadpan Snarker: Nelson.
• Despair Event Horizon: Nelson and Lewis' reaction on having heard that Karen Gillan was spotted wandering naked in her hotel in NYC, and they weren't there to see it.
  Lewis: It's like... "Hey, they put the wrong address on one of your biggest fantasies and someone else got it instead. Sorry about that."
  • Similarly, Nelson's reaction to the infamous "Red Wedding" episode of Game of Thrones
• Did Not Think This Through: Lampshaded by Shawn during a corpse-retrieval run.
• Discredited Meme: Jokes about Call of Cthulhu's lethality rate need to be allowed to die already. invoked
• Doomy Dooms of Doom: Meet the "verbal meme trigger".
• Dream Sequence: Technically flu- and fever-induced hallucinations, but close enough.
• Duels Decide Everything: Parodied here.
• Embarrassing Tattoo: Lewis, apparently.
  Frank:Then I guess someone will be saving up to have a map to Milwaukee's "Safe House" bar lasered off his tattooed butt, huh?
  Lewis: We agreed that topic was off limits!
  Nelson: For aesthetic reasons alone...
• The End of the World as We Know It: Many, many of their campaigns end with the game world uninhabitable in some fashion.
• Enforced Method Acting: Nelson knows when to invoke a trope, oh yes.
• Eskimos Aren't Real: Nelson insists that anyone who functions as a corporate mascot doesn't exist. He includes Steve Jackson among them.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • One of the gang's game-breaking schemes manages to disgust even the undead monstrosity they (accidentally) created.
    "I may be a monster...well, several monsters, but there's only so much even I can take. You people are animals, and not ones I would care to dine on. Good day!"
  • Lewis gets called by a hacker blackmailing him with data stolen during the 2016 Yahoo data breach. When the hacker actually looks at the data to try and force Lewis's hand, he's horrified.
    Hacker: You signed up for that forum? And this one with the... wasn't this stuff banned by international treaty? ...You disgust me! [hangs up]
• Everyone Hates Mimes: These guys do, anyway.◊
• Everyone Is Single: And every time Lewis manages to avert this, it doesn't last very long... unless he actively lies about himself to the woman in question. Then again, given this exchange between him and Nelson, it's surprising he gets that far to begin with.
• Executive Meddling: In-Universe. The comic takes a shot at Marvel Comics' editorial staff in this comic.
• Expose the Villain, Get His Job: Lewis does this...sort of. He gets to be assistant manager at Kool Kopies after turning the incumbent in for piracy. Specifically, for printing off copies of pirated D20 material for him.
• Expo Speak Gag: Used to hide the fact that it's a Christmas-themed game.
• The Faceless: Shawn is never seen in person.
  • Interestingly, the webcam is sometimes treated as if it were his actual body, and he fulfills most aspects of the Snarky Nonhuman Sidekick. This could have interesting implications, or it could just be authorial silliness.
  • It gets to the point where even in situations where he should be seen, he still appears as the webcam, such as at conventions or when everyone creates online avatars that resemble themselves.
• Fandom Heresy: In-Universe: Frank never read The Lord of the Rings...
  • Frank later turns the tables on Nelson and Lewis by reading A Song of Ice and Fire before watching Game of Thrones, which they hadn't done. And makes up stuff when Lewis asks for spoilers.
• Fan Wank: In-Universe, fans do topographical analysis on a The Elder Scrolls game to determine where in Tamriel the game would be set. And uploading hours-long videos on their methodology.
• Genre Shift: Frank occasionally pulls these out either to try to salvage the world-shattering antics his players often get up to, or planned ahead of time to trick them into playing a different campaign than they thought they were getting into. Neither variety tends to go over well.
• The Ghost: Frank's sister is mentioned occasionally. She is probably quite cute to judge from Lewis and Nelson's reaction to the news that she is going bikini shopping.
• Gone Horribly Right: Frank, in an effort to get his players more involved in the "RP" side of RPGs, developed a system where they'd roll to "hit" in conversations. They didn't even make it out of the Inn before he regretted this.
• Groin Attack: Lewis' Deadwood character "lost some... ah, functionality" as the result of a zombie attack.
• Haunted Technology: The radio in "Stephen King: The RPG".
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: When Lewis tries to declare Speaks Fluent Animal the worst superpower, Nelson interjects with how it could be awesome if comics writers took it up to eleven (including citing the page image).
• Heel Realization: Lewis has his paladin become an oathbreaker, converting his alignment to Evil. He spends some time working out how to behave in a way that is evil but not suicidal and realizes the method he needs is how he always plays, just without excuses for alignment violations.
• Horrible Camping Trip: Frank's family make him go these and his game inevitably suffers for it.
  Frank: Okay, having gotten hopelessly lost, you're forced to spend the night in the forest. When your characters awaken, they discover that they'd been ravaged by dire mosquitoes to the tune of 3D6 worth of blood loss. As the vultures circle and the sun climbs, you begin to suffer heat exhaustion... Due to multiple insect bites and the fact that you had to sleep on the rocky ground, all your feat and skill rolls will be at minus five for the next day and a half.
  Lewis: I vote that our D&D game gets a week off after your parents make you go camping.
  Nelson: Seconded.
• I Call It "Vera": Lewis calls one of his character's broadswords Betsy and a lightsaber Lucille.
• Imperfect Ritual: Lewis tries summoning a demon, using beef broth mixed with red food coloring instead of blood and spraypainted candles because he didn't have any black ones.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Lewis proposes the Stormtroopers were being issued shoddy weapons. The sales rep was a smooth-talker and convinced the Emperor himself that the inaccuracy was just due to inept clones and them passing on the same ineptitude to the conscripts.
• Instant Drama, Just Add Tracheotomy: Parodied in one strip as a movie cliche that Aaron Williams hates.
• Intimate Marks: One strip suggests that Lewis has a map to Milwaukee's "Safe House" bar tattooed on his butt.
• It's All About Me: Nobody in the strip is exactly overburdened with compassion. At one point, when everyone but Shawn and Emma disappears from a table because of supernatural stuff going down, Shawn asks Emma to move him closer to the sourcebook Nelson was reading because his copy hasn't arrived in the mail yet.
• Jury Duty: Lewis was called up for one. The trial turned out to involve a lawsuit by a game publishing company against his favorite gaming store.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler:
  • Frank wanted to avoid spoilers for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, causing Lewis to declare him a heretic for not reading the books.
  • Frank gets his revenge through Game of Thrones, thanks to having read A Song of Ice and Fire beforehand.
• Lawful Evil: Lewis, according to Frank and Nelson. After he lost his job, Lewis downloaded the newest D&D supplements from a pirate site, spent his unemployment check getting copies printed up for everyone, then turned in the assistant manager who ran the copies and was hired to replace that person. invoked
• Limited Wardrobe: Unless they make a point of dressing up, the characters are always depicted wearing the same clothes.
• Little Miss Badass: One of their PSA strips would like to remind you that, between The Ring, Let the Right One In and Kick-Ass, little girls are the deadliest thing you'll ever face.
• Logic Bomb/Mind Screw: In-Universe, the group gets stuck on pondering whether Dragonborn females would have breasts or not.
  Shawn: So... would they be scaly? Wait, why am I asking that?
• Loophole Abuse: Playing a game so poorly designed that it seems impossible to actually complete it, Frank eventually draws a card declaring their souls have all been trapped by a demon to eternally play the game. Nelson reviews the rules and finds players are allowed to take breaks, but there's no limit on how long the breaks can be, so they bury the entire game.
• MacGuffin Super-Person: The boy Falgen is being pursued by demons, angels, fallen gods, and all manner of lesser beings as they believe claiming his power when it manifests will secure their dominance.
• Mandatory Twist Ending: Discussed and mocked in this strip.
  Nelson: I sense an M. Night Shyamalan plot twist rearing its ugly head.
• Medieval Stasis: This strip invokes the trope by name, as the players are pleased to note that their characters' actions have preserved a status quo which suits them just fine.
• Metagame: What the players are playing all the time, much to Frank's frustration.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Nelson has a "Whoopsatrocity" list of the many times the guys have accidentally unleashed devastation on the world.
• Minion with an F in Evil: Emma. she's a demon from Hell, but she's too much of a lazy slacker to really care about actually doing evil things. She's stuck around with the gang because it means she can sit around streaming TV shows all day while eating chips and Twinkies. That's not to say that she doesn't understand how to be effective at being evil, because she does, but doing so takes work so she doesn't.
• The Mole: One of Nelson's characters, carefully planned in advance with a sealed (and notarized!) envelope containing the details of his true allegiance (only opened after killing Lewis's character by ambush).
  Frank: Wow. It's even notarized!
  Lewis: Words fail to describe the myriad ways you suck.
• Munchkin:
  • Nelson. The Crowning Moment of Munchkinry was when he managed to finagle his way into ruling a fair chunk of the world and even appointed his character a god, complete with Prestige Class and Alignment Violation Coupons.
  • Shawn may be one as well. When the other players question how they can be certain his die rolls will be fair (they rely on him reporting the results, since he plays by webcam) he offers them each a +5 vorpal sword that he randomly rolled as a show of faith.
  • Really, all three players are Munchkins. Nelson is just the best one at it.
• My Rule Fu Is Stronger than Yours: When Shawn rejoins the table, Lewis points out that the by-laws state everyone has to chip in on pizza, regardless of how little they eat. Shawn quickly counters by stating his preferred toppings are pineapple, anchovies, and onions, and encourages them to chow down.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Lewis once played a character called Dark Lord Evisceratrix O'Kittensquisher.
• Never Heard That One Before: In the May 19, 2005 strip, where the boys are at E3:
  Lewis: Can I have a T-shirt?
  Booth Babe: Let me guess: mine?
  Lewis: You've done this before!
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: d20 Modern + All Flesh Must Be Eaten + Harpoon = Somali Pirates of the Caribbean.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Waffles back and forth on this. Real celebrities will get mentioned regularly, but sometimes Aaron Williams does this for affectionate parodies, such as with "acclaimed fantasy artist Andy DeLaTurzzi" (to make fun of a set of character sheets designed by Tony DiTerlizzi that featured Pin Up style character art).
• No Name Given: Downplayed in that the main characters are almost exclusively known by their first names.
  • In fact, a mini-arc from October 2003 reveals they went several years without sharing their names and had been calling each other by their in-game characters' names instead. This arc also shows Lewis's name was originally written as Louis.
  • A September 2005 strip gives Frank's last name as Stortz.
• Noodle Incident: Not only has there been plenty, but the players keep an entire BOOK of them, including the incident regarding the sunproof vampire.
• Notary Nonsense: One of Nelson's characters is revealed to be The Mole. He has the DM read a sealed and notarized letter he'd submitted prior, containing the details of his character's true allegiance.
• Not Helping Your Case: While in the past, the party is confronted by chronomonks who declare the party must not return to the present as they'll cause another catastrophe there. Nelson asks why they're bothering since the party will create a catastrophe no matter what time period they're in. After a moment of realization, the chronomonks attack.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: At least twice, something has been mentioned to happen in Real Life, and a text box on the panel assures us that it's actually happening. The author also claims that some of the strips, especially the earlier ones, are based off actual roleplaying sessions with his gaming group.
• Obviously Evil: Lewis crosses this with Stupid Evil when the group decides to play an evil-aligned party
  Nelson: Yeah, I love how we have to spend every 10 minutes explaining away your cleverly innocent name of "Dark Lord Evisceratrix O'Kittensquisher" to the town guard ....
• Off the Rails:
  • Sort of the rule of any game we see them playing, rather than the exception.
  Frank: Subjecting plots to them is like giving children to a daycare run by the Manson Family!
  • Defied here, where Shawn says that they weren't planning to wreck the game, they just knew that at some point a Big Bad Eldritch Abomination would be released and planned to make a profit off that.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: Seen here.
• Only Sane Man: The characters usually take turns in this role... Except for Lewis. Frank fills it most often; Nelson is a close second.
• Perverse Sexual Lust: The Harry Potter game started with the players wanting to "open Hermione's Chamber of Secrets.
• Porn Stash: Frank apparently still has a physical one, while Lewis (and most of the rest of the world) has switched to digital.
• Product Placement: Discussed when talking about how X-Men: First Class would subscribe to the 1960's style of comics. Later, Emma claims that soul-sucking otherworldly entities actually do drop everything when you throw Hostess Fruit Pies at them. Justified as due to older rituals where something was given in offering in exchange for the entities' departure.
• Proud to Be a Geek: All of the characters are pretty strongly out and proud in their geekdom.
• Pungeon Master: Frank's indulgence in the literal form of this trope (including a necromancer named "Emba Lamer" and MIT - Magician's Institute of Thanatology) leads his players to declare a Pun War.
  Nelson: Dude, you're going to get the freakin' Puns of the Navarone!
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: Lewis puts them on when confronted with the remainder of an Orc clan.
• Quiet Cry for Help: An instance of the trope appears in the Tabletop RPG within the comic; the characters encounter what seems to be an alien machine controlled by an organic brain, and their Universal Translator reports a string of bureaucratic demands plus a Help Me.
• Rage Quit: After the party use their allied soldiers as Bulletproof Human Shields to save them from a nuke, and then Nelson shoves one teleport gate into another, Frank decides that he's got math to do.
• Random Number God: The group suffer from dice perversity quite frequently — especially Lewis.
• Red Shirt: Discussed here, when they proposed strapping photon torpedoes to their backs, justifying it as a deterrant.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: Discussed here.
• Refuge in Audacity: Lewis went to a copy shop to illegally copy D&D books. Then he turned the guy in for illegally copying D&D books and got his job. Frank and Nelson were both awed.
• Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: Frank's reaction when Lewis uses a stroke of extreme good luck on mending his character's "little friend" rather than ensuring the success of The Plan.
• Rule of Cool: "So it's got nothing to do with seeing a giant space-faring battleship firing all of its guns at once?" "Granted, that's just awesome no matter how your brain works."
• Rules Lawyer: Nelson.
• Ruthless Modern Pirates: "Somali Pirates of the Caribbean"
• Sadistic Choice: Presented to Jamie Hyneman as the setup for Saw XXXIV - either tell kids there's no Santa Claus, or he loses his moustache.
• Said Bookism: Frank goes on a writing forum where half of the users think using "said" is fine, and the other half decry it.
• The Scrappy: Discussed with the trope namer himself. invoked
• Screwed by the Network: Referenced In-Universe as the "J. Michael Straczynski Table".
• Seen It All: This is mixed with Serial Escalation in this strip where Nelson points out how hard it would be to make a new Star Trek series interesting if it took place after the previous ones.
• Self-Deprecation: Right here. And here.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: One of Frank's campaigns has the standard fantasy world setup but actually exists centuries after a peaceful society where all the races lived in unity was wiped out by a cataclysm. A time traveler attempting to avert the cataclysm accidentally strands the party in the past, where they proceed to cause the cataclysm by stoking racial tensions until the society tears itself apart. Notably, Frank didn't plan this outcome.
• Shipping: In-Universe, Frank doesn't like a Love Triangle that develops in a procedurally-generated world, and thinks that the guy having an affair with one lady would be much better off with another one.
• Social Semi-Circle
• Shout-Out:
  • Multiple to Phil and Kaja Foglio, Real Life friends of Aaron Williams.
  • "If that's not ''Girl Genius'', the MMO, I don't know what is."
  • In a moon base building game Shawn announces that he's "pulling a Heinlein".
    Nelson: "You're going to let Paul Verhoeven make a really bad movie out of a novel you wrote?"
  • Frank made a list of plausible reasons for players to have failed various saving throws, including one for Constitution because they "should've skipped the salmon mousse".
• Soup Is Medicine: Invoked by Shawn during a story arc that had Frank, Nelson, and Lewis all sick with the flu. Shawn called a local-to-them Asian restaurant and ordered three large bowls of "Ho Shee Chit" hot and sour soup and "Emperor's Assassin" ginger ale to be delivered. It works.
• Speak of the Devil: Entropo the Harlequin, one of Frank's original characters, will appear when his name is spoken or if somebody thinks about him too hard.
• Spotting the Thread: When all four characters are apparently simultaneously infected with a sapient cold, Lewis twigs that something's wrong when he points out Shawn, being several states away could not possibly have caught the same cold. Shawn admits a "sapient cold" certainly sounds like something created by a bunch of cold drug-addled people being manipulated by somebody healthy... but the cold really was sapient; he mailed them a batch of contaminated brownies to spread it.
• Squick:
  • Discussed here, with a side-helping of Bile Fascination.
  • One of Frank's specialties, for the rare times he gets one over on his players. Such as the idea of mind flayers crossbreeding with lizardfolk (which in truth is pretty gross but not in the way the players think), or during a "rise of the animals" apocalypse game when he demonstrates what's happening with a video of rats climbing up out of toilets.
• Statistically Speaking: Lewis' Charisma stat is usually high. Frank does not allow him to get through social situations through the power of his dice, however.
• Take That!:
  • Towards modern-day politics.
    Shawn: So I could "win" a conversation without knowing what I'm talking about?
    Frank: I got the idea from cable news and most of our elected officials.
  • Nelson occasionally delivers them to Western anime fandom, though the other characters are less hostile.
  • Defeating the Devil's Radio in the "Stephen King: The RPG" arc required Lewis and Nelson to sing a forbidden incantation, which turned out to be Achy Breaky Heart.
  • When Lewis mentions Star Citizen coming out next year (in a 2018 strip), the narration helpfully cuts in with "Just kidding, it'll never be finished." invoked
• Theme Naming: While playing an Indiana Jones RPG, their archaeologists' names are Arizona Smith, Wisconsin Johnson, and Wyoming Brown.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: Nelson's state after the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones.
• Throw the Book at Them: In the Nametags story arc, the DM Frank renders Lewis - who put "Zeus" on his tag - unconscious with a D&D rulebook.
• Timey-Wimey Ball:
  • Referenced when Frank tries to come up with a new Character Class - The Physicsomancer, a character that would apply real-world consequences to a fantasy setting.
  • Playing a space race game, Lewis is repeatedly hit with time travel-related events which cause his ship to duplicate. By the time the makers introduce a limit to how many times a player can be duplicated, Lewis has covered two tables and half the floor with ship markers.
• Too Clever by Half: During the Wizzerween arc, the party received a locked mystery box early in the quest. During the final confrontation with the wizard, Nelson unlocks the box and throws it at their enemy. Frank then reveals the wizard disappeared because the box contained a teleport scroll that would have taken them home, along with various goodies to celebrate Wizzerween. Instead, they're now trapped in the wizard's tower of insanity surrounded by eldritch abominations.
• Too Dumb to Live: Lewis tends to fill this role with his characters. Particularly a Paladin with no survival skills wanting to approach the keep through the swamp while having no wilderness skills.
  Nelson: I was under a minus four penalty [to hit] because I was laughing my kiester off.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth:
  • In the Halloween 2014 arc, they wind up in a house with a demon that tries to eat the souls of everyone present (using a "Now Serving Number X" ticker). Lewis ends up with a 1 and is therefore the first victim but the demon finds out that his preexisting contract with Emma means that he's got compound interest on his soul, meaning that he's "got a soul-debt so big that trying to eat it is like trying to suck a milkshake out of the guts of an industrial vacuum cleaner set to 'Black Hole.'"
  • In a strip after the Yahoo hack of 2016, a hacker calls Lewis after getting his old Yahoo profile information in an attempt to blackmail him. Lewis merely asks for the urls to be forwarded to him, prompting the hacker to actually look at them and refuse to have anything further to do with him.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Discussed here, with the couple described as "Arwen marrying Samwise in 'The Lord of the Rings'."
• The Unreveal: During the COVID-19 Pandemic, they game via Zoom. It turns out that Shawn's webcam (as in the one with him in Alaska, not the one he usually talks through) was left in a leaking shed for ten years, and as a result, he's pixellated. We do learn he has dark hair and a beard.
• Urban Legends: One storyline features Frank being stalked by the Slenderman. Turns out he's mistaken all the NPC s slaughtered by the group in their sessions for real people. They get Frank out of it by making up a character based on Frank and killing him off in Frank's place. To be on the safe side each player also plays a character based on each other...except Lewis.
  Lewis: So that's why you had me play a character based on Shawn. He's "dead" too now, so he's safe. .
  Nelson: Right and he played a version of me.
  Lewis: I see. Then screw the both of you.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Over the years, the players have shown no issue with murdering their in-game allies and friends, to Frank's continual frustration. He finally manages to make the guys actually care about one of his characters with Falgen, a somewhat sullen young boy who thinks they are the coolest people ever.
• Vikings In America: Frank finds a Viking axe buried in his backyard, somewhere in the continental United States. He gets possessed.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Though Frank was talking about their characters in a game (specifically Sim D20 City), he was pretty spot-on describing the group as "a case study for abusive symbiosis." Shawn prefers the term "frenemies with benefits." It got to the point that Frank had spent an entire Con complaining about the trio ruining storylines, and was invited to do so again next year complete with Filk band and a web adaptation starring Wil Wheaton.
• The Voice: Shawn
• What Did I Do Last Night?:
  • The main characters went to a New Years Eve party at the "Goblin Hole" and look through their pockets to figure out what they did while under the influence of "Klingon War Nog". Frank finds a character sheet for the elf ranger from the D&D movie, Lewis finds a receipt for the Everquest sourcebooks, and Nelson (who hates anime) found Yu-Gi-Oh! cards.
  • When Frank's nephew entered a pine-box derby, Frank and Nelson drilled a hole "whose geometry looks straight out of the Necronomicon with a drill bit that may have gone through someone's skull" in the car. They blanked out at the pine-box derby; when they came to, they'd been dumped in a basement to scream themselves unconscious after tearing a hole in reality.
  • After a cold sets in hard and fast, the chracters wake up feeling fine only to discover they lost a week of time. While Frank is upset they apparently filled in his vintage character sheets for a game they played by taping together every game board in his house, Nelson is horrified to find he apparently bought multiple visual novels and anime dating games and logged 72 hours in them. Eventually they find a letter claiming their cold developed sapience and played the game before their immune systems kicked in, only to deduce that in their addled state they were just manipulated by Shawn... except the cold was sapient and had made a deal with Shawn.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: A little girl is the worst nightmare of every adventurer. It's never just a little girl.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: One storyline is set in one, with four major power players all dangling plot hooks for the players to take. Like any good sandbox players, the group take all of them.
• Xanatos Gambit: Frank started a game with about four major power players in the background, with dangling plot hooks for each so the group could go for any of them without derailing his planned game. They decide to take all the plot hooks, so that no matter what they come out ahead because they've been playing everyone off against everyone else to their own benefit. It turns out to be Frank's own Batman Gambit because he fully planned for them to bite all the plot hooks in hopes of making off with the bait, tricking them into roleplaying and thinking through a campaign they normally would have just fought through.
• Your Vampires Suck: One of the many movie rants is about Twilight and its "neutering" of the vampire genre. Suffice to say, Frank and co. are not amused.

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