A thread for praising amazing GMs. I'll start with one of the many I've been fortunate to know, going way way back:
Gary Shelton: The GM of a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay campaign I played when I was but a young kidlet in high school ... He bore an uncanny resemblance (including voice and sense of humor) to Martin Mull, and that was every bit as surreal in a WFRP context as you might imagine. But he was also the maestro of large groups. His game ran in the back of a general hobby store (specialized in trains, RC cars and art supplies, with a tiny gaming section) and was so popular (and he was so softhearted) that it usually had from 11-14 players on a given night. I've seen games like this collapse into a black hole, but not Gary's ... he ran two long-term consecutive campaigns spanning about four years of real-time and decades of game time, and every player felt involved, the roleplaying was real and constant, and every other GM in town wanted to be able to bring NPCs to life -- and keep the player-spotlight moving - the way Gary could.
Dave Dalley: One of my first gaming recruits. He was a lynchpin member of my first gaming group in school, which stayed together a decade. Very early in his career Dave hit the sweet spot between handing the players the world on a silver platter and running through PCs like some sort of sadistic meatgrinder. He was one of those DMs that could make saving a hamlet of peasants from 3 orcs seem like the epic adventure of a lifetime. He was excellent at fleshing out monster encounters, finding uses for them other than simply as targets for bloodthirsty PCs. Over a decade later his Krynn campaign still strikes me as one of the best games I've ever played.
Sweet! There was this one guy who I gamed with for 12 years and I just HATED him. Every week he would... oh, uh a thread about the good stuff? Ok.
Chris Organ
Got me back into gaming after a five year hiatius when I thought I'd never return. His games always struck me as a wild, spinning balance of rabid creativity and tactical action, which always, somehow, would come back to rock solid emotional character play. And he had achieved, over years of GMing, the perfect blend of "I dare you to," and "Do you really want to do that?" that always egged us into situations where we were seriously out of our depth, yet somehow might just be able to survive. Great poker face. Fabulous improviser. And he would make us Korean food. :cool: