Best GM's:
1. SA: The two best campaigns he ran were Pendragon and Ars Magica.
They were great because he knew the genre cold. Extensive collection of
King Arthur material he read and 12th Century Europe must have been his
other hobby at the time. Amazing adventures and possibly the only times
when I've actually roleplayed a character that is not essentially "me".
I actually looked forward to playing his games. He also ran other games
that tanked horribly badly, but those two campaigns were priceless.
2. ER: Our group's utility GM. It seems like he can run anything with
little preparation on his part. And we've abused that ability
constantly. At one point he ran three weekly campaigns (two on
Saturday, one on Sunday) for a period of like a year. He has the
approach of "here's the setup, what do you do?" and when we run with it
in any direction he can coolly GM it and we can't even tell when we've
gone offtrack.
Best Players: I'll stick with the best players I've GM'ed since when
I'm a player I don't pay as much attention to how other people are
playing.
1. DW: My favorite player. My campaigns tend to be "stick to the genre"
affairs and he does a marvelous job of it. He's the one player that I
can run random subplots at and he'll run with them, and he'll run with
them the way I would like them to go. The kind of player that enhances
my gaming experience as a GM.
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2. DK:
Actually probably an average to below average roleplayer for our group,
but he tries so hard. He's sort of my barometer player: if he's having
fun then I'm probably running a good session. Sometimes he's out of
genre and sometimes he's a munchkin, but he's also a player who I can
say "you're doing it wrong, this is how I want the universe to work"
and he'll correct his mistakes. Maybe he'll fall back to his bad habits
later but he does try and he's enthusiastic and I like that.
3. SA: He's a good GM and he's a good roleplayer. Traditional
roleplayer: creates a character, lots of subtext, plays him to the
hilt. Now, even though sometimes his characters are not what I would
consider properly in-genre, he plays them well enough that I can
forgive that. And when his characters are in-genre, they're the best
characters in the campaign.
The reason I put him third though is that he's the most intimidating
player for me to GM. Intimidating in that I keep thinking that I'm not
doing a good enough job. It's like he raises the roleplaying bar higher
than I'm comfortable running at. I've GM'ed players with whom it's a
struggle and we're practically fighting over things. But to me it's
easier to have an adversarial relationship with a player than have a
relationship where I get the feeling I'm disappointing the player by
not being a worthy GM. Not that it's his fault or that he even feels
that way, it's just the way I feel.
-1. ER: As a side note, he's a good GM but an awful player. Not awful
as in he's a bad roleplayer, awful as in he intentionally creates
characters that derail adventures in (sometimes really) amusing ways.
Everybody else in the group thinks it's just a way for him to get back
at us for our conduct in his games. He's actually played one or two
decent characters, but most of the time when he's a player it's payback
time.
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