March Fo(u)rth for GM's Day Giveaway - Pimp Your GM!

[RangerWickett]

GM's Day Giveaway by E.N. Publishing

In celebration of GM's Day (March 4th), ENPublishing is pleased to announce a product give-away. Simply nominate your GM and tell us why they deserve a prize of ENPublishing's works, and we'll submit you and your GM into a drawing for the complete electronic catalogue of ENPublishing. The grand prize winner will also win a copy of each of the Ambient and Natural 20 Press print books we still have in stock.

Be creative -- tell us why your GM rocks, and have fun with the format. Nominators will also receive a prize. But act fast, because only posts that are made by 11:59pm Eastern Time, March 3rd will be eligible to win. So get your best haiku and stories of GM moments together, and March Fo(u)rth for GM's Day!

 

[RangerWickett]

Also, don't forget, there are tons of ways to give your GM gifts!

While new books or dice are traditional, never underestimate the joy of getting fan art of your character. If your GM is also a player, or has an NPC he or she is really fond of, swing by the Art forum and offer a few bucks to one of the aspiring artists there for a portrait of that character.

April looks to be great for gamer movies. With Hitchhiker's Guide and Sin City both coming out wouldn't it be great to pick up the books or comics that inspired the movies? Maybe get a few issues of Hellblazer to show your GM what Constantine really could have been. And, sad though true, some GMs still don't have a copy of the Lord of the Rings DVD trilogy.

Finally, for all your older gamers out there, March 17th (St. Patrick's Day) may be a Thursday, but I'm sure the spirit of the holiday will let you have your D&D Drinking Party on Friday night instead. Buy your GM the necessary supplies for the evening, and maybe buy him a leprechaun mini, just in case. Make up a list of all the cliche things you love doing at your games, and make a drinking game out of it. Just remember, "Take a drink every time you're hit" should only apply to PCs. *wink*

GM's Day is only as good as how you celebrate it. It's up to us, the players, to make sure our GMs feel appreciated. And before someone asks, "When's Player's Day": Every day is player's day. Have fun, and good gaming.

 

[eris404]

Stupid Question of the Day #2(I'm full of them today): do we post our nominations in this thread?

 

[Dextra]

Stupid Question of the Day #2(I'm full of them today): do we post our nominations in this thread?

Yes, please! It'll be easy for us to track them all, and besides, some public accolades can go a long way with some GMs (can you say "ad hoc XP bonus"?).

I'll get us started:
(even though I don't qualify, what with being an ENP staffer, but heck, it's never too late to try and score some bonus XP)

Hellhound deserves recognition as a GM for his ability to paint a vivid picture (complete with sound effects), especially in his cyberpunk games. His descriptive abilities, pacing, and knowledge of rules enable the players to get into the scene and see, smell, taste and feel the action. We've had scenes of us creeping through dark, damp, abandoned subway tunnels haunted by cannibal gangers where I had goosebumps on the back of my neck, scenes full of pathos as the exertly-concealed spook died, alone and ignobly in an elevator of mustard gas exposure, and combat scenes where you could practically taste the linoleum exploding over our heads.

shiny, spinning dice
I feed you pizza and coke
give me my XP

 

[Voadam]

Nice haiku Dextra.

My DM is great
Plots atwisting left and right
Just want more gaming

I nominate my brother for a masterful turn at weaving plots out of character history, world background, and things we come up with during play. And the climactic 30+ round combat before I took over the campaign was fantastic, I've never had so much fun in a spell duel before.

 

[Voadam]

Nomination 2

Oathbound campaigns rule
I now nominate Ashy
for pbp game

As a second nomination I look to the pbp Oathbound game here run by Ashy. It's had good combat, wierd creatures and races, and been a fun chance to play in the Oathbound high fantasy milieu.

 

[mostholy2]

Haiku's are fun! I haven't composed one since grade school.

Years of D&D-
Gaming will be passed down to
New generations.

I would like to nominate my older brother for introducing me to D&D and GMing my cousin and I (even though we were 4 years younger than him) back in the day when I was just a wee lad of 9-years of age. Now that we are both Dads and his son is 9-years-old, he is introducing his son and all of his son's friends to D&D. D&D: the Next Generation. A Dad that enjoys GMing so much to pass down the tradition to a new generation to the point of calling ahead of time to schedule play-days for the kids is truly deserving of some kind of award.

My best new memory of playing with my nephew and his buddies: A first-level adventure where the big encounter ended up with all the party characters incapacitated or unconscious, except for one out-of-spells wizard in melee combat with the last 3rd-level also out-of-spells wizard enemy. That was the first time I believe that a 1st-level adventure was hinging on the wizard resorting to melee combat to save the party. Nail-biting stuff, even for me a jaded D&D player for over 25 years. Also the concept of two wizards bashing at each other with their staves is pretty funny. There can be only one!

 

[Patman21967]

Well, I am no good at haikus, but Dave is the king Gm...Our core group has been together now since 1986 and 3 of us since 82. We have played, and he has learned more systems than I care to count. We had a Glorantha based Runequest game that lasted 11 years, gaming every Sunday night. In college, I remember many a night sitting up until 4-5 am, trying to solve some puzzle. But best to illustrate my point is our groups catch phrase...."OH NO, A talking NPC". His NPC are always flavorful, and somehow manage to dig even the most secret information out of 1 certain player. Best of all though, is not only he a great GM, but a classy guy and good friend too.

Pat

 

[RangerWickett]

Dr. Tom Jones sings
And flusters when we derail
His heroic plots.

I believe my friend Tom Jones is now a doctor, as of this weekend. He has DMed two campaigns for me, though I came late to the first, and the new one is only half-done. He enjoys using accents, and though he dislikes it when players want an explanation for inexplicable things that the villains do, he always lets us find out eventually. This is the man who had us fight a ceiling-walking, spiked-chain-wielding vampire with combat reflexes. When we jumped up to try to attack him, he got an AoO on the way up, and another on the way down. Yikes.

Tom's fun to play with. He reminds us as players that we should be heroic, because that's what makes the game fun. We give him a hell of a time, but he keeps coming back, and he hasn't killed us yet. Do no harm, and all that jazz.



Stanely, we called him.
Chain-smoking sarcastic friend,
claims he hates us all.

Michael Gallogly, though, has to get my nomination for best GM I've ever had. He's just funny. He knows how to make fun of someone with just the right tone that they'll laugh at themselves in amusement, rather than become angry. His plots have included such bizarre twists as a kobold sexual holy day, a warrior who fought with dual immovable rods, an ancient secret society devoted to saving the world through origami (run by a man named Morpheus), and a tragic defeat that forced the PCs to integrate into dark Elf society for the rest of their lives, becoming the best dark Elf bakers ever.

I co-DMed with Mike for a while, and though he eventually gave up because the PCs in the group were wildly mismatched for the plot, he never let me down. His NPCs were always hilarious, and he just made the game plain fun. Like when the PC barbarian bard refused to give up his cursed +5 keen scythe even after it started making him bleed from his eyes and . . . other parts. Or how we spent an hour of game time discussing whether to open a book that was sitting on a pedestal in the middle of the arctic -- the book wasn't trapped, since the guy who put it there figured putting it in the middle of the arctic was deterrent enough. Or when we found a rare and wondrous magic item -- the amulet of protection from vegetables (which ended up being critical to saving us when we were attacked by a grain silo). *grin*

When I first met Michael, I called him Stanely for a month, because that was his PC's name, and he did such a good job convincing me he was a dim-witted guy who worshipped chickens, I didn't want to doubt him.

 

[Pinotage]

A GM such as she,
There nowhere else can be,
more twists than leaves on a tree,
leave me with no time free.

Yeah, I really suck at poetry and I'm even worse at Haiku's. Don't hold this against my DM, though!

Seriously, I've known my current DM, Vivriel, for three and a half years, two of those which she's DM'd a game for us. It's a PbP game (and a female GM! ), and since most of you know what those are like, sticking with it for so long is a real achievement. She'd devious, committed, fun, and a great spinner of good yarns and better poetry than mine! There have been more than 2500 posts on this game (I've got a copy of all of them!) and she's kept the interest of her players for a very long time.

She's always creating cliffhanging moments, challenging us around every corner, and keeping us on our toes with nasty surprises.

I could post every one of her hundreds, if not a thousand, posts, but I won't!

Pinotage