RPGaDay 2024 #23 Peerless Player

 I bet you thought I was going to say Kris here, weren't you?

Well, I could. But I want to keep Kris in the hopper to help me answer a couple of the other prompts.

So for today, the prize is going to go to Erik, my unreformed Old School DM. While I will talk up all the things about megadungeons and the OSR that I think helped my campaign last for as long as it did, I would be remiss if I didn't mention his contributions as well. Because a lot of it was his enthusiasm and his player-wrangling efforts that kept the group together and showing up for as long as it did.

I was doing okay with Boots and Mike and a couple of other players getting the megadungeon started. But then I was introduced to Erik, who was running a campaign that one of my other players was in, too. While I assumed that most people who run D&D are running the latest version (I think this was right around the transition from 4th to 5th, though 3.5 and Pathfinder were still relatively popular), I was surprised to find that his campaign was Old School as well, straight out of the AD&D books. So when he stuck his nose in to check out my campaign, he was quite pleased to discover that I was running something that he understood.

He asked to join my campaign and he was very quickly my most motivated and enthusiastic player, bringing his wife and some of the other players from his home campaign into my game, wrangling them to show up just like he dragged them to his own campaign. Not that anyone was dragged or in any way unwilling, but whoever said that being a GM is like herding cats was right two ways.

The typical assumption is that "herding cats" means keeping the players on task during the session. But it can also mean the task of wrangling players to show up to the session in the first place. And Erik was very good at both of those things, for his group and for mine.