Monte Cook

Monte Cook is one of the big daddies of modern tabletop RPG game design, alongside Robin D. Laws and Keith Baker, because having a name like an action movie actor/character is apparently a prerequisite of the "Game Designer" class. He is one of the founding creators of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, had a strong hand in designing D&D Next, and has done lots of work writing his own games and version of other games, including a personal take on the World of Darkness and Numenera, a game set on Earth a billion years into the future.

As a game designer, Monte Cook is known for three major things: being a genuinely brilliant and insightful game designer who crafts fun and imaginative systems and games, being a raging perfectionist who is fun to work with but regularly quits and re-joins the industry over disputes with the management, and for having an insane, out of control spellcaster fetish beyond all expectation or reason. In fact, he once infamously said that the biggest tweak 3rd Ed. needed was a hard nerf to all martial classes, particularly the fighter, and an across the board buff to all spellcasters. Yes, we are talking about the same 3rd Edition in which spellcasters could pull shit like this.

Still, it could be worse. At least the personality that seeps into his work is warm and fun rather than smug and unpleasant.