Monte Cook

Monte Cook is one of the big daddies of modern tabletop RPG game design, alongside such figures as 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 half the classes in the game were better fighters than the fighter, and spellcasters could pull shit like this.

One thing people like to hold his feet to the fire over is the "Ivory Tower" school of game design: deliberately sowing weak "newb traps" into your game as character advancement options (explicitly compared to "Timmy cards"), to punish new players for the crime of inexperience and offer veterans an inflated sense of self-worth that comes from attaining a wholly artificial sense of "mastery." To his credit, he has since apologized for the whole thing and admitted it was a terrible idea from start to finish, but here we are, still scrubbing through the aftermath years after the fact.

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