Oo, a tricky one, I don't want to offend my players by missing anyone out, but nominating 'everyone I've ever played with' is trite and inaccurate. Besides, I'm related to half my current group, so I don't want to be accused of favouritism.
But over the years I've had the pleasure to enjoy this hobby with very many people, so I'm going back to my early days, to the days of the KMMGS, Huddersfield New College Gaming Club and games played at each others' houses.
Dennis was in the year above at college, and as keen a fantasy fan as I. He tended to be a player rather than a GM, though I remember him running S1 Tomb of Horrors to deadly effect.
He tended to play wizards, and got the best out of his spells, not just Fireball and Lightning Bolt either. He came up with imaginative uses for spells, and often saved the party with a Reduce or Polymorph.
I think he was the first player I knew who actively pushed the idea of the party as a team. New players back then often saw the game as their own personal hero trip, which went well for a while, but tended to go badly when things got tough. He encouraged us to work as a team and make choices that benefited the group as a whole.
He was there in the Halls of Anubis and going through the lich mega dungeon.
I remember both adventuring with and GMing for Fordeldrax, his favourite wizard character. Playing alongside him I learnt a lot about exploring different solutions. Back then many adventures had a regrettable tendancy to present problems with only one way out (often combat). He looked for different ways, and certainly as a DM I responded by being more open to this, and now, in the words of Justin Alexander, I 'prep situations, not solutions'.
Dennis also introduced me a lot of music I'd never heard before. He led a trip to Leeds to see a group and we missed the last train. Lacking the funds for a taxi, we all spent the night in the waiting room improvising a game using coins instead of dice.
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