The Bunny

There's a variety of board games where, at any given time, there's one special player. This is common in games with multiple rounds where the order of who goes first each round changes, but there are other instances, such as the Encounter Player in Tom Wham classic Mertwig's Maze. In that game what monster shows up is the choice of the Encounter Player. After one play from your hand of monsters (or if your adventurer token encounters a critter) you pass the Encounter Player duties to the next player on the left. To keep track of who is supposed to play a monster card next, there's a special card (labeled "Encounter Player") that sits on the table in front of current Encounter Player. But lots of other games need to mark one player as the "activating player" or whatever. Often this is done with some plastic tchotchke or token.

I used to play boardgames once a week with my brother-in-law Jim and a couple of dudes named Bruce and Al. Bruce and Al are a couple of real old school mofos. As I recall, they were founding members of the University of Illinois wargames club and the original organizers of the local con. And Al bought a copy of OD&D at Gen Con the year it came out and turned the campus nerdos onto RPGs. In a side room in Bruce's basement is monster wargame that recreates the European theatre of WW2 at the battalion level. The two of them started playing this beast more than 20 years ago as a playtest. I'm pretty sure the publisher went out of business many years ago with the game unpublished, but last I knew they still play a turn or two some weekends.

So even as a grown-ass man with a job and a wife and a kid, I was still the snot-nosed newbie among these guys. For months one of the things that mystified me about these guys was the fact that, whatever game we were playing, these guys always referred to the equivalent of the Encounter Player as "the bunny." This practice mystified me, but I never asked because I was usually too busy trying to get the gist of whatever weird boardgame we were playing that night. Often, everybody else at the table had played it a bunch and it was new only to me, so I was always playing catch-up. Still, I would dutifully pass "the bunny" to the next player when instructed to do so. Finally, one night we played some train game (Santa Fe something?) and it all came into focus. The special token in whatever-game-it-was happened to be a little wooden steam engine token that, when stood up with the front of the train pointing to the sky, looked a helluva lot like a little black rabbit.

The reason I am bringing this up this dumb anecdote is because some days I wonder if some D&D groups could use a bunny at their table. What often happens in a dungeoneering expedition is that one player, the most energetic, motivated, and/or charismatic, tends to make the majority of the decisions, like whether to turn right or left at a T intersection. They become the de facto Caller. I sometimes call this person the Quarterback because if you metaphorically give them the ball they will try to do something with it. Not every player does.

But I think you could draw out a few more active players if there was something like a Bunny. If the Caller role passed after every combat or something like that. Everybody takes a turn leading the party. Maybe use a little skull as the marker.