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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6360987" data-attributes="member: 4937">I can sympathize with that.  And I try to do voices so that at least the players can recognize a voice as IC, I'm just not really that good at it (although, when I read Harry Potter to the kids, they can recognize each voice of every character without being told who it belongs to, so I'm not terrible either).My biggest quick is probably, "The DM makes all the rules."I don't really DM anything without changing the rules at least a little.  Expect a huge stack of house rules.I do have some tropes I rely on in stories that are fairly predictable.  One of them is that you always meet the BBEG in a social scene, often a dinner party, before he's discovered to be the villain.  Another is that there are always multiple suspects, and at least one really good red herring.   I will always have at least one murder mystery.  I will always have at least one dungeon.  If it's a large city, there is a dungeon of some sort below the city.  There is always at least one building which is not introduced to the PCs as a dungeon, but actually is one.  There will always be monsters well above the party level that enjoy talking more than they enjoy fighting or eating the PCs.  Often they have a motivation for steering how the PC's respond to the BBEG because they want a particular resolution at the end.   There is almost always a clan of lycanthropes of some sort somewhere.  There is almost always a dragon somewhere.  There will almost always be a mass combat of some sort the PC's are expected to participate in, and if high level to lead.  I like to begin campaigns with events that are well beyond the player's ability to influence directly, and the most they can hope to do is survive or provide aid to survivors, then return to a replay of those events at much higher level when the PC's can actually make a big difference.</blockquote>

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