What's your DM Shtick?

[Rafael Ceurdepyr]

Every PC in my games generally ends up related or somehow emotionally connected to the various NPCs that come along. Either the [evil female] villain seduces one of the PCs or a PCs long-lost sister pops up or someone's who saw a PCs father slain in his final fateful battle comes on the scene... I can't help it. I'm really trying, as I've been taken to task for it by other players who shall remain nameless (yeah, S, I mean YOU).

I have a special fondness for undead, too. As monsters and NPCs I mean! Not in real life. That would be wrong. My dream is to someday have a party of a high enough level that they can fight a lich. Sigh, liches rule.

Did I also mention I'm big on plot? The more complicated the better. I'm in rehab for that too.

 

[BullMarkOne]

Props, lost of props. I use props for all sorts of things, from puzzles, to obscure clues, to magic items. I can't really seem to run an adventure, much less a campaign without them.

 

[Arbiter of Wyrms]

Every adventure I write is basically 2 adventures merged into 1...

That's not a shtick! That's a set of instructions. And they're brilliant. Well done!

As for me, I guess I have three shticks:

1) Everything "seems to be," "looks like," reminds you of," or "might be." I almost never say "You see . . ."

2) Nobody ever seems to achieve their goals. Not that I thwart them, really, it's just that everybody's goals end up changing before they reach high enough level to achieve their original ends.

3) I always have too many shady benefactor NPC and never enough outright villains. Nobody ever kills the real villain, because they always think they might end up needing him later.

 

[Agamon]

My schtick in my area? I'm good. And trust me when I say, that says far less about me than the rest of the players around here...

 

[diaglo]

we were referees first.


OD&D(1974) is the only true game. All the other editions are just poor imitations of the real thing.

 

[The_Gneech]

My players always seem to be convinced they're about to die ... no matter what they've encountered.

ME: "Okay, your tenth level barbarian sees a kobold and a dire rat."

PLAYER: "A kobold! Yikes! And a DIRE RAT??? Holy crap!"

ME: "..."

The other thing is, there is always a displacer beast, hook horror, or orc in the adventure somewhere, it seems.

-The Gneech

 

[EricNoah]

My schtick is spellcasting bad guys. The big bad guy is always some kind of spellcaster.

 

[ElvishBard]

I suppose my schitck when DMing is that for every adventure, I figure out how it happened exactly, and make sure that I understand it and that there are no holes in how or why. Then the players do the adventure without finding or caring about any of the history of why it happened, which means I wasted quite a few hours of my life.

 

[Talmun]

Things that often show up in D&D games run by me:
1: The Scarlet Brotherhood
2: The Far Realm or some other Lovecraft-ian nastiness
3: Unique magic items (for example...The Acrobat's Blindfold - Blindsight 10' and +5 to Tumble and Balance but all the drawbacks of being blind)
4: Plots that put two or more PC's in conflict with each other; usually it's a moral or philosophical problem, but not always.
5: Undead....lots of undead...I mean scads of undead.

Other DM'ing stuff I usually do:
I ask my players for a written backstory for their character, and try to create some plot elements or even a major over-arching plot from hooks and other tidbits they give me. Very often I don't have a plot of my own running, the characters simply play through the various plots and adventures related to their backstories.

I also give out rewards ala action points, although they take the form of pente stones and a player can get one for good RP or almost anything else that makes the game more fun for everyone at the table. These can be turned in at the end of a session for a 10% boost on the XP earned that session or they can be used to 'bump' the roll of a die by 1 (this actually changes the number on the die - a 1 becomes a 2, a 19 becomes a 20, and so on).

 

[The_Gunslinger658]

Hi-

I tend to use personalities of people I met while in the Army. So my NPC's tend to be very animated both in language and jestures.

My players are also very paranoid of magic items, why is beyond me



Scott