What's your DM Shtick?

[Stalker0]

When you DM, do you have a certain style or quirk, that seems to transcend the campaign you run?

For me, its interrogations. No matter what campaign I'm running, I always seem to encourage lots of interrogations...and I never actually plan them

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Well, if the PCs are searching for traps and they don't find any, I always say something like "if there are traps there, you didn't find them."

 

[Templetroll]

With my homebrew I was told that paranoia was a survival trait. Another said that nothing was as it seemed. I loved illusions and creatures that could alter their appearance. I also found that instead of saying, "he is casting a spell.", describing action, like somatic gestures exactly, would confuse players and let the encounter get a spell off more often. They thought it was cool, even if they got hurt.

 

[Wombat]

I rarely give my players, under any game system, clear black-and-white moral choices. There are always loose ends, there are always choices, and there is never simpley a Good Choice and a Bad Choice.

I like to have my players think about the implications of their decisions.

Sometimes these decisions come back to bite them...

 

[dave_o]

I always have some sort of colonialism or the effects of colonialism in my games. In my current Black Company d20 game, it's the effects on the local tribal population and their subsequent attempts to reclaim the lands taken from them. Though, in my upcoming Deadlands game, the colonialism thing is kinda hard to avoid.

 

[Nathan P. Mahney]

Orc invasion. I did it in my last campaign, I'm doing it again - I can't seem to shake the meme, despite its cliched roots! Still, once a classic...

 

[Zelligars Apprentice]

I have been told that I "always" use evil cults and humanoids (orcs, goblins, etc.) as bad guys. On the other hand, another GM in the group seems to "always" use demons and undead.

I have wondered sometimes if we should swap shticks, just to confuse people.

 

[MonkeyDragon]

I always wind up including some encounters that are so mind-numbingly easy that the players wonder what the significance is. I also usually include a few mundane items in treasures or as room features that serve no function except to wig players out. Once I let players find a pebble or marble on the floor of an empty room, simply because they insisted on searching the EMPTY (I even said empty) room multiple times. They carried the rock for the whole campaign, convinced ti would be important eventually.

 

[demiurge1138]

Tentacles. Lots of tentacles.

Or, in other words, there's always the threat of aberrant or Far Realmsian incursions in my games. Hideous things that defy time and space are usually par for the course. I've also discovered the joys of shadowy manipulator villans, and all of my more recent games have had powerful beings toying with the players, sometimes known, sometimes not (rakshasas, illithids, yugoloths, that sort of thing).

Demiurge out.

 

[fafhrd]

I've recently been accused of turning everyone into a Brit.

I try to vary NPC accents based on racial and national origins, but I suppose the evidence speaks for itself.