Your DM style and secrets. Talk about it here!

[Astvinr]

As I was just gonna sit down to prepare my group's roleplay meeting this Saturday, I started to wonder how other DMs out there do it.

Do you prepare everything? Do you write dialogue for every NPC your players might talk to? Do you roll all possible hidden rolls beforehand? Do you write hundreds of notes that you might or might not send your players during the meeting depending on what they do? Do you carefully select exciting music for those special encounters and fittingly moody music for whereever they go?

Or perhaps you prefer to just read it all through a few times and then the parts of the adventure that the group might find themselves in during this particular meeting? Do you prefer to write notes during the game? Do you get the feel of the NPCs and improvize most of their dialogue, rather than prepare it beforehand? Do you prefer to do those hidden rolls during play, so you don't know the outcome beforehand and to make it more exciting for the players (because they hear you roll the dice every now and then). Maybe you don't like to use music during your meetings?

Tell us about your particular DM style, your oddities and special elements, your tastes, your secrets.
Like how far you push your voice acting, or if you refuse to sound that silly. Maybe your group is all about the action and less about the detective business?

[Spiritoflennon]

Haven't DM'ed or played PnP since 1992 .
However I used to lovingly draw all the maps, create all the npc's, draw nice little pictures and prepare yards of scripted dialogue and then...
Throw it all out of the window and wing it as soon as the players decided to go left and not right at the first opportunity.

[Arkzein]

Never DMed myself but enjoyed how our DM organised things. Pages and pages of notes covering almost every eventuality from general things like information people may/could give us (loads of ways to go about it, for example complicated webs of info. on what people knew and heading back when someone lied, or they wouldn't let you in on their info until you knew so much allready etc.) or just detailed layouts of places to thing like mind boggingly exact little details. We once found the reason for a small scar on the back of one guys head after a long chat that got off track (Blame the beer!)... no reason for it, no use and we thought he'd made it up on the spot yet there it was in his notes. As you can gather we tended to play quite social-sided games.

Some of the fun for us playing was trying to do things that he hadn't planned for. I recall once, playing Vampire the Masquerade, with some luck (how I went about gathering info and "persuading" the right people) and then a run of insane dice rolls I managed to finish a quest days early in a weekend session by attempting the seemingly impossible (Played an insane Malkavian, totally in character) and succeeding. Seeing the DMs face then was a picture perfect moment, he was evil to my poor deranged character for a while after that.

Ah, good times. Anyway, most likely I would do the same, have tons of things that will never be seen/used/spoken so as never to be put on the spot, some nice well thought out storylines.

[Astvinr]

Haha, I hope you had fun doing that Arkzein. ^^
I used to play VTM, but it was sooooo long ago, I can't remember much of it. I wasn't the DM back then, since I was only like... 11 years old or something.

But a DM who prepares everything is bound to have stuff that the players never see. Unless the DM makes sure you have to walk a specific path in order to reach the destination, like that you said about needing to already know this or that for an NPC to give you info.

The game I'm currently preparing has tons of content they won't see, and there's hundreds of different combinations for success. The reason for this is that it's a bit random. The sequal, a semi-independent adventure, will be more straightforward and unbelievably awe-saturated. It's one of those "save the world"-adventures. Very balanced though, lots of interesting dialogue and intrigues everywhere yet at times filled with truly epic battles as well as lesser battles. I haven't read it all yet, but it's really exciting!

Originally Posted by Spiritoflennon

Haven't DM'ed or played PnP since 1992 .
However I used to lovingly draw all the maps, create all the npc's, draw nice little pictures and prepare yards of scripted dialogue and then...
Throw it all out of the window and wing it as soon as the players decided to go left and not right at the first opportunity.

I see why you haven't played since 1992!
Sorry to hear that though, it's damn good fun.
Like I said, you're bound to lose a lot of content. But the beauty of it is that you're the DM, the omnipotent entity that controls the world. If they take a wrong turn somewhere you'll either have a back-up plan or do some improvization. The challange is to make it realistic, and not force your players to do things all the time.

But seriously, if I would leave lots of clues for my players and they don't pick up on the trail, instead wandering out into the wilderness or something... I'll just let them die at the hands of some bandits and say "No wasn't that fun? I'll see you next week."

[Spiritoflennon]

Nah, that's not the reason I stopped, I used to love my players throwing me a curveball and rarely fell flat on my face.
I just ended up in a different geographical location to my group and it was many years before I ended up back in the same place. By that time we had all moved on with our lives and had other priorities. It wasn't until fairly recently that I regained interest in roleplaying games. Thankfully through the internet there are now many more options.

[Astvinr]

Originally Posted by Spiritoflennon

Nah, that's not the reason I stopped, I used to love my players throwing me a curveball and rarely fell flat on my face.
I just ended up in a different geographical location to my group and it was many years before I ended up back in the same place. By that time we had all moved on with our lives and had other priorities. It wasn't until fairly recently that I regained interest in roleplaying games. Thankfully through the internet there are now many more options.

Nah, I never thought you would let yourself be deteriorated by something like that. But I understand why you haven't started playing again. Even if you could reunite your old group, it's hard to find the time to be a good DM. But to me it sounds like if you wouldn't be playing DDO, you could use that time.
If I had to choose between my RP group and DDO... I'd have to let go of DDO. Luckily for me, I think I have enough time for both.

Anyway, DMs! Speak up! Where are you? ^^

[Grumlock]

I've GM'd a couple of times, but my group never got the kick of it (maybe my fault), but my regular GM is a nutter who single-handedly does all the quests, missions etc (We play MERP with Rolemaster rules mostly, having dabbled with AD&D and Call of Cthulu). He plans things to the most detail he can think of, but somehow we always find a way to have "secondary" quests thrown into us. Sometimes because we are too cautious, others because we are too brave lol...

[phoonzang]

i usually have a main concept in mind, and 2 hours before my friends show up i prepare some encounters and situations, dungeons for that day.
but all in all it comes down too 50% prepared stuff and 50% improvising. sometimes its just great to improvise if the mood is right, but hardly depends on my as the DM to do it right, its not very easy.

[Sarodikus]

I bought AD&D 2nd edition in 1991 and the DragonLance campaign setting. I started a campaing there in 1992, called it Judgement Day. I had 7 players and they made up a good group. I made some adjustments in the world, created own gods and stuff and changed things for my campaign.

And still today, 2006, the campaing is still running. Have one player left from the beginning and new ones...one cool thing is that the player that been there since the beginning is now playing the grandson of his first player character.....but later this year the campaign is gonna end in a big fight Really loking forward to it.

Are planning also to write a book about the campaign, and are creating my own world atm for it to use.

[Silverblade-T-E]

I'm an Evil DM (tm) :>
Been DMing 20 years.
For me the main thing is ot make/have the maps for a setting, a background of it all, and then I make the NPCs (I use E-Tools nowadays to save time).
The NPCs and PCs often end up "wrtting" their own story as they should be characters not just stas.
I also love adding thigs based form odd real world things, like last cmapign was volcanic region with numerous geological things happening that became part of the plot.
http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com...dventures1.htm
some of the stuff I've made is on my site.
I use 3d art, CC Pro to do grpahics to spice si tup