Throwing dice to wake up sleeping players.

I have not tried this but I might

D you use the metal ones?

I always include an artifact of power in my games. This is easier if it's fantasy, but even if it's Sci-Fi or contemporary, I will stick in some piece of advanced tech or legendary weapon that the players will acquire somehow. I find a legendary artifact helps foster a reasonable level of player conflict, and can always be turned into a macguffin, but can also be useful until I do.

This dates back to my early days of Roleplaying, where I would just invent outlandish weapons like the Random Destruction Cannon (a grenade launcher that, when you fire it, roll a D6- where ever the 6 faces is the way the projectile fires). Eventually, I learned that Super powerful weapons and tech can also be useful and entertaining to the players, not just me ^.^

Although I still pull out the RDC for "Rocks fall, everyone dies" situations. We never grow out of some things...

Magic minerals almost always turn up in my dungeon crawls. I have a book, published by the Early |English Text Society, compiling seven pre-Shakespearean lapidaries, listing rocks and their mystical significances and physical or magical powers. Some of these minerals have never been identified (as to what the authors thought they were), so I throw those in.

I tend to stand when I GM, though usually that only happens about two or three hours into the game, or after the first combat (because I usually have to stand in order to move the paper minis about the grid).

I also always have thematic music playing. I have a giant collection of movie, TV show and game soundtracks, and I take great delight in putting together music mixes on my iTunes to play during the game. It's gotten to the point where if I'm playing in someone else's game and there isn't any music playing, it feels strangely flat. So that's my little obsession.



Back when I was in junior high, I ran a fantasy game for my friend in which there was a shopkeeper named Bard. When my friend's PC went to another shop, I absent-mindedly described him in the exact same terms as Bard, leaving my player to wonder if he had a twin brother. I said, "No, it's the same guy," just as a joke, and we began to joke about Bard being the only guy in this town, running between shops as the PCs went through town. This led to the running joke (ha ha) that every NPC shopkeeper was named Bard.

Except for magic shops. They were always run by women named Aleena, because I accidentally recycled that NPC once, too. My player asked, "Do you have any, you know, special magic items that you don't put out on the shelves?" Running with this, I had her nod and say, "Come around back." And then she showed the PC to her 'secret collection' of magic weapons and stuff.

Later on in life, of course, my friend and I realized how ridiculous it was that these people would have such items, just waiting for someone clever enough to simply ask if they could see them, so now we have another running joke where we ask shopkeepers if they have any "special" items (to which the response is always a sage nod and "Come around back.").

But I don't have magic item shops in my games anymore. I don't know if that counts as an idiosyncrasy.

I used to have a dedicated "DM's shirt" for a while, a well-worn black and red World of Warcraft "For the Horde" shirt, because it was a reminder for me to be evil. (If not evil, then at least murdersome when it came to my players.)

It has been retired since my players have found numerous ways to incite DM frustration and a desire to kill without the need of a reminder.

I have started wearing a Be Bold shirt in my new Technoir game. I want my players to get in the NPC's faces and don't just let the game move them but move the game themselves. I don't know if it will work, but I hope that it does.

T.

For my Feng Shui game, the group bought me a "Don't Make Me Bring Out My Flying Monkeys" shirt that I tried to wear to most sessions. (Their second adventure had featured cyborg flying gorilla-supremacists.)

I'm another stander/pacer.

I also have a house role for all game systems that if you describe your character's actions in an exciting or amusing manner, you get a bonus to your roll, which results in players replacing "I hit the monster with my sword" with "I run towards the beast, cursing his doubtful parentage, as I slice from below with my sword, hoping to rend it open!"

My games are goofy, but fun.