Finds purchase

>finds purchase
>*inserts "kinda" into sentence*
What habits do your GMs have? Storytelling, verbal etc.

Basically...

Her teeth sometimes graze my cock when she gets a little too excited during an act. I don’t have the heart to tell her because she’s enjoying it so much.

Oh I am very much guilty of

>"They kind of look like gnolls."
>They are gnolls.

>"Shit, I'm not sure, let me look up the price"
>For a night at an inn

>Describing the temp and humidity of the air when setting a scene.
>Reusing descriptions when describing combat
>Forgetting half of the abilities my monster had, since the default attack is working pretty well.
>Forgetting to move henchmen into flanking
>Having every accent I do morph into bad scottish.

>"Shit, I'm not sure, let me look up the price"
>Forgetting half of the abilities my monster had, since the default attack is working pretty well.
>Having every accent I do morph into bad scottish.

Fuck. Too close to home.

trying to act out enemy reactions when we hit them. All manner of bandits, goblins, and scorpions tend to say "AW OW FUCK"

>HER HAIR TIED TO A TIGHT BUN

You should also break into bad Australian. Flip flopping between the 2 is the most jarring thing and my players laugh almost every time I do it.

Let me add to this excellent list.

>Reminding the players of how human interaction works, after they are questioning why a band of tieflings, half-orcs, and dragonborn, covered in blood, are walking into a rural village decked out in weaponry.
>Fucking up initiative for mooks, so that they miss their turns.
>Having every female voice I do sound either like a child, or a very sultry male.
>Throwing down random encounters to get the damn party going back towards the pre-planned dungeon thanks to clues and sometimes outright maps.
>Having monsters be sub-optimal in fights because the PCs were stupid enough to make a low CR engagement into a TPK.
>Inventing a random NPC who ends up being interesting enough that I want to make them a PC to play with in another game.
>Swearing I will never GM another game and just be a player because this is some tedious and tiring bullshit.
>Having it all be worthwhile when the players thank me for a fun night.

I played with a DM who constantly said "What appears to be." Drove me nuts.

I myself say "Uh, sorta like you're looking at $(STUPID METAPHOR)" all the time.

That sounds cute.

>I played with a DM who constantly said "What appears to be." Drove me nuts.
It's tougher to DM then you might think. Especially if it is a new monster, would any of the characters have seen it before, or will they know what it is without a name? Try describing some of the stuff in the monster manual without using the name, its fucking hard to do on the spot sometimes!

hell, try describing a cow to someone, without using the word cow or other animal names. They'll think for sure it's a goddamn killer beast with devil horns and grotesque genitalia.

My DM smells like pubes and unwashed giraffe.

Maybe he is a masochist?

>Having every accent I do morph into bad scottish.
I keep doing this. I practiced it a lot because I needed to improve and now I can't stop.

>verbal
He is a cool guy and a good DM, but oh dear God, does he loves quips. Dialogue in his campaigns sometimes sound like banter straight out a generic Avengers movie.

sounds gay4reelz

But they are that. You don't need similes to describe everything

"You see before you a docile beast, with large, stupid eyes, a rectangular stub of a muzzle, and two horns that are scooped backwards for defense rather than forwards for aggression. It flicks its dog-like ears lazily at you, letting out a low rumbling noise that seems more irritated than angry. Its body is firmly stocky, covered in muscle along with enough fat to make it useless. It's basically a brick of fat and muscle on slightly-thin legs. Topping it all off is a rope-like tail with a tiny bit of fluff at the end."

Bonus points if it all happens in the same session.

Every non plot relevant NPC is Steve

To be fair, variations of Steve, Steven and Stephens are fairly common so I'd let you get away with it.

Forgetting that the players are fighting a new enemy and saying "the goblin attacks" when they're fighting skeletons.

>...if that makes any sense

YOU THINK I DON'T KNOW THAT IT'S YOU THREE?
CUT IT THE FUCK OUT.

>So yeah...
>...but enough about that, let's continue...

>"They kind of look like gnolls."
>They are gnolls.

Guilty. Usually I'll be like
>You see something that looks either like gnoll or maybe a catfolk.

And it's always the first thing I said :(

Also guilty of
>Are you *sure* you want to do that?

"Shit, it's probably a fucking trap. Thing's going to morph into a fucking killing machine. I attack it with magic missile!"

>Having every accent I do morph into bad scottish
Wayyyyy to close to home

Instead of saying "are you sure you want to do that?" would it be better to say something like, "Okay, but this will be a challenging roll." ?

I usually go with:
"Let me set the scene so you understand this better, you are perched on a roof, that is on fire, and you want to leap across to try to hit a dragon flying over the street, all while in full plate as well as being exhausted..."

"Well when you put it that way, it does seem like a stupid plan."

"It's your choice, I just wanted to remind you of your characters environement and condition before you commit."

I initially liked his use of "finds purchase" but without mixing it up with something along the lines of "the grappling hook latches onto the ledge" or "the swing of his axe deals a great blow to the creature's carapace" it started to stand out as a artificial way of sounding erudite.

Well basically, you see before you what appears to be a zombie.

He hasn't been using "finds purchase" for like a year, the real problem he has is overusing the word "smashes".

I'm not exaggerating when I say he has used it for every attack ever single round for the last five years.

Someone fired an arrow? Smashes into the targets shield

Oh, you used Fireball? The arcane blast smashes into the ground causing an explosion

Closing a book? The pages smash together as you gently put it away

>Coming up with (what I think are) cool dialogue and quest hooks and then totally forgetting to interject them when the appropriate time comes.
>Constantly worrying that the way I've decided to incorporate a PCs backstory into the plot is heavy handed or just fucking retarded.

>literally me yesterday

That's very well put. I'll have to remember that.

Ah, see I'm just getting into it and am around the ep. 25 mark. Tiberius is still around. Not sure when Ocaba leaves. Also not completely sure why he gets the hate he does, I find that druid Keyleth to be far more grating.

If I'm running a premade adventure, I have a bad habit of skipping over details.

You're welcome.

I know why they're there. But I find that premade adventures tend to ramble on about background shit that will NEVER effect the adventure and that the players 99% of the time won't give 2 shits about.

>>Describing the temp and humidity of the air when setting a scene.
This is really good, though? I love that kind of sensory detail. Bonus points if you also describe ambient smells and sounds.

My old GM prided himself on making his NPCs as autistic as possible, it drove me up a wall.

>"Hello good sir, where can we find an inn?"
>"Why?"
>"So we can go to sleep."
>"Oh. Well you can find an inn in the next town over, about a day's travel to the east."
>"What? You mean to tell me that you have no inn in this town and we need to travel a day to get to one?! We've already been awake for twenty hours!"
>"Sorry."

We travel to the next town begrudgingly, takes all fucking day in-game and like two hours of real time because the GM was slow as shit and needed to bring the action back to the present for inane shit a million times instead of letting us mercifully fast-forward to the fucking inn. We get there, sleep, and then come back. Turns out in the village we had originally talked to the peasant there was already a fucking inn, just on the other side of town! GM of course shrugs and says "You just asked where to find AN inn, now this town's inn."

Nigger, it might have been a funny joke if you didn't waste going on two hours of our fucking time with it. And EVERY npc does this shit.

>Women begs to have her son saved from the undead lurking in the caves.
>Go to caves
>Nothing there
>"Oh sorry, it was some different caves."
>Go to different caves
>Nothing there
>"Not those caves either? Okay... well, he's dead by now so I don't need your help anymore, goodbye."
And of course when someone inevitably bitches about this he responds by saying of course a peasant wouldn't know much about geography and we should have confirmed where we were going was the right place beforehand.

HOURS of fucking time doing this shit. An entire session could be this shit. He thought it was cute and funny, and maybe it was ONCE.

>basically
>what appears to be a dog
man, you done fucked it all up

this is a good habit, pay attention to what you do include and you'll find out what the good bits were

I'm glad you said OLD GM cos that sounds awful. At that point even I would have started spite plays like special gun or party deathmatch pact.

This was back in high school and he was the only dude I knew willing to GM.

It did train some useful habits into me at least, like how to ask a LOT of probing questions and to never believe anything until I can confirm it with my own eyes. I very often get comments from GMs that I seem very engaged with the setting because if I hear a rumor that the guards are training more often than normal, I am going to try and learn as much information about that as possible as fast as possible and then I am going to follow up on it to double check whether or not it's legit. I will ask a million questions about the local politics, the economy, important figures, etc.

And you better believe if someone mentions their local economy is based on orange groves I am going to go check out those motherfucking orange groves.

To an outside observer it may seem like I'm just really energetic and curious about the setting, but in reality it's just me being paranoid as fuck about getting deceived by some dumb bullshit.

Wat

YOU CAN CERTAINLY TRY!
HOW DO YOU DO IT?