but now I also use it when they seem to be doing well.

That phrasing can definitely fill the players with dread, but do you find that it also points out that this could be something important to them, or do you use it sometimes to misdirect them and keep them on their toes?

@Kurt “Telas” Schneider – Game on is popular with one of my players, but with a more . . . yelling to get over the din of whatever distraction is going on.

@Swordgleam – You may certainly try gets brought up a lot in our games too. The guy who is GMing our current game falls back to the “I have no idea if that will work”, but not in the exact way. We tend to raise the bar for stupidest plans, but we generally make them work. I think that if he went with your “You can certainly try” attitude and phrasing more than the “I have no idea if that will work” we wouldn’t feel like we could get away with the stupid plans so much.

@JackSmithIV – I think we’ve all done that as GMs, letting battle pacing creep into other elements. If we, as GMs, follow the reading our players path and become reactionary to their ideas we often have a harder time shifting gears to get into the narrative. Being a GM is a fine line between leading the players into the story and letting them control it.

So I think a lot on my feet. I run story-intensive games that work out wonderfully, but one of my best DMing skills in improvisation. This leads to a busy mind, however, and sometimes there’s just a lot to keep track of. One of these examples of initiative. I’m so concentrated on keeping track of everything else (I think I do a great job), including narrative, I often rely on the players, shouting out a quick “who’s next?”. They catch on and inform me rather quickly. But oftentimes, I’ll just say it. After they complete their first action, after they make just about any standard.

The worst though is it just creeps into _everything_. Even out-of-combat narrative. “Who’s next” ends up infiltrating any other intended phrase, such as “What do you do”, or “What do you say”. Or when I’m supposed to do something as simple as describe a room.

One I use on a semi-regular basis is, “What do you think?” which is usually code for “That’s one of the stupidest ideas/questions/plans I’ve ever heard.” (The bar for ‘stupidest plan ever’ gets raised on an almost session-ly basis. My favourite is still their plan to put a sabotagued nuclear generator near the goblin’s base and hope for them all to die of radiation poisoning.)

“Hold on a second.” Because I can only write so many notes at once, and when debate is flying fast and furious and everyone’s gods are chiming in, there’s a lot of writing to be done.

“…So, where were we?” Usually follows the above, once the ruckus settles down.

“I convert it/him into experience points.” When I’m playing, and the GM asks what I do.

And I often refer to questgiver NPCs as ‘Basil Exposition’.

Are you going to [open] [touch] [move] the [thing]?

@Tony Graham
What’s in the flask, Egg? Magic potion?
Egg: Yeah.
Thought so, good. What do we do, drink it?
Egg: Yeah.
Good, thought so.

I use “Something familiar about…” as a clue to inform players that they have missed something or aren’t putting 2+2 together and getting 4. It usually revokes a response along the lines of, “Oh, crap!”

“You’re feeling good. Sorta invincible.” Typically accompanied by the hand-sign from BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, lets my players know that heal/save-throw/blessing worked.

This raises the question about how cinematic you want your game to be. Should you narrate “scenes” with events and NPCs that there characters have no way of knowing about?

I have never had a character address the camera, but that is another cinematic trope that night be interesting if used carefully.

I’ve found that movies are great to study for dialogue. They can really help you pick out what kind of clues you give off with your speech.

That’s the most iconic I use as DM I think, but I’m fond of,
“So that happened.”

Uttered in a deadpan when something immense and dangerous occurs which is from the movie State and Main. Right after Alec Baldwin crashes the station wagon he’s driving he pops up and says it.

Of course when they see an NPC that the PCs crossed, the tension mounts as the PCs wonder, “Ok, what the heck is she doing here!?”

In cases where the NPC did the PCs wrong, the PCs almost never forget them. Sometimes, it can be just one or two of the PCs that remember an NPC but one is all it takes.

@BryanB – How do the players react to knowing that a recurring NPC is going to come back? I’ve found a huge disconnect between player memory and what characters might remember. Is this the kind of mental jog that gets the players back into familiar territory with the NPC?