In Character
I love doing over-the-top voices for my characters. That’s because 1) I like comedy in my games; 2) I’m an unabashed scenery-chewer; 3) it helps me to get into character; and 4) it’s a useful way to distinguish between “out-of-character” speech and “in-character” speech.” And honestly, it’s that last one that’s important to today’s comic.
If you’ve ever half-jokingly suggested assassinating a king or sucker punching a dragon, only to have your GM respond with, “His august majesty Flametail the Wicked takes offense at your remarks,” you know how important it is to distinguish between the player’s words and the PC’s.
Possible solutions include common sense (e.g. “Obviously my character wouldn’t say that.”), somatic components (i.e. making some gesture like putting your fist on top of your head to show that you’re speaking out-of-character), or blanket rulings (i.e. everything said at the table is always in character). Each has its problems though. The first invites misunderstandings. The second is awkward. The last leaves zero room for side-conversation, and that can be annoying when it comes time to order pizza.
That’s why I think that character voices can provide a decent alternative. If you’re rocking your silly British accent, everybody knows that it’s Sir. Smitesby talking rather than Steve. If your voice rasps like the lid of sarcophagus, it’s obviously Obolak the Risen rather than Stacy. It cuts way down on confusion without any of the troublesome add-ons.
“But Colin,” I hear you say. “I suck at accents! I’m not a voice actor. I shouldn’t have to audition for drama club just to play a game!”
Well no. No one expects you to nail a perfect DeVito, Schwarzenegger, or Dr. Orpheus. Rather than going for specific accents or impersonations, it can be just as effective to pick a verbal tick. A slight stutter works wonders. Increasing or decreasing your voice’s volume or speed can be enough to make the difference. Even something as simple as adding dramatic pauses or exaggerated sibilance can work as a character voice. The point isn’t to be perfect. It’s to be different enough to distinguish the character.
And hey, if you really are uncomfortable varying from your normal speech pattern, I’m certainly not going to twist your arm. Some folks dislike speaking in character in general, and that’s OK! But if you’ve never given it a try because you think you’ll be bad at it, I’d encourage you to give it a shot! Even a little difference can work wonders, helping the fantasy to come that little bit more alive at the table.
All of the above of course leads us to our question of the day! What kinds of voices have you got in your repertoire? Do you like to speak with an accent or use a verbal tick? Alternatively, do you have some other method for separating in-character from out-of-character speech? Let’s hear all about those very-Scottish dwarves and abrasive Bronx bugbears down in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Twice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
I have no idea why this is, but tons of people have asked me where my accent comes from. I don’t HAVE an accent! No one else in my family gets asked this question, just me.
As for in-character voices, I’ve only played 3 of them outside of one-shots at conventions so I’ve never really done any. I don’t really have any thoughts about how they’d sound either. Right now I’m playing Prince Alester. I wonder what a male dragonborn would sound like.
I’m thinking posh American. Great Gatsby style.
“That was a fine critical hit, old sport! Now would you kindly help me tangle with this brute of a bugbear?”
Not sure I can do that one. Maybe I’ll do a Southern Bell type of voice for Tara when she’s in her princess identity. Then drop the drawl when she’s in her Vigilante identity.
You know the southern gentleman from that one episode of Samurai Jack? Antebellum, Gone With the Wind type voices are a blast.
My dude was named Beaumont Lillygreen, and he was every inch the dandy fallen upon hard times. That was a fun Firefly game.
I get the same thing! Everybody used to think I had a british accent, then it died down for a couple years, but recently I’ve had half a dozen people ask me if I’m from Ireland. I’ve never been outside the united states!
Same here! I’m like, what are they hearing that I’m not?
And if you are the GM, this really doesn’t do much but make your throat hurt by the end of the night. x.x. I do try to do voices, but it isn’t always easy to keep the voices of 20+ high school superheroes in your head at a time.
I generally change speech patterns, but pitches and accents can be fun. One of the characters in the current game is fun cause she’s an alien, so I often mix up plural vs singular versions of words, omit articles, and have odd ebbs and flows in the speed of her speech as she translates in her head. My gypsy witch/bard (Depending on incarnation) had me attempting the accent, which I had to trigger off of her name.
One of my players committed to a Cockney accent for a changeling who was most certainly not Jack the Ripper. It was fun.
Female alien teenage superhero is hard. That’s because Starfire has such a strong shtick that it’s tough not to copy her outright. At least, that’s what Laurel tells me concerning her current female alien teenage superhero PC.
Yeah. I mixed in a liberal dose of mad scientist for this character because she’s secretly Starfire’s whole political story if Starfire was a genius studying interdimensional travel. She was experimenting with her dimensional travel device when her evil brother destroyed the interdimensional signal transmitter in her lab, essentially throwing off her navigation and making her get lost in the multi-verse. No one has really interacted with her enough to realize that she’s the child of the royal family though.
Assuming you mean old animated Teen Titans Starfire and not comics Starfire, she did a really good job on her Out of Place Complication. The writers worked hard to make her seem like a normal teenager, just from a completely bonkers place. Nothing against comics Starfire, I’m just not familiar with her and I know DC has as many continuities as there are shades of blue.
Not gonna lie, my roommate and I throwing on the exaggerated (and bad) cockney accents is INSTANTLY recognizable as us being in character as our Half-Orc bothers! And just doing the voices makes it so we have dumb, in character conversations that the party loves… Especially when they break down into ~~bad~~ BRILLIANT idea planning!
Apples and pears you say? Nice!
I always try to watch Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels if I know I’ve got a Cockney character coming up.
As a DM, I’m terrible with accents. As a PC though, my accents can vary. Originally I didn’t do much with voices, but now every PC has a voice. There are two possibilities: either I organically develop a voice that I feel naturally fits this character, but is too different from my own, or I go way over the top in what monstrosity of a “funny accent” my demented vocal chords come up with. (Warning: trying this latter strategy can result you your character become a very skill trap detector, courtesy of the barbarian’s grapple skill)
I told you about Laurel lisping unicorn, right? She would up hating her own NPC’s voice while the rest of us loved it. We would engage the unicorn in conversation just to watch her glare at us.
My players have a very good method of diffentiating between in and out of character speak. They say words, then if NPCs don’t like what they hear, the PCs claim they were speaking out of character. They then out of character have a conversation about killing that NPC, while still acting like their characters, and with their characters somehow knowing about this plan of murder.
They should really just go ahead and get Rary’s telepathic bond or something. With the amount of times they use out-of-character as an excuse to plan without enemies knowing, it would really make life easier. Especially since telepathy is instantaneous, which solves that issue of players having 30-second conversation about their tactics during then 6-second round.
It’s this mess that gives rise to the “everything said at the table is in character” rule. It’s drastic, but it might be a good fit if there’s a legit problem with table talk.
This very situation is why I stole the Vampire LARP rule for out of character chat and brought it to my group. You cross your fingers and hold them up for everyone to see. That’s how we know you are out of character. The only person exempt is the GM, who will often be speaking out of character to inform you of the world.
My party running a telepath in the Superhero game fixed this, especially with their battle strategies. Unfortunately, the telepath is the character that was switched out.
Is that where that convention comes from? I suddenly find my curiosity piqued about the lineage of “crossed fingers” vs “hand on the head.”
The convention I’m familiar with is a sign made by folding your left hand in a 90° angle (palm horizontal, fingers pointing down) hitting your right hand flat (palm and fingers vertical). AFAIK it came from the local LARP scene. It’s a distinctive gesture with no real world signification (well, I don’t know sign language, maybe it has one) and it’s less awkward than putting your hand on your head, especially if your hands are full of cheeto dust and you have just washed your hair.
Is that specified in the rules of some particular game system? Or is it just local custom?
“I suck at accents! I’m not a voice actor. I shouldn’t have to audition for drama club just to play a game!”
…Good news (especially for DMs everywhere) on this front: Being good at accents is not remotely required to do accents. You haven’t lived until you’ve subjected your table to your attempts to play a Cockney character when you have practically no concept of what a real Cockney accent even sounds like. And this works for so many different accents too!
As for my own repertoire: I’ve expanded it a lot this past year since finally learning to throw caution to the wind and just improvise voices. Apparently my best is my snarling monster girl voice. Two different players have reported being turned on by the gnoll slaver they’d been tracking down after finally hearing her voice.
My favorite is when I realize my accent is taking a train ride across Europe. Inconsistent Transylvania / Russian / German is always good for a laugh.
My answer is always “you’re not doing a bad Russian accent, you’re doing an accurate Dwarven one!”
I’m socially awkward/shy, and most of my games are text-based, so no examples of my own here.
Notable is that the ‘saying OOC things in-character’ can be great fun for a lighthearted, silly gane, as the Glass Cannon podcast shows (Tom Exposition and so on…).
As for silly voices/accents… Check out the Dragon Friends podcast. Especially the Strahd season.
That “great fun” is my problem. I love the frisson of saying OOC stuff in my character’s voice. That’s where a lot of the comedy comes from at my table (and in Handbook for that matter).The trick is to make it obviously OOC, or else you wind up with the problems that Its_a_Trap describes with those table talking players.
Figures Fighter would be too stingy to give away ONE coin.
He tossed them all to the witcher since his bard was so good
Topical!
Also, I regret not making this the scrollover joke.
When speaking OCC, I tend to hold up my hand with my fingers crossed. It’s something that my old home game came up with back in ye olde times, and I still practice it during current day Pathfinder Society tables. I may just need to let the GM know that it’s my OOC signal, just to make sure there’s no ‘gotcha’ moment.
As for voices? I tend to make minor variations on my own voice, since I couldn’t carry a note if you tucked it into my fanny pack.
Of course, that can change depending on the character. My ‘artist’ elven necromancer, for example, is specifically inspired by a League of Legends character. Every time I want to get inside his head, I just listen to these quotes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwQ3i9L0j74
holy crap I did not expect that link to take up a huge swath of the page
Yeah… It didn’t used to do that. No worries. I deal with it too.
I’ve never actually done the “somatic components” thing. Did you ever forget and have something ooc count in-game?
I can’t really do proper accents, mostly because english isn’t my first language and I only play games in english, and even in my first language I just can’t accent.
So I always use stuff like higher/lower register, speech speed; and since I was a extrem-metal vocalist for a while I can do some pretty decent screeches and demonic growls.
But for main NPCs or important characters in general I use a voicemod software to add things like echo, effects and even more pitch correct. This obviously only works when playing online, my main way to play, but it’s a great way to expand voices you can use
Any handy links to your voicemod software of choice? I find myself running on Roll 20 these days, and I wouldn’t mind getting better acquainted with the bells and whistles.
Sure, I’m usinge Voicemeeter Banana first of all as a mixer, to seperate different and it has a built in feature for effects; mainly echo, pitch, location and a few minor proper effects
This is the software: https://www.vb-audio.com/Voicemeeter/banana.htm
I recommend looking into some tutorials for setting it up properly since that can be bit of a pain
Cheers! Could be nice to bring in some special effects for boss fights and such.
I always used to say I couldn’t do any accents, until a friend gave me two very good pieces of advice. “Everyone can do one accent, you’re doing one right now,” and “You can learn anything on YouTube”.
So once I started DMing I spent time actually looking up tutorial videos for various accents, and now I really enjoy playing with them. I’m still not great, but to be honest when I do my dwarfish accent I don’t care if my players can’t tell if I’m attempting Russian or Polish, as long as they can tell I’m doing dwarfish!
On the subject of out-of-character conversations that’s more tricky; I find it much easier to stay in an accent all night, so I would rather use my in-character voice for out-of-character interactions too.
I keep having people ask me about voice work. It honestly feels like those situations where your friends say, “You’re so funny! You should do standup!” The knee-jerk is to go “thanks for the compliment, but it’s not my interest.” I’m honestly beginning to consider it thought. With YouTube and various aids out there…
https://www.amazon.com/Accents-Manual-Actors-Revised-Expanded/dp/087910967X/ref=sr_1_8?crid=2W39FHKCPMFW4&keywords=accents+and+dialects+for+stage+and+screen&qid=1583785107&s=books&sprefix=accents+and+diale%2Camazon-devices%2C152&sr=1-8
…It could be fun to record an audition or two and see if I get any hits.
You should go for it. Worst case you give it a go and it doesn’t lead anywhere, and then you’ve still lost nothing and had fun playing with some voices in the meantime.
Honestly I’ve always imagined Fighter as being voiced by Patrick Warburton.
As for my own voices, some of my PCs have been: a cockney street urchin straight out of Oliver Twist (Inspired by Rags from the webcomic Guttersnipe), a deep-voiced bard-barian warforged, and a somewhat simple-minded young prince with a light English accent. My NPCs all have rather heavy accents, ranging from a French criminal to a mildly senile old king’s adviser to yet another young woman with a thick cockney accent because I am very creative and definitely have more than three different voices that I can pull off.
Oh, and Thieve’s Cant is just a mashup of slang from the past century or so. “You say there’s a bum rap that those bodacious dames were playing backseat bingo? This is so sad. Alexa, play despacito”
Love it a lot, honestly.
Never have I wanted to play a Dying Earth setting so badly. Of course, coming up with that mess on the fly would be crazy challenging.
Actually, it’s not a Dying Earth campaign at all, just a rather basic fantasy setting. I was just brainstorming with my players what a dialect that used normal words to mean entirely different things would be, and we immediately came up with modern slang.
Also partially inspired by https://www.xkcd.com/771/
All my Dwarves speak in New York accents, all Duergar speak in Boston accents since they’re an evil reflection of Dwarves. “Praise ~~The Sox~~ Ladaguer! Praise ~~The Pats~~ Asmodeus!”
My Halflings speak in either rural-British (Tolkien imagined Hobbits as a stand-in for the rural-Brits) or New Zealand (Peter Jackson. Also I had a player from NZ who played one) accents. The Halfling language sounds like an unintelligibly thick British accent
Elves have French accents since they’re pretentious, fancy, and smelly. Drow have French-Canadian accents.
My Gnomes all sound like Looney-Tunes. The actual Gnomish language sounds like a mixture of Elvish and Dwarvish since in my homebrew lore Gnomes are a crossbreed of Dwarf and Elf that achieved a sustainable breeding population.
This is because outside of Norse myth Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, Leprechauns, Faeries and the like were used interchangeably. That’s why Santa Elves and Cookie Elves are basically just what we think of with Gnomes
Draconic sounds like various hisses. (Lizardfolk and Yuan-Ti also speak it so it seems like something that would be optimized for speaking with reptilian anatomy)
Goblin sounds like Boomhauer and Goblinoids have Southern accents.
Orcish sounds like Mongolian.
Gith sounds like Klingon. All Githyanki have names that are based on famous Yankees like “D’rak Ji’tar.” All Githzerai have names that are based on enemies of the Yankees like “Rez’dox Buz’ton”.
Giant sounds like the Swedish Chef from The Muppets.
Deep Speech sounds like “R’yleh f’tagaan c’thulhu!”
Sylvan sounds like Gaelic since most of our Fae lore is rooted in Gaelic folklore.
Primordial sounds like Arabic. (Genies speak it)
Celestial sounds like Hebrew. (Like you’re singing and trying to hock a loogie at the same time)
Infernal sounds like faux-Latin chanting. (Think the Rosemary’s baby soundtrack, or the Sephiroth theme from FF7)
Abyssal sounds like death metal. (Lots of words that start with De sung from the bowels of your lungs. “Desecration, desolation, deli-style!”)
Modron sounds like dial-up.
Slaad sound like words you understand in a sequence you that makes no sense. “When lighting a fish on fire underwater, apply futons”. (It sounds like nonsense in any language you understand)
Heh. Looks like you’ve got a system. Nicely done.
One of my favorite threads on Reddit was about Scotsmen doing dwarven accents:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/7i7fuf/scotsmen_of_rdnd_what_accent_do_you_use_for_your/
Fun to dip outside the local culture and find a few alternatives!
Why would it be weird for Scotsmen to do New York accents? Although now I am picturing a weird hybrid-accent from Scottish players trying to do the Dwarven/New York accent.
I’m not good with voices. At all. What I’ve kinda picked up on doing is just changing my tone.
Old female singer = moderate pace with a smooth, airy tone
Young upperclass high elf = quick, sharp tone
Good grizzled prison warden dwarf = slow and gruff.
Sounds to me like you’re great with voices. You bother to think about it and find something that you can pull off consistently. As far as I’m concerned, that’s what it’s all about in this hobby.
Well thank you kindly. I guess I’m going off my impression from The Adventure Zone and Griffan was great with voices.
Naw man. Griffan can do droopy dog or cartoon-German, and they are a lot of fun. They aren’t exactly the same level you’d want in a stage play though. But what makes them so wonderful, and what makes them work, is that he’s got showmanship like a sonifabitch! He’s not afraid to look or sound a little silly, and I think that’s the biggest hurdle when it comes to GM voicework.
For OOC conversations I’m a fan of putting a fist on the head, even if you use accents too. It instantly shows out of character talk for everyone at the table, players and DMs alike. Sure if you have an IC accent or verbal tic people can figure out when you’re doing IC vs OOC talk, but that only works if everyone is doing one that is instantly recognizable and still doesn’t help the DM. It may seem awkward at first, but after a few sessions it becomes natural (at least as long as you’re gaming with the same group. It’s when you go to another group with the old habit that it becomes awkward.)
Personally, I have tried to do accents or verbal tics for my PCs, especially when I’m in voice chat games. The character I’m playing now is a warforged who prefaces all of his sentences with what the purpose of his sentence is (basically I stole HK-47’s speech pattern.) One thing I like is everyone remembers he is warforged because of this, and it makes him feel more robotic. The funny thing is that this was the first warforged anyone has met in the game, so everyone assumed that’s how all warforged talked. Which meant that when we came across some warforged NPCs who initially didn’t talk like that, the other PCs said they didn’t sound like warforged, and the DM quickly adopted my character’s speech pattern for these warforged. Now all warforged in the world have the same speech pattern my character does.
That is a wonderful example of players participating in worldbuilding, not just GMs. Love it!
I never do accents or special voices, but due to the sheer amount of mentions of the Cockney accent here, I felt obliged to mention that time when, as GM, I had an NPC (captured alley thug) with such a thick Cockney accent that whenever he said anything, PCs had to make Linguistics skill checks to try and understand him. This proved to be way funnier than any accent attempt I could have made.
My favorite part oy my Cajun combat troll was that half the table could understand me just fine while the other half looked at them like black magic was afoot. Unintelligibility is always good for a laugh.
This has hilariously come up a couple of times in my games, resulting in me responding to OOC stuff in IC and vice versa.
I believe the folks at Space Station 13 have a saying on how to handle that…
I don’t know the Space Station 13 reference. Care to explain the joke, and thus ensure that it retains 100% of it’s comic value?
I play a Elven Artificer who talks in a New York accent. (Why New York? Because despite being a high elf he’s distinctly non-elf-y in his personality and mannerisms, and I thought it would be funny)
That said, I as a player am TERRIBLE at accents, so what this ends up coming across as is a really crappy NY accent mixed with a lot of stammering because when I talk IC I need to come up with what to say and then try to say it out loud in the accent. But I think that stammering is still in character for him. Charisma 8, yo!
The character voice is something that develops over time in a lot of cases. I didn’t think my Austrian superhero would be into one-liners, but in the heat of battle, it was almost inevitable that a little Arnold would come out. It has since been incorporated into that character’s shtick, just as important as my (very bad) Austrian accent.
In other words: GJ making that stutter an asset!
Even when the character has a distinct accent in-world — Doktor Krauss’s pseudo-Prussian, Xaari’s Drainei-cribbed-heavily-from-Russian, Teague’s warm Caribbean lilt — I would never make my fellow players listen to me try to do an accent, any more than I would make them listen to me sing. I’m pretty sure there are whole sections of the Geneva convention on just that topic.
Every character does, though, have their own distinct voice. It comes out in the rhythm of their speech, syntax, and word choice, rather than actual accents.
Churrik’s voice quivers with nervous enthusiasm held in check by the need to check and double-check his understanding of the strange surface world and cultures around him. He assigns creative meaning to unfamiliar words from the context where he first heard them, and never forgets that definition even once he learns the true one. (Churrik now knows that a storm is a dangerous meteorological phenomenon found on the Surface. But a “storm” is also a great leathery flapping terror with wings and talons and teeth, because a drake attacked our camp shortly after the druid warned us that a storm was coming.)
Krauss constructs clipped, meticulously logical statements, almost devoid of emotion save for a constant faint undercurrent of desperation. Teague lies playful verbal games, layering meanings atop one another, and then pulling them away mid-sentence to catch impatient listeners off guard.
And Xaari? Never she speaks with accent. Is anti-Draenei calumny, just like slander about piloting skills! Exodar landing was superb piloting! What you are meaning you heard otherwise? Ha! Maybe I put you in overcrowded flyer, let lying elves who are liars sabotage engine and strip away half your fuselage, then we release you in uncharted sky and see how many survivors you have! Eh? Look out for WHAT airship? Ah. Is possible we drift off course a bit just now. Is all under control. On unrelated note, your seat cushion also is flotation device.
I think perhaps you do accents. 😛
I do character voices not just to distinguish in-character from out-of-character talk, but to help get a feel for the character. My most commonly-used voices are a coarse “tough” voice for warriors and other brute-force types and a lighter “gentle” voice for more style-based and charming characters, pitched up or down depending on whether the character is female or male; I also have a high, scratchy voice I use for kobolds, goblins and other small monstrous humanoids. For some characters, I’ll add impressions or accents – for instance, my snide, selfish wizard Klezin has a voice based off of Severus Snape since it conveys their personality quite well.
I think that every gamer knows “goblin voice.” It’s a high pitched, aggressive muppet voice, and the true lingua Franca of the tabletop.
I don’t make voices, i can’t. All my characters sound the same, i only change words and phrases. I have a too marked accent, a Russian one, even here, in the country in which i was born and raised, people ask me if i am from another place. I sound too much like i am about to gloat about my plan to destroy capitalism. Therefore i don’t even bother with accents, even when feign a French accent i sound French/Russian. I can’t help it, the accent is from my family, not my fault 🙁
As a rule in our table, when speaking in character we approach the table or we put a hand on it. When we talk out-of-character we try to not approach the table. This rule is better than the older one in which anything said was in-character if it got a odd number of silabe, out-of-character if even. Except for iambic pentameter in which case anything said was in-character, while any haiku was out-of-character. We rule out this rule because it didn’t make sense, iambic pentameter isn’t good for portrait in-character dialogues 🙂
Yeah. Iambic pentameter is the most naturalistic meter. That’s fine for a play, but not at all for the highly stylized fantasy of the typical adventure game. Dactylic hexameter or bust!
Burst then!!! Dactylic hexameter in a tabletop game? The horror 😉
Also good you are back 😀
The common cold is a hell of a drug.
So is rage, hate and the Tony awards 😛
The people at my D&D game do the opposite: The accents are for the OOC joke characters, or the players having fun naming the monsters we’re fighting and having them have discussions surrounding the encounter, while IC discussion is usually done with normal voices.
For me, the expectation of speaking “in character” is incredibly frustrating, because I have a voice for the character, in my head, but it’s impossible to express it verbally.
I think there’s some relevance to the Proxy comic here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/proxy
You’re never going to perfectly recreate the fantasy image in your head. That’s no reason to abandon stagecraft though. From my point of view, accents and character voices are only partially for the player. They can also contribute to the collective immersion of the group, and that’s about more mental images than just your own.
I try to make my character voice at least a little different from my regular voice, but it’s tricky sometimes. It doesn’t help that I’m hopeless with accents for any extended conversation. I’ll start off doing some terrible Irish accent and then it’ll slip into Russian and then Southern USA. Now I just try to make the tone and cadence different rather than go for an accent. Still fail a lot at that, but at least it’s less obvious and embarrassing.
Have you heard of “key in” phrases? They’re go-to bits of dialogue to help you reacquire the accent. The Bostonian “park the car at Harvard yard” is probably the most famous.
Yes, I usually speak in a color or bold. smirk
Ok, I know you’re being silly here. But like… Do you really?
In pbp, absolutely. You want you spoken text to stand out from narrative text our thoughts. Color when possible also helps people more easily keep track of who said what. (You can easily blur other people’s characters together when you’re in multiple games at once so everything you can do to distinguish your character from someone else’s helps. In my case I even use a table that includes a character picture if I can find one somewhere online that works.)
Irl… I haven’t yet, but I’ll certainly try when I next get the opportunity. =P
Asked Laurel what color her first PbP character would use, expecting some kind of graphic designer paroxysm of indecision.
“Blue.”
“Why blue?”
“He’s a tiefling. He’s blue.”
“Ah. Fair enough.”
Yeah that’s pretty much how it goes. You choose whatever color best matches some feature of theirs (skin, eye, or hair color usually) and if those are all already claimed you just go for something that isn’t so bright that it makes someone’s eyes bleed or so dark/same color as the posting background that it’s too hard to see that you happen to like.
And of course it’s typically a color the forum (or whatever) has as one of its default options so you don’t have to type in the name or hex code in manually every time. As such Red, Blue, and Green of some variation are extremely common picks for this reason. Then you get your purples, oranges, browns, teal, and bolds (because that’s the closest thing to “black” on most forums that already use black text as the default color). Then the less common things like some kind of not too bright shade of violet or yellow. Though sometimes I personally like to use royal blue because I know it’s a color forum color coding will know by name rather than number and it’s visually distinct from other blues without being so bright people hate you.
Man… I’ll always be grateful to this comic for exposing me to other ways of playing. The different assumptions that go into different styles of game are crazy. For example, the reddit thread on today’s comic had a Danish dude talking about “Danish is in-character, English is out-of-character,” since everyone at the table is bilingual. Not something I would have considered on my own.
Wizards Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. It was first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc.
You’re not wrong.
Now I’m wondering how Handbook Fighter would handle meeting 8 Bit Theatre Fighter and who would win in a 1:1 duel. 8BT’s Red Mage would referee, of course.
I’m pretty sure Fighter would bet on 8BTF and throw the match.
I usually prefer a certain attitude to differentiate my character than an accent but man one of the most FUN i have had was playing with one. I had a dwarf knightly character named Ilsa Mountainstorm that sounded kinda, vaguely, russian-ish. the best part though was the GM ran regional languages at varying levels of proficiency so I got to use broken english to also represent being not in my native tongue, which i then could phase out of as the game went on and i put more ranks in it. Of course if I was speaking in my home language i got to be suddenly eloquent and it was lovely.
I also got to make up a drink in game with her that was then mixed up and made next session and agreed by all to be fabulous. Dubbed The Golden Apple, was 1/2 oz of goldschlager, 1 1/2 oz of absolut orient apple, an apple ginger vodka that last i checked is SADLY out of production and tasted nothing like the typical green apple stuff, and fill in a rocks glass with actual apple juice. tasted like drinking apple pie.
Apple pie is the local cocktail, and the unofficial drink of Dragon Con:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dragoncon/comments/1kj51j/pie_recipes/
I always have a voice specific to each PC – they are not 100% on point or consistent, but they’re recognisable, which is what I think matters. My exiled politician was well-spoken but with a northern english rasp (think Sean Bean); my oblate-turned-warlock was a Brummie girl; my king’s guard paladin was strictly BBC RP English. With my current PC, a woman just shy of 20, I put all my focus into speaking softly and in a higher register, and so she has my own indistinct three-countries-mashup accent.
But DMing, now that’s where the real voice acting chops are whetted. My current campaign is set largely in modern-day earth, so I have no excuse not to bust out my repertoir of non-english accents: At the moment I have among the NPCs three french accents, two russian accents, a dutchwoman, a scot, an RP englishman, an aboriginal australian, a californian, and a louisiannan. And pretty soon there’s a Greek and an Ethiopian going to appear.
I don’t always manage. A couple of sessions ago I got stuck after doing a solid hakf hour as Aleksandr Alexeiivich and couldn’t switch into Fremch for Raymond. I tried for a minute before apologising to the players and continuing in normal voice.
But mostly it works, and I have a lot of fun doing voices. And it’s not just accents; proper use of stress and enunciation is also essential. I love this stuff.
Some players in my gaming group use character voices, complete with silly accents. (Actually, most of the group does, just not many at once.) None of us are good at accents. For instance, my kobold rogue/fighter has what’s supposed to be a generic Eastern European accent, which wanders unfettered between bad imitations of Russian, German, and Transylvanian accents. I probably should have kept it fettered enough that it didn’t wander to French, though.
This is why I like doing character voices. Makes in-character and out of character quips incredibly easy to differentiate.