LogFAQs > #896666622

shadowsword87 posted...

I do want to ask you PO, when you played an IRL RPG over a decade ago, did you use voices/accents at all?

Depends. Most of the time as GM, I generally delivered lines in a sort of third person ("He tells you to travel north, where you'll find the thing you seek"), but occasionally I'd drop into a more direct first-person sort of speaking voice (usually for more ominous or combative lines - "This will be your tomb, fools!"). I rarely did accents because I didn't feel 100% comfortable with them (though I DID have one deliberately annoying NPC who talked like Sylvester Stallone in the later Rocky movies, and my players would moan to themselves whenever they heard me start with the mumbling mushmouth talk, because they knew who it was before I ever described him physically). But if I was doing direct dialogue, I would try to put proper inflection into the words, and might occasionally pitch my voice up a bit (for "innocent" characters) or down a bit (for sinister characters).

As a player (as rarely as it happened ~grumble~), I did feel I was sort of obligated to talk first person (ie, "I do this" instead of "He does this" or "My character does this", and delivering dialogue as I would say it, rather than paraphrasing). I still didn't use accents, though, because I'm not hugely comfortable with them (my accents are stereotypical as hell, and if I talk with them for two long they tend to drift in and out, so I might start off Irish, stray into Russian, and end up Jamaican all in one paragraph). So any given character would just sound like me (this is also partly why I avoided playing as female PCs back then).

When I used to play online, I felt a lot more free/comfortable with dialogue (part of the reason why I'm not necessarily a huge fan of playing online with mics), so I'd be much more inclined to pepper dialogue with implied accents (like comics do with Rogue and her "Ah reckon so" sort of Southern accent), foreign-isms (sort of the way comics do with Gambit, where he's speaking perfect English but then ends with a "ma chere"), or even outright foreign dialogue with subtitles (basically, we'd write what we wanted to say in English, run it through Babelfish, translate it into French or whatever, then post it. It didn't result in perfectly accurate translations, but it did a lot to set mood, and meaning wasn't lost because we'd always provide the original English translation to other players - assuming their characters actually SPOKE the language being used). Being online also sort of opened the door for me to play female characters in first person (both as PC and GM), because I feel a lot less inhibited writing out female dialogue than I do trying to speak it in my natural deep, baritone voice (though Brian Posehn playing Calliope in the Force Grey games shows that you can get away with it if you're playing with the right people).

Finally - and I feel like I've told this anecdote before (but let's be honest, I'm old so I've probably told most of my anecdotes before, multiple times, until it gets sort of tiresome for everyone) - I did run one game where I deliberately tried to push the idea of accents and "real" dialogue as a sort of experiment. So not only was I trying to use active voice as GM as much as possible, but I created stereotypical NPCs with blatant accents which I then gave to the players, and I would make them run them as a sort of co-GM whenever those NPCs showed up. And I would give the players extra XP for their main characters if they played those NPCs with consistent active voice and accents, and just sort of threw their hearts into it.

(little bit more on this in a bit, hit character limit here)


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