Do you use accents/"funny voices" when playing your PC?

[cybertalus]

Depends on the character.

Sometimes a voice is so central to the concept of the character that I can't play the character properly without it, such as my old 2E cleric who was a former sailor. His voice was sort of a cross between Wolverine on the old X-Men cartoon and Arte Johnson's Dirty Old Man character from Rowan and Martin's Laugh In. Whenever I tried to do that character without the voice, I just couldn't play him right.

Other times my attempts at a voice just get in the way. When I played a monk in a game where all monks come from that world's Japanese-equivalent culture, my attempts at an accent came out sounding so much like the Trade Federation aliens in The Phantom Menace that I quickly stopped.

 

[ArcOfCorinth]

It really depends.

I tend to do terrible Irish and Scottish accents for NPCs.

Meepo, the kobold, has been a tag a-long for ten levels now and I use the "Smeagol" voice for him.

 

[Herpes Cineplex]

I don't do funny voices when roleplaying my PCs mainly because it's too tiring to maintain, and leads me very quickly to boredom. [..] On the other hand I always do weird or funny voices and acting when portraying NPCs as a DM (of course if it is appropriate to the creature).

Same here.

For a PC, it's just too distracting to try and maintain a silly voice or accent all the time; there are better ways for me to be using my time and energy during a game. The most I'll do is adjust my own speech pattern to fit the character, by using more formal grammar or speaking in softer tones or whatever, and even that will go by the wayside if it starts to get in the way of my fun or anyone else's.

NPCs are different because they're only on-screen for brief periods of time and you have to switch between them so often that even an obnoxiously silly voice doesn't have to be maintained for very long, and besides, anything that helps players tell the difference between NPCs easily is a good thing.

At some point, players are going to figure out my secret rule, though: the sillier the voice, the less important the NPC. Any NPCs with really elaborate accents or voices are either posing as someone else or are utterly irrelevant to whatever's going on, because I'm obviously not planning on having them show up and say anything ever again. Then they'll concentrate all their attention on the NPCs whose "voice" is closest to my own, and that'll be the death of any mystery game I ever run.

--
though i used to be able to do a fairly good pagan sing-song voice from thief: the dark project
ryan

 

[Piratecat]

If I am "in character", yes. If I am "out of character", no.

Yup, same here.

 

[Greylock]

Heck no. I sound really stupid when I try accents. Just not one of my talents. I've played with others who use them to good effect though.

Funny thing, I thought my DM was darn good at accents and characterisation for a while. But I finally realised... [whoops, forgot he reads here.]

 

[s/LaSH]

I think I was born with a couple of ranks of the Voice advantage from GURPS. (I had to give the trophy back for the next year's competition, but I've still got the certificates somewhere.) So when an accent is needed, even if I can't do it justice, I'll delude myself into thinking I can.

Frex, I got mad props from my gaming circle with my Russian Private Eye affectation in our previous In Nomine game (they got me to do a session recap, so I narrated it all as though I were reading it out of a novel, but with this big fake accent, and in subsequent sessions there was never any question as to who was doing the recaps). I blame too much James Bond. Or maybe too much Goon Show in my formative years. Thank you, Messrs Milligan, Sellers and Seacombe! Without you, I'd be a much saner person.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

I don't, despite being a pretty fair mimic. The times when accents and altered voices have come up in our games have usually seen them used for comedic purposes.

Last week a DM ran an hour-long game with an actual plot that he whipped up in the time it took three players to create their PCs, and added to the frantic, humourous feel by doing a terrible Irish accent and encouraging the players to do the same.

In one campaign, a PC indicated that he was speaking in Goblin by adopting an exaggerated Swedish accent (which sparked off a long discussion about mapping D&D languages to real-world languages).

"Oh, no! Zis deer, it iz too large to fit in ze cave! Someone, come out and help me cut it up!"

Two goblins come out, get killed.

"Oh, zis bison, it iz still too big!"

I'm amazed it worked.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

Another memory just surfaced: continuing with the theme of doing accents for comedy purposes, I played in a short-lived Spycraft campaign which conclusively established that my friend Andrew's Russian accent is the SECOND-WORST IN THE WORLD.

 

[Pants]

Sometimes. Only when doing NPC's though. I tried doing a raspy, Vicious-esque voice for an evil cleric I was playing, but it was hell on my throat so I quit. I haven't done it since.

 

[demiurge1138]

I usually prefer to use speech patterns rather than speech accents. The last time I tried an accent for an NPC, it ended up sort of a mix between Australian, Cockney and occasional Texan. I'm out of practice.

I have impressed my players with one specific NPC voice (a bizarre falsetto for a kobold archenemy) that they think I can do voices better than I actually can. So I've got a good racket going on.

Demiurge out.