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D&D General BG3 Massive Spoiler Thread


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The voice acting community was criminally underpaid for a long time, and it became a somewhat "ruthless" practice to hire impersonators at even lower rates to get almost the same sounding voice. So voice actors developed an unspoken agreement that they would NOT directly imitate the voices of established voice actors to undercut the practice. If you did directly imitate, you had trouble getting jobs.

Eg, you could hire someone besides Kevin Conroy to do Batman, but the new person isn't supposed to try and sound exactly like Kevin Conroy (even if the studio pushed them to do so). Of course there's always quibbling about whether or not a voice sounds too similar, and the old "starving voice actor just needs to put food on the table" argument.

In any case Matt Mercer knows this, so there's some scuffle about why he imitated Jim Cummings so closely. And Jim Cummings didn't know about it / wasn't approached by Larian, WotC, or Mercer. Mercer himself has a lot of credibility so it's doubtful any harm was intended, but something happened there.
I'm sure this was true at some point, but it obviously hasn't been true for at least a couple of years.

It's extremely obvious why Cummings wasn't approached - not only is he 70, which might or might not have been an issue, but more importantly, in the civil case with his ex-wife, even the stuff he didn't deny makes him an extreme creep by most people's standards. I won't give details here because animal abuse and sexual abuse (separate, not together) are triggering to a lot of people. He technically won the civil suit, but again, what he admitted to puts him beyond the pale for a lot of people.

A similar situation has occurred with Rick & Morty - the VA for both, who had long ago basically stopped being involved with the show creatively (just doing the voices for the last few years), got away from a criminal domestic violence charge (because it was dropped, as they often are), but essentially had to admit extremely questionable/creepy behaviour with a lot of teenage girls (because it was recorded in text messages), which again stops short of obvious criminality, but is beyond the pale for perhaps the majority of people.

And what's happening with the voices for Rick & Morty? They're using sound-a-like VAs (two instead of one).

Or for a less scandalous example, look at Mario's voice - no not Chris Pratt - actual Nintendo game Mario. Charles Martinet has been replaced with a very good sound-a-like - to the point that a game came out and people didn't know it wasn't Martinet until he said he retired before that.

So it looks like the unspoken agreement has developed a degree of nuance, specifically that if:

A) You're controversial/creepy enough in your personal behaviour that people don't want to be associated with you, you can be swapped for a sound-a-like.

B) If you age out of being able to do a voice, or retire, it's now acceptable for the next person to do a sound-a-like of your voice, rather than having to make it their own.
 




Reynard

Legend
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I justnearly killed Laz in the creche and then the doctor locked us in the room and upon leaving we had to kill a whole bunch of Githyanki. Should I revert back a save? Am I screwed if I started a fighting them here?
 



I justnearly killed Laz in the creche and then the doctor locked us in the room and upon leaving we had to kill a whole bunch of Githyanki. Should I revert back a save? Am I screwed if I started a fighting them here?
The only way to not kill lots of Githyanki (possibly every last one) is to not go to Rosymorn.
 

Are you sure? It doesn't sound like her at all.
I'm not sure. It's definitely not the same actor (Aisling Groves-McKeown VS Mariya Anastasova), but a letter mentions that Raphael delights in Hope's singing when she's alone in prison, so I assumed the first voice was intended to be the deuteragonist of the House.
 

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