D&D General Matt Colville on the “Forever DM”

[The Soloist]

Curse you! I had to rewatch it for the hundredth time. Excellent. 3.5 million views at this juncture.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

This might well be cultural. I don’t know where Colville comes from (he has always struck me as west coast but that could be wrong). However like a lot of gamers his accent seems fairly neutral (at least by US standards) and that makes it hard to gauge (I know people Born in Charlestown Boston or NY who talk like him despite the rest of their family having heavy accents). In the NE I think this comes off as being invested in the conversation and trying to engage the listener. I would almost describe him as milquetoast

Some people have a different public speaking voice than they do for everyday.

For some reason my dad always had a Scot’s accent for public speaking, despite being a scouser.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Some people have a different public speaking voice than they do for everyday.

For some reason my dad always had a Scot’s accent for public speaking, despite being a scouser.

I have noticed this. As you can imagine lots of people around Boston have heavy local accents but they were doing a call in looking for people with Boston accents on the radio yesterday and a woman with a very heavy accent said she worked at a call center and showed off her ‘phone voice’, which was completely different from her normal talking voice. And I feel like I have seen people do this in real life too (I even notice I have a bit more of an accent or very close friends when I am with my family than when I am out in the world: but I don’t have much of an accent these days)

 

[TiQuinn]

If we’re just talking voice, I would listen to Matt Colville’s voice all day long versus the what is typically out there in long form YouTube videos.

Most seem paced at x1.5 or x2 speed where the speaker is rattling off words without ever taking a breath to let something sink it, no matter how complex the topic they may be discussing. There’s the folks out there who have a strange rising lilt to their voice that they use at the end of every sentence, there’s the folks who have this vocal fry at the sounds like every last word is slowly dying. And then there’s the monotone contingent that just don’t seem to know what communicating is about, and these are the ones I typically bail out of when I’m watching.

Delivery matters.

Colville has a radio voice. It’s a stage voice. He has a sense of space and knows when to slow down for emphasis, and can sound like he’s carrying on a conversation even though he’s working off a script. All of this is just massively helpful for communicating and helping the audience understand his point.

 

[damiller]

i think that man is my brother

no he isn't

but he's close

 

[Bedrockgames]

i think that man is my brother

no he isn't

but he's close

This video made me realize that All Men Are Brothers

 

[Saracenus]

Some people have a different public speaking voice than they do for everyday.

For some reason my dad always had a Scot’s accent for public speaking, despite being a scouser.

I have noticed this. As you can imagine lots of people around Boston have heavy local accents but they were doing a call in looking for people with Boston accents on the radio yesterday and a woman with a very heavy accent said she worked at a call center and showed off her ‘phone voice’, which was completely different from her normal talking voice. And I feel like I have seen people do this in real life too (I even notice I have a bit more of an accent or very close friends when I am with my family than when I am out in the world: but I don’t have much of an accent these days)

This is called code-switching where a speaker either switches between languages or dialects of a single language based upon the listener or the circumstance the speaker is in. It can expand into non-lingual aspects as well.

This happens in several ways:

• Using two distinct languages at the same time. Spanglish: A bi-lingual person uses both Spanish and English words in a single sentence or conversation. Example: "Pero WHY do I have to go a la casa?" instead of "But WHY do I have to go home?"
• Using two dialects of the same language at the same time.
• Moving between dialects based upon who the intended audience is. Typical examples are a "phone" voice vs. everyday conversational voice or changing how you explain something based upon the listeners understanding of the topic or a minority groups dialect at home vs. the majority dialect at work.
• Changing clothing styles to blend into a dominate group.

This list is not exhaustive.

I learned a solid "phone" voice because my mother was in Real Estate before there were answering machines or cell phones, so we could not answer the phone in a conversational style because all three children were expected to answer the phone with a professional voice. My mom even drilled a script into us.

This skill helped me get hired for phone tech support where I then learned to convert "Engineer" to normal human. There was also a marked difference how my black co-workers answered the phone vs. how they spoke to me in the lunch room to each other. When I was the only white person with them I was included but when someone who had not been given a pass or was management showed up their business professional voice was right back on.

I have used Spanglish after living in Colombia for a year back in the '80s. It has faded over time but I sill occasionally interject certain Spanish/Colombian phrases into my English conversations unconsciously. Mostly Spanish swear words .

Back in high school I transferred out of my district to the "rich" kid school and within 6 months I had changed my wardrobe for school so I didn't get picked on. My stoner-wear camouflage (I hung out with the stoners, but was stone cold sober) from my middle school days stood out among the preppy dominate wardrobe of my new classmates.

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

This is called code-switching where a speaker either switches between languages or dialects of a single language based upon the listener or the circumstance the speaker is in. It can expand into non-lingual aspects as well.

See:

Sorry to Bother You - Apple TV

In an alternate reality of present-day Oakland, Calif., telemarketer Cassius Green finds himself in a macabre universe after he discovers a magical ke…

tv.apple.com

 

[Swarmkeeper]

You know who (else, for some of you, no doubt) has an even more annoying tone, even though it is not audio? The Angry GM.
You know what he has in common with Colville? He actually has some good advice for running your game.

To be clear, I don't agree with Matt on everything but he does provide advice which does resonate with people and, even if you are not among those people some/most/all the time, he can at least make you think about how you would handle similar situations... and he does it with passion. It's fine if you find his style annoying. But, yeah, I agree with those here urging us all to engage with his point(s) instead of just complaining about his style. Aren't most of us presumably here to learn from one another and improve our respective games? It's a bummer to me when folks crap all over that ideal by dealing out ad hominem attacks on each other and the personalities/designers/publishers in our industry and then add insult to injury by getting all indignant or, at best, getting defensive or making excuses when called out on it. Excusing your threadcrapping on the OP for not giving more of a synopsis of the video? Wow.... just wow.

 

[JediSoth]

I used to play with a group where, while we had 3 GMs (including me), they absolutely refused to play anything else except D&D (3.X at that time) during my game days and no one else wanted to GM games for us during my game days. The group didn't last long after the point where I suggested we play a Star Wars one-shot that night because I'd had a busy week and never finished prepping for D&D and I needed a break from D&D, even for one night. Half the group picked up their things and were about to walk out of the door rather than give me a one-night break from D&D*.

The hard part of finding videos on how to play a different game, though, is wading through bad presentation to find the good videos, and even then, you're not guaranteed to find someone who is going to present the information in a way that actually works for you (because despite what the decision makers in society believe, not every person learns the same way).

At least my group now will try just about any game as long as one of us has a copy of it. The biggest hurdle we have is that it's hard for me to learn most games by reading it and/or by trying to run it. And then, if we have a run of Real Life™ interfering, it makes learning a game and getting into it even MORE difficult. I've been trying to run a Star Trek Adventures game since October-ish and we've managed a whole 4 sessions in that time. Not only am I not retaining the system with all those gaps in playtime, I lost interest in the story I was trying to tell at the table, despite having had the bones of the campaign planned out since the first edition of STA was new. I guess that's the problem with running a group with just the bare minimum number of players we're comfortable having. Scheduling really is the Final Boss of TTRPGs.

* And before people dogpile me for not giving notice for not wanting to run D&D until after everyone showed up (as happened on a different thread here), I will point out this was in the late-1990s/early-2000s (pre-9/11), so instant mass communication wasn't as ubiquitous as it is now. I'm pretty sure some of us didn't even have cell phones.