Character voices

[Thandren]

Any of you play D&D games where the players put on a 'silly' voice to give there characters personality ?

 

[smootrk]

I have a player with a Drow Mute Mime Bard... very interesting. Sometimes he pantomimes around, sometimes just points, and sometimes he uses a mini-whiteboard at the table.

Wouldn't a game with Robin Williams or Jim Carey as DM be a blast?

 

[Piratecat]

None of the voices are silly, thank goodness - but all of my players have distinctive voices or speech patterns for their characters. It makes it easy to realize when someone is speaking in-character and when they aren't.

 

[Crothian]

Silly might be entertaining for a little while but in a long campaign it can drive people nutty. I do tend to speak differently but it may be only I can tell. I have no skill for different voices.

 

[Wik]

Yeah, I suck at character's voices. I tend to just paraphrase what NPCs are saying, although I do cut in with some voices every now and then - but they're more "language-based" voices over anything I'm doing with my voice box (ie, a wizard uses a different vocabulary over the 1st level commoner).

 

[Mallus]

Silly might be entertaining for a little while but in a long campaign it can drive people nutty.

Heh... it suppose that depends on the quality of the silly accent...

The people in my old Greyhawk campaign seemed to enjoy the chainsmoking Jewish gangster/Harvey Firestein voice I used for my cleric/monk, Grenache Shiraz.

And the genteel Southern cowboy drawl I used for "Eastwood" West in an old Dragonstar game was downright infectious. Everyone at the table started to talk like him after a while.

 

[Crothian]

Heh... it suppose that depends on the quality of the silly accent...

It also depends on the people listening. Even a good quality silly voice can become annoying.

 

[Mallus]

It also depends on the people listening.

Fortunately for me, my friends have low standards.

Even a good quality silly voice can become annoying.

True. But it seems a perfect fit for a silly game.

 

[Ambrus]

I try to speak simple sentences in a deep voice when playing my gold dragon PC. He was just a few months old when we started the campaign and had spent most of that time caged in the back of an alchemist's shop being harvested for spell components. For the first few session I role-played his limited ability to talk by simply dropping lines he'd commonly heard during his imprisonment: "All sales are final", "Be quiet", "Hold still" and "This won't hurt a bit". It was fun to throw some of those in the middle of combat.

Later I started repeating things I heard other party members or NPCs say and eventually started piecing together my own sentences. At first I only spoke in the third person but eventually managed to start using pronouns properly. Nowadays my character just speaks normally although I try to keep that same deep voice. On occasion, when my character gets excited, I start speaking in the third person again.

 

[Michael Morris]

I have a very wide vocal range which I enjoy using in play. My funniest character was a halfling thief who's voicebox was crushed when she was hanged for a crime and cut down before she died. After that day she always talked in, and went by the nickname of 'Whisper'