Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 9785235" data-attributes="member: 5948">I try to have distinct voices for important NPCs, but I’m not a professional voice actor and can’t improvise voices worth a damn so I have to plan and practise a bit beforehand, so it’s not practical to do it for every shopkeeper or guard or urchin. My current campaign is the first time I’ve really gotten into it, and it’s actually working better than I expected. It’s a great ‘shorthand’ way of establishing character - you can give an NPC a voice that reminds your PCs that the NPC is young, or uncertain, or dignified, or whatever. And it is a much better toolkit for running scenes with multiple NPCs in a single conversation - much less confusion about who is saying what.The accent thing is a bit fraught though. Do you give all dwarves (for instance) or NPCs from a similar part of the world a similar accent? If so, how many different and distinct Scottish (or German, or Russian or whatever) voices can you do, and are your players going to be able to distinguish one dwarf from another? And similarly, how many different distinct old lady voices can you reliably do, or do you end up just doing one cliched one? I do think it adds to the game. And I don’t get embarrassed or self-conscious about it (I mean, we’re all grown adults who catch up once a fortnight to pretend to be gnomes, and you’re telling me to get embarrassed about silly voices?!). But it’s not always easy and there are a few pitfalls, I hope I get better with practice.</blockquote>

Verification