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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Olaf the Stout" data-source="post: 2766513" data-attributes="member: 13703">Hi Guys,I have just started DM'ing a 3.5E Freeport campaign having not had much experience in DM'ing before.  So far the areas that I feel I am a little lacking in are my combat descriptions and my NPC dialogue/voices.In combat I try to describe the results of the dice but after a while they just seem to become repetitive and start to sound like:"You stab him with your sword.  He's bleeding.  He doesn't seem to be too happy about it."Ok, so it's not quite that bad but it's not much better.  I have encouraged the players to describe their actions based on the results of their dice rolls and a couple of players have started doing this.  This is good because it involves the players more and helps to provide some variety.  I'm sure that there are other things that I could be doing to make things sound a little more exciting and different.Something I have been trying to do is to compare the dice roll with the AC of the person they were attempting to attack and see how close they were to actually doing some damage.  If the result was less than the 10 it's just a miss.  If they hit an AC higher than 10 but lower that the armour bonus the blow bounced off the armour.  If they just miss by 1 or 2 points I might say that their opponent dodged out of the way at the last second (Dodge bonus) or if their opponent has some sort of protection spell such as Mage Armour active then I try and describe an invisible barrier turning the blow aside.  Often though in the heat of combat I forget about doing these sort of things and resort back to "You hit, he misses" type descriptions.The other area that I find myself lacking in is NPC dialogue/voices.  We have nearly completed the Freeport adventure "Dead Man's Quest".  In the adventure was a pirate captain.  I tried to put on a bit of a pirate voice while I was talking as the captain but I felt like a bit of a tool doing it and overall I think that I did a pretty poor job of it.  Apart from adding "Yaaarrrr!" at the end of each sentence I was kind of lacking an idea of how exactly to talk.I also feel like all my NPC's, whether they are pirates, educated or common riff-raff and sound the same.  Even if I try to differentiate them they all seem to drift back to my normal speaking voice the longer that I talk.  Can anyone give me some advice on how I can improve in this area?Well this post is kind of long so I'll just end it here I think.  Thoughts/ideas?Olaf the Stout</blockquote>

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