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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mark" data-source="post: 1918656" data-attributes="member: 5">These <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/ref=dp_searchBox_1/002-4449542-4116006?url=index%3Dbooks%26dispatch%3Dsearch%26results-process%3Dbin&field-keywords=acting+with+an+accent" target="_blank">"Acting with an Accent" products by David Stern</a> work well and I've picked up a few different accents and dialects for stage work with them.  This <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/9992224223/qid=1103507161/sr=1-4/ref=sr_1_4/002-4449542-4116006?v=glance&s=books" target="_blank">one</a> is for Sottish.  It's worth mentioning that simply doing an accent for comic affect doesn't have legs without the proper material, and it's actually the material that gets the laughs in the long run.  You're better off not going "over the top", but rather doing it subtly and well (almost as a afterthought).  Pushing to do the biggest scenery-chewing accents with nothing to say or worthy of attention will more likely bring a game to a screeching halt.I know one DM who does one (count it, one) squeaky voice and it became very tiresome when that same voice was used for each session but for different characters; One time it was for a small child, then for an imp, another time for an old woman.  It wasn't inappropriate for any of the individual times he did use it, but it got to the point where myself and others were wondering what type of appropriate character would be shoehorned into a given session's events so he could break it out.  It got distracting, to say the least.I do a lot of accents, dialects, and impressions but break them out very, very sparingly so that they don't overwhelm or detract from the meat of the game.  I won't use any particular accent or dialect for a given race or region (as a general rule), but rather just use them very lightly to denote when a particular character should stand out as interesting or noteworthy...but foreign (in some way).  If you do them subtly enough, they are almost imperceptible, and undefinable, but will help to clue in your players that something is up or askew.Sometimes I'll utilize the impressions for comic affect (about the only time to use them without plunging the game into a stand up act) but I try to make it otherwise of importance to the game, as well.  I had one group who always used a particular city gate because the two guards (as Stalone and Schwarzenegger) who worked "the swing shift" always gossiped about the people who had passed through earlier in the day...if you got them talking about it.  The image of those two gossiping, with their voices but in the style of a couple of elderly women, just cracked me up, but was also a good vehicle to pass along information to the players.  They might be arguing about the clothing of someone while unwittingly giving out information about who it was, where they were from, what they had in their cart, etc.  (Stalone - "What a shabby cloak he wore!"/Schwarzenegger - "Yes!  He was dressed like a refuge from Somethingland, with no pride whatsoever!"/Stalone - "I'll doubt they'll allow him to stay at the Local Arms Hotel no matter how much of his gold he breaks out of those chests!"),  Part of the fun was that I definitely never named them Stalone or Schwarzenegger, and I even denied I was doing impressions of them, though, of course, everyone knew exactly what I was doing.Anyway, that's some of my thinking regarding unusual voices and their use in roleplying games, for whatever it is worth... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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