Roleplaying accents?

[RodneyThompson]

It kind of depends. When I'm GMing, I alternate between using accents and not. As a player, I rarely do. On occasion I'll adopt a speaking pattern--in my Monday night Expedition to Undermountain game run by Mike Mearls my character talks and acts like Zap Brannigan of Futurama fame. Similarly, I had a character that was basically an undead pirate, so I spoke with the kind of "Dark Rastafarian" accent like the trolls use in World of Warcraft. "Zis ____ is cursed!" was my favorite line.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

No. We mostly talk in third person as well. "I'm going to ask the Barkeep why he is such a sissy..." instead of trying to act it out. If it's a bigger situation we will sometimes RP it but usually we leave the bad accents behind.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

I would like to, but I usually mangle the accent pretty throughly. I have a great German accent, but after a couple of sentences it becomes Russian. Which is wierd, because I can speak German but I don't know any Russian.

Hmm. Maybe my German has a Russian accent...

That's pretty much what happens to me. Except that mine are bad to begin with and usually end up sounding Irish.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I'm quite good at accents and character voices. I tend not to use them a lot for characters or NPC's because it's hard to keep it up for too long without it getting tedious (or at least so it seems to me). In any case I don't do all that much roleplay in first person because my PLAYERS don't.

However, when the spirit moves me I have done characters and accents for particular instances - and I've KILLED with them. Best one I ever did was probably "Luigi" the Type II demon with a bad Italian accent. He was in a sealed vault and thought it was his best shot at convincing the PC's to open the door and break the seal if he could convince them that contrary to the DETECT EVIL results he was not a threat.

"I do not a-suppose you could-a let-a me out, eh? Eets-a not-a so nice een-a heeah you know."

The players just could NOT reconcile the voice to the solid evil ping behind the door and could NOT decide what to do, so they just kept talking to him and his evasive answers kept them squirming. I, at least, was having a blast. When they finally found out the truth they were rotfl for some time. I still throw that voice at them at key moments IRL and it sets them off EVERY time.

 

[Piratecat]

I play D&D as an excuse to use accents and odd voices. It's a talent I have fun using.

 

[Lanefan]

I play D&D as an excuse to use accents and odd voices. It's a talent I have fun using.

I'm with him.

My problem is I only have a repertoire of about 6 different accents that I can usefully maintain for any length of time, so they keep getting re-used.

What I find unexpectedly difficult is to do just a slight accent, rather than the full-meal deal. Anyone else have trouble with this?

Lanefan