Roleplaying dialogue styles

[Hypersmurf]

Actually, in my new campaign, Dwarves all have Russian accents...

In the one-shot I just finished, the dwarves had very thick Eastern-European accents, and poor Common

I'm very much a dialogue-in-character person, both as a player and a DM. It's not very often I resort to "He tells you that that sounds fine".

-Hyp.

 

[Capellan]

I do my best to talk like a real person in a fantasy setting (talk about an oxymoron!)

By that I mean that I don't talk like something out of an Arthurian legend ("Prithee, Good Sire ...") but I avoid modern slang, game terms, and such. I also try to invest some of the personality of the character in their voice, so my LN cleric of Hextor is brusque, direct and overbearing; my Neutral Dwarven Wizard is sly, snide and precise, and my NG human ranger has an irish brogue and is generally good-natured and friendly.

 

[sellars]

In one of my groups some of us try to play 1st person with an accent and all, and some refuse to play like that (rather playing 3rd person perspective), which is rather annoying.

in the 2 other groups everybody plays 1st person, and when it applies uses accents and everything.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I have regional accent stereotypes in my campaign, and generally use them to portray additional information about the NPC (cadlanese speak very clipped, Singharese speak slowly, Borderlanders have an irish brogue).

A game that I play in is set in fantasy Erth, with analogs of many modern languages, and like in the sitcom "'Allo 'Allo" we use accents to indicate the language we are speaking in, be it Germanic, Frankish or (occasionally in my characters case Xinghua (chinese))

Dwarves in my campaign speak like Klingons. They are, in fact, like short Klingons (no other star trek analogus exist though).

 

[Teflon Billy]

In our campaign if the conversation just needs to happen but isn't of great import, we'll go the "I ask the shopkeeper for a potion," route. If it's more important than that, we will talk in character. I usually start off saying "I say," just as a statement that I'm going into "in character" mode, then I speak as my character would....

That's pretty much us too.

Our great shortcut is, when "bringing someone up to speed" (that is, reiterating information that everyone at the table has already heard) We just point at our heads and make a beeping noise...this is a holdover from our Cyberpunk days and is colloquially known as "giving them the chip" (meaning a memory chip)

 

[Teflon Billy]

Fairly often we come across what is fast-becoming the newest "Gamers Stereotype"; the dwarf whose entire personality is "Screaming Scottish Psycho"

This predates John Rhys-Davies as Gimli...anyone have any idea where it originated?

 

[Lord Pendragon]

As a DM, I do "voices" though that doesn't always mean an accent. Sometimes it's merely altering my normal voice to make it deeper, or adding in a certain scratchiness. I find that, regardless of how good my accents actually are, they are very good at getting me into character, and are very fun for me personally.

As a player, I've tried the accent, but just gotten funny looks. I think you need to have a group where everyone's doing a voice, for it to go over very well. Now, I just alter the pitch of my voice somewhat, so that the DM and other players can tell that I'm speaking in character, without resorting to third person.

 

[Dirigible]

"Screaming Scottish Psycho"
This predates John Rhys-Davies as Gimli...anyone have any idea where it originated?

Rhys-Davies being neither psycho, Scottish or particularly prone to screaming. Okay, he did play Gimli with a rather Scottish accent; you can have that one. Boybach.

That it came form Blizzard games seems pretty feasible; some combination of Griswold and the Dwarven Demolition Team, possibly?

Generally, if the conversation is asking directions, shopping for muffins or other nonessential gubbinry, I synopsise. Otherwise, it's more like:

or is it more like a real person - "Hey, wait a sec, guys. Do you see this staff? It says right here: Minister of Pain. Now, you're not gonna give the Minister of Pain any problems, are you? Good. Now get your ass outta here before I hit you with a horrid wilting, if you know what I mean."

And I'm definitely stealing the Minister

 

[Herpes Cineplex]

I think it's funny how dwarves seem to have Scottish accents nowadays, as opposed to the older German accents.

I've noticed that, too. All dwarves are now a bunch of short Scottish Vikings with axe fetishes. It's weird.


Our group uses a mixture of the three dialogue styles. We paraphrase and synopsize conversations with NPCs that aren't particularly interesting, or ones we can't justify spending that much time on. So arranging to have the horses stabled and fed will get "I ask the guy running the place to have someone look after our horses tonight" as readily as King Royalpants gets "We tell him all about what we did at the fortress, and make sure he knows that Duke Evilguy is probably still out there."

Synopsis also gets used when a character's much better at public speaking than the player is (or when the player just doesn't feel up to trying to make a speech). "I give an impassioned speech to the troops to raise their spirits and make them willing to give their all in this next battle. Later on, I tell the squad leaders about the wolves, and make sure they know what to do when the wizards up on the ridge start casting."

So we end up speaking in-character only for the conversations we think are interesting for some reason. If an NPC seems particularly cool, that might prompt more in-character dialogue. PC-to-PC conversations tend to be in-character. If the subject under discussion is one that's important to a character, the dialogue is more in-character than not.

And whether it's casual or pseudo-fantasy-ish really is a matter of taste. Personally, I absolutely HATE the way fantasy characters typically speak; it drags me right out of the game and makes the character seem shallow and phony. Fortunately for me, no one in our gaming group is all that fond of it, either, so I'm rarely subjected to it.

Sometimes I'll use exagerratedly formal phrasing for things to indicate that I'm being really polite, diplomatic, and/or snooty, but mostly I just say things in modern colloquial English. It's convenient, it expresses exactly what I want to express, and it lets me concentrate on the content of what my character is saying rather than get bogged down by trying to pseudo-medievalize it.

--
if i could rattle off shakespearean blank verse more easily, i might feel differently
ryan

 

[Berandor]

Between characters, I mostly speak "in character", even though the rest of the group is more likely to keep to third person descriptions or out-of-character speak ("modern speak").

In dialogue with the DM, we use the abbreviated form for most dialogues, and speak in character for important scenes.

I like to have my characters give off cinematic statements, and I have even held a speech of two. One of my characters, a grieving LN wizard out for vengeance once spoke before a big battle about the power of hate - that I rolled a 35 on my diplomacy check was the icing on the cake