Speaking in "faux old English" [Poll]
- Thread starter Ringan
- Start date
DestroyYouAlot
First Post
I do use accents, sometimes, but only where [I think] they belong, and I'll tell you why ('cause I know you were just dying to ask 
):
One thing that always struck me about Tolkien, even before I read an interview where he explains it, is that the further you get from "home" - i.e., the more foreign the speaker is to your "point of reference", the hobbits - the more archaic/dialect-y the speech gets. His intention was that you identify with the hobbits, as the most "pastoral modern English" culture, and that you got the same sense of awe and mystery about the strange foreign men and (especially) elves as the hobbits did. The idea was that none of them were speaking English, but the accents and dialects used in place of their actual languages were selected to be familar or foreign, where appropriate.
In my games, depending on the setting, there's usually a "home" culture - the one the adventurers are from, or at least the most familiar with. Most folks from that culture, I portray as "without accent" (or, as accent-less as someone from New England can - luckily, there's no "cahs", they go to taverns instead of "bahs", and "wicked" has an entirely different connotation). I'll use a faux-cockney accent for people who are a bit "rough around the edges", bouncers, dock workers, etc. (no offense to anyone who has a cockney accent in real life, but that's the point of reference to a Yank), and a faux-"upper-class" English accent for people who are either of the nobility or university-educated. Dwarves (in a Tolkien-y stock fantasy setting) get thick Scottish burrs, elves have a hint of a British accent, and humans from foreign cultures get assigned a real-world accent, chosen based on a) real-world analogues of their homeland (those from a northern frontier will either get Scandinavian- or Slavic-sounding accents, for example), and b) my abillity to do the accent without stumbling over it.
I'm shying away from accents more and more, though, other than for a few chosen NPCs, because it interferes with my ability to come up with a distinctive voice for each major character - it's hard enough to play a voice low, high, fast, slow, with a lisp, a tic, whatever, when I then also have to overlay a regional accent on top of that. Alec Guinness I'm not.
):One thing that always struck me about Tolkien, even before I read an interview where he explains it, is that the further you get from "home" - i.e., the more foreign the speaker is to your "point of reference", the hobbits - the more archaic/dialect-y the speech gets. His intention was that you identify with the hobbits, as the most "pastoral modern English" culture, and that you got the same sense of awe and mystery about the strange foreign men and (especially) elves as the hobbits did. The idea was that none of them were speaking English, but the accents and dialects used in place of their actual languages were selected to be familar or foreign, where appropriate.
In my games, depending on the setting, there's usually a "home" culture - the one the adventurers are from, or at least the most familiar with. Most folks from that culture, I portray as "without accent" (or, as accent-less as someone from New England can - luckily, there's no "cahs", they go to taverns instead of "bahs", and "wicked" has an entirely different connotation). I'll use a faux-cockney accent for people who are a bit "rough around the edges", bouncers, dock workers, etc. (no offense to anyone who has a cockney accent in real life, but that's the point of reference to a Yank), and a faux-"upper-class" English accent for people who are either of the nobility or university-educated. Dwarves (in a Tolkien-y stock fantasy setting) get thick Scottish burrs, elves have a hint of a British accent, and humans from foreign cultures get assigned a real-world accent, chosen based on a) real-world analogues of their homeland (those from a northern frontier will either get Scandinavian- or Slavic-sounding accents, for example), and b) my abillity to do the accent without stumbling over it.
I'm shying away from accents more and more, though, other than for a few chosen NPCs, because it interferes with my ability to come up with a distinctive voice for each major character - it's hard enough to play a voice low, high, fast, slow, with a lisp, a tic, whatever, when I then also have to overlay a regional accent on top of that. Alec Guinness I'm not.
GrumpyOldMan
First Post
librarius_arcana said:
So is Berk, or Berkshire hunt, but we won't go there.
LizardWizard
Explorer
Arnwyn said:Other: We use faux cockney accents, because saying "guvnah" makes every game session better.
If only you knew what a similarly-sounding word means in Russian...
Lonely Tylenol
First Post
I use it for characters who are old enough to have lived through that era of language development, and learned to speak Common when it was spoken that way. I don't usually use it for outsiders, who are timeless, and therefore can speak Common in any way it's ever been spoken, with the exception of those outsiders who are trying to affect it deliberately, or those who haven't spoken to a mortal for hundreds of years...the old "angel guarding a forgotten tomb" scenario, for example. It's a good clue to my players that they're dealing with an ancient individual.
Aaron L
Hero
No, it sounds silly. I also get really irritated when its used in the Forgotten Realms in a badly handled and inconsistent manner. They arent speaking English at all, so drop the pretense and the misused "thee's" and "ye's." It's really jarring, and most of the time only serves to irritate me or make me laugh at things that Im not supposed to find funny.
Its especially annoying when people affect this horribly fake style on message boards.
Its especially annoying when people affect this horribly fake style on message boards.
Voadam
Legend
In the collective DM campaign I play and run in we use thee and though for "Olde Tongue" an archaic language used by past civilizations, old church records, and by the olde gods in their communications.
When the game is pbp I use translated languages using google and other online translaters for certain D&D languages. Abyssal is german for instance.
Normal speech for characters is generally otherwise normal.
When the game is pbp I use translated languages using google and other online translaters for certain D&D languages. Abyssal is german for instance.
Normal speech for characters is generally otherwise normal.
Gold Roger
First Post
Pirate Sailing said:
Geez, so that's what a nonnative speaker gets for snagging some random word from a message board and using it.
Really, I agree, should have just said modern english.
