How To Talk When You're Not A Voice Actor
I’m not Matt Mercer. You probably already knew that.
You’re also not Matt Mercer… unless you are Matt Mercer.
(Hi Matt! Please mention Tool Craft on your show! I would pay for an ad spot, but I can’t afford it.)
What I’m trying to say is, if you’re just a Dungeon Master running a game for a bunch of your friends, chances are you are not an incredible voice actor with a huge repertoire of accents like Jeff Hays or Matt Mercer.
But you don’t have to be. In fact, I’m definitely not and will never have it, but I can still give my characters their own uniqueness by adjusting how I talk, how I narrate, and pitching my voice. You don’t need a repertoire of accents. You just need to be able to talk.
Here are some ways you can adjust your voice and speech so you can create unique voices for your character, even if you can only do a terrible German accent for all your villains.
Narrate the NPC’s Voice
The easiest way of creating a ‘voice’ for an NPC is to simply narrate it like you would read a voice in a book. When reading a book, you can’t hear the character’s accent (well, audiobook… maybe, depends on the narrator). Instead, the author uses words like “snobby,” “stuttering,” or “bellows” to describe the character and how they’re talking. This is also a great method if you aren’t yet comfortable talking as the character.
For example, I’ll often narrate what the character says closer to how an author writes a book, letting the player’s imagination create the voice in their own head.
Bobo-koko, the goblin bartender, looks up at you with fear in his eyes. He screams in a stuttering voice as you approach, “You a-a-adventures are all alike. Y-y-you always steal me best ale!” His voice turns to a squeak at the end.
This is also handy when you don’t want to come up with a bunch of words that the character could say, allowing you to skip through parts of an encounter that are meaningless or would slow the game down.
The farmer shares information about how his crop is doing. His voice is deep like a bass drum. While he is excited to talk about his upcoming harvest, the moment you mention the dragon, he suddenly grows quiet and only mumbles a few more words before turning away from you.
Change Your Speed or Pitch
While people have different accents, they also talk differently within the same accent. Some people are fast talkers, not letting a space in between their words, while others talk so slow you could navigate an oil tanker through the space between words.
When talking as a character, change how fast or slow you talk. A merchant might talk fast, like a carnival barker trying to get your players to buy some cheap knockoff magic items, while the king has a boring way of talking that makes people forget the start of the sentence by the time the king has meandered to the end of the sentence.
This technique can also be used on specific letters. For example, when people describe how snakes talk, they draw out the sssssssss sound. You can do this for any sound or letter you want.
“Aaaalright. I’ll help you aaaadventurers. Saaaay, you waaaant this aaaapple?”
Another way to differentiate your characters is by raising or lowering your pitch. A big man could talk super low, sounding like a millstone grinding on rock, while a child could have a high-pitched squeak that sounds like a mouse talking to the brave adventurers who just rescued them.
This is also great to play with if you are currently speaking on behalf of a teenager NPC. Your table will gleefully mock a teenager when their voice cracks, making the teenage NPC instantly memorable.
Overuse of a Specific Word or Phrase
We all have our favorite words. I use ‘kobolds are the greatest’ and ‘a wide variety of ways’ way too much. I also like to use commas like the sprinkles on a cookie, overloading my sentences with way too many of them (but commas are harder to convey when speaking).
The same is true for everyone. Everyone has words that their brain just likes and uses way too much. We have the cliche that valley girls go ‘OH MY GAWD’ and gymbros say ‘bro,’ and your NPCs can be much the same way. I currently have an NPC who has a political quote ready every time the party goes to talk to him (they roll their eyes and tell me to stop, but they’ll never repress Oleg’s manifesto!)
For example, you might have a druid that only talks in folksy metaphors, finding a way to share a tale about a tortoise and a frog, a scorpion and a frog, or how frogs never jump out of pots of boiling water (in fact, maybe the druid just really likes frogs). Another character could sound like a surfer dude, saying ‘gnarly’ and ‘tubular.’
Not only does this provide characterization, but your table can have fun with those mannerisms, too! They might share a new frog story with the druid, or mimic the surfer’s vocabulary, making the surfer think that they are part of their group.
Mix It All Together
Being the voice for every character in the world is difficult, but you don’t have to make it harder on yourself by learning dozens of accents and trying to match what you see Game Masters are doing on YouTube. Some people have a natural gift for voices, spinning up new ones in a heartbeat.
Other people, like me, just make do with two to three terrible accents and then employ a ton of different tricks to differentiate my NPCs.
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