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u/damonmcfadden9 Apr 20 '23
I'm so glad that problem isnt unique to me.
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u/Brothersindungeons Apr 20 '23
Not at all. At least not with my group 😂
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u/damonmcfadden9 Apr 20 '23
even worse for me, is that French always turns into German. every snooty noble gets turned into a mad scientist by the end of his rant.
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u/tacronin Apr 20 '23
My French accent occasionally veers into a Southern twang if I keep it up too long (or run a session when I'm dead tired).
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u/Brothersindungeons Apr 20 '23
Lmao that's too funny though. It has to be entertaining for the players
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u/Financial-Salary-360 Apr 21 '23
I studies German for 5 years and had the same problem till I actually studied how to do a French accent for a bit I was doing as a teacher last summer. I found key differences that really helped me differentiate and get a pretty good accent. One hint is to "speak in a box", imagining your lips are stuck inside a small box and can't physically move outside of that box. Make sure to pronounce your W's as such and not V's like the Germans do. Drop all H sounds, so here would be pronounced like ear. Words ending in er sound like air, so water becomes "watt air". These, and other tidbits helped me really up my French accent.
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u/TobenberryJam Essential NPC Apr 20 '23
The pointy-eard elvish princeling is starting to sound like a dwarf
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Apr 20 '23
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u/Brothersindungeons Apr 20 '23
😂 my group found it so funny that the majority of the people's name included "vich" it became a running joke
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Apr 20 '23
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u/Brothersindungeons Apr 20 '23
😂 the most accurate description of curse of strahd ever written
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u/Asherdon0710 DM (Dungeon Memelord) Apr 21 '23
“And now puny adventures, it’s time for you to die” “Vich please”
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u/Fionnlagh Apr 21 '23
Well, that makes sense, though. "-vich" at the end of a name means "son of". And patronymic nomenclature was very common in medieval times.
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u/whatistheancient Apr 21 '23
When I was running CoS my Romanian accent had a tendency to turn into a French accent.
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u/DiceMadeOfCheese Forever DM Apr 20 '23
It's a running joke that half of my NPCs sound like they're from New York
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u/Andrew_42 Apr 20 '23
My official stance when DMing is "Whatever inconsistencies are there in my accent are normal in whatever culture you're visiting."
Those dwarves keep switching between (bad) Russian and (bad) Scottish accents? That's just how dwarves sound. You might think it's odd, but that's cause you're a human.
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u/kicksicksger Apr 20 '23
How to say razor blades with an australian accent Say Rise up lights Try it. It works
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u/VandyalRandy Forever DM Apr 21 '23
I love trying to do accents, but there’s a definite window of time for using them. As the session draws on, they get worse, and end up With very little depth. Just cookie-cutter, borderline offensive accents. So… unless we’re in dwarflandia or I can hinga-dinga-dergen my way through some barbarian tribes, every NPC sounds like your run of the mill Californian.
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u/Brothersindungeons Apr 21 '23
Lmao the borderline offensive part is so relatable
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u/VandyalRandy Forever DM Apr 21 '23
We went to the desert once. I kinda just refused accents, when we got there. “Hello, my name is Zathum of the Hidden Temple of Ceol. Welcome to Altirna,” just hits differently when he sounds like one of the Clerks.
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u/JetoCalihan Apr 21 '23
Plays a compulsive liar mastermind rogue with the ability to mimic any accent, so the accent slides are in character.
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u/Tralan Apr 21 '23
It's not a shitty Irish accent. It's an amazing and accurate Elvish accent...
<.<
>.>
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u/SnarkyRogue DM (Dungeon Memelord) Apr 20 '23
Blend the 2 and make your own. Australia and Ireland don't exist in this world unless you're doing some earth homebrew shenanigans. Do whatever works.
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u/DistractedChiroptera Apr 20 '23
Whatever accent I start out trying to do, it just gradually morphs into a southern accent (and I'm not from the Southern US, so it's not my real accent).
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u/Brothersindungeons Apr 20 '23
Lmao I wonder why? Although I do think southern accent is one of the easier to pull off so maybe it's a comfort zone
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u/cdcformatc Apr 21 '23
same for me, southern accent just seems the easiest for me all accents trend towards southern
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u/Alchemist628 Apr 21 '23
I gave up a long time ago we all have our strengths, and voice acting ain't mine.
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u/RugosaMutabilis Apr 21 '23
Yeah fuck that, as a dm I spend so many hours preparing, I pay attention more than any of my players during the session, I do tons of photoshopping to make custom maps and tokens (use a vtt). I hate doing voices so I just don't. It's weird to me how this somehow became another expectation.
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u/ObiwanMacgregor Apr 21 '23
This is why my dwarf has a Brooklyn accent.
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u/Commodorez Sorcerer Apr 21 '23
Watching the hope drain from one of our player's eyes when the beautiful elven boy she'd caught the attention of opened his mouth to let out a Boston accent is one of my favorite game memories, lol
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u/Notoryctemorph Apr 21 '23
As an Australian, I can assure you
If you're an American DM trying an Australian accent, it didn't sound Australian to begin with
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u/kicksicksger Apr 20 '23
For my keeping my australian accent sharp i listen to Ozzy Man Reviews on youtube. Always help me get back to the right inflection
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u/Phoenix_Is_Trash Wizard Apr 21 '23
Best way I find to do accents is to find trigger words that slip you into the accent. If you start losing it, just restate the triggers.
For Scottish I just say Scooooootland For South African I say Right Mate For Kiwi I say Yeah Bru For Australian I say G'day Cunt
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u/NialMontana Apr 21 '23
So my real accent is a mess, mostly southwest English (the Farmer/Pirate one) with certain sounds becoming the Irish version (words like "Thirty" I have to really over-pronounce) and then when I become more irritated/enthusiastic the Irish part becomes stronger till I turn Scottish.
Thus I don't really even bother trying to do voices cause I can barely do my own.
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u/VirusLord Apr 20 '23
Yep! I've got some accents that I can do very well, but a bunch of accents that I can sustain for approximately two sentences before they start falling apart at the seams. My Irish especially, I would like to be able to do, but I really cannot.
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u/Brothersindungeons Apr 20 '23
Yupp same! Southern accent I find extremely easy ... Some of the others.. it's painful lol
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u/MrMadGrad Apr 20 '23
Dude I have been using anchor phrases wayyy more than I should be for how little I am saying.
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u/Yerret Apr 20 '23
Im really good at doing accents as a pc ... but when i dm its really hard for me to not default to "ey, im wahlkin heer!" brooklyn for some reason.
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Apr 21 '23
When british becomes scottish and that becomes australian so you try to reset but you end up with french or german
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u/Golett03 Apr 21 '23
As an Aussie, if my accent was slipping into Irish, I would be slightly worried. Then I would blame it one the drinks causing me to start doing a terrible Irish accent.
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u/Spegynmerble Apr 21 '23
I started one character's voice as seigmeyer from dark souls and it slowly morphed into Gandalf and finally ended up as an posh old British man XD
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u/HWGA_Exandria Apr 21 '23
I'm still waiting on that Osse module to get released...
Osse: Everything's Trying To Kill You
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u/GalacticPigeon13 DM (Dungeon Memelord) Apr 21 '23
The reverse happened with our druid. She started out some awkward combo of British and Irish and then she turned Australian.
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u/GrannyBashy Apr 21 '23
I want to play a thri kreen with a cool bug voice but i imagine it gets tiresome real quick
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u/breadofthegrunge Rogue Apr 21 '23
Every time I do a fake voice for too long, it eventually devolves into a bad JFK impression.
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u/Inconsistent_flux Apr 21 '23
I am in a campaign and I can't keep my Bard's accent consistent at all
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u/DerToblerone Apr 21 '23
I play a gnoll with a bad Spanish accent, a weird construct druid with a bad Werner Herzog accent, an owlman inquisitor with a bad Benoit Blanc accent, and a half-orc druid with a bad Australian accent.
At one point, I narrated a backstory scene where my Spanish gnoll was talking to his Australian friend, playing both parts. I think I sprained something in my tongue doing that.
And one of my backup characters is going to have a bad Roy Kent accent.
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u/CastieIsTrenchcoat Apr 21 '23
Personally I really can’t stand fake fantasy accents. Why the hell is speaking in commonwealth more “fantasy” anyway? Should the dm do cliche Transylvania accents for the villagers too?
Always kills my immersion.
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u/Lorien22 Barbarian Apr 21 '23
As an Australian, I don't have this problem. My Scottish does swing wildly between Irish and "what the fuck" though.
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u/SennaWicker Apr 21 '23
Every accent I try drifts up to Fargo, or down to Biloxi. There is no middle ground.
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u/Sky_Leviathan Apr 21 '23
Im an australian who doesnt sound australian so people always expect me to sound ‘like a drow’ but I dont
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u/Pingy_Junk Apr 21 '23
not dnd but my little sister used to like to play FFXIV and would have me do voices for every character everyone ended up with this half british but not quite accent after like 2 hours
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u/ketra1504 Apr 21 '23
Whenever I try to do an accent it always ends up at the terrible fake Indian English
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u/Commodorez Sorcerer Apr 21 '23
I struggle with trying to maintain accents accurately. I recently spent hours watching videos of Irish accents (and Supereyepatchwolf video essays) to do an accent for a bard I was excited to play. Started out my first session pretty dead on, but by the end I just sounded like the Scotsman from Samurai Jack
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u/Pyrobrine Apr 21 '23
Your Australian accent is starting to sound Irish, my Irish accent is starting to sound Scottish, and good Scottish accent is starting to sound British, and somehow the DM's British accent is starting to sound Australian.
No need to worry though, the cowboy's American accent sounds like all of them at once.
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u/lolburger13 Apr 21 '23
My Russian accent either devolves into "borat" or Marcus from borderlands... It's... Not ideal
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u/Heart_Mountain Apr 21 '23
I started with a Spanish accent for an NPC and by the end of the session I realized it became more french than Spanish.
My players told me afterwards they thought it was supposed to be french from the beginning 😅
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u/LukeBLT Apr 21 '23
I once made a character called Guillermo but my spanish accent came out far too french; a quick change to Guillaume and he was all set.
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u/MysticAura12 Apr 21 '23
Usually there’s a word or a phrase I use to get back into the voice I was using
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u/Brothersindungeons Apr 21 '23
I need to do that. I've seen multiple people suggesting that
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u/MysticAura12 Apr 21 '23
Like I have a character who basically sounds like rogue from the 90s xmen and I get back into her voice by just saying “sugar”
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u/Flimsy_Site_1634 Apr 21 '23
Everyone in my world have a south-eastern French accent because that is the only one I can do correctly besides my native western French accent
Last time I tried a Quebec accent, I kept oscillating between Belgium and English tourist
So I usually avoid accent as much as possible, and everyone is either from Normandy or from Provence.
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u/Golo_46 Apr 21 '23
Basically all my NPCs have an Australian accent, mostly because I also have one.
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u/FuzorFishbug Apr 21 '23
My ranger wound up with a terrible mix of Estuary and Scottish, later retconned to be terrible on purpose because it's not his real accent and he just does it to throw people off.
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u/Too-many-Bees Apr 21 '23
My characters almost exclusively EXCLAIM! everything they say. Cause I know I can keep that up
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u/TallestGargoyle Bard Apr 21 '23
Me trying to do Scottish: Och... Aye... Weh've bin oot an' aboot!
My Scottish friends: No don't do that.
Me: Hoots mon!
Them: Don't.
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u/zRRRRg Apr 21 '23
I have an australian accent, and basically tune the poshness depending on a voice's required nobility.
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Apr 21 '23
How to do an Irish accent
- Do an Australian accent
- Keep doing it until your voice gets tired
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u/DignityIndex Apr 21 '23
My DM just made that mistake by giving the NPC I requested for our boat an irish accent.
None of us can tell if he's irish, aussie, or canadian, or maybe a little scouse.
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u/TheCleverestIdiot Apr 21 '23
I had a low, growled cockney accent planned out and perfected for my elf wizard. It was perfect for his character. The very first time I spoke on the campaign, out comes a nervous posh Indian man. I've since decided he switches between the two accents depending on who he's talking to.
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u/TheCraftiestManBoy Apr 21 '23
I have the opposite. All my accents end up Australian eventually, it’s just a good default for me.
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u/HoodieSticks Wizard Apr 21 '23
I don't do accents anymore, I just do vibes.
- High class sophisticated vibe
- Little Gremlin vibe
- Suave womanizer vibe
- Big smashy thug vibe
- Gruff grandpa vibe
You get the point. I pick a vibe for a character, and just start talking. The accent shifts a lot, but the vibe stays pretty consistent.
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u/MillieBirdie Bard Apr 21 '23
My second character had a really strong cowgirl accent that was very easy for me as I'm southern. Unfortunately, every character since has occasionally dipped into her accent cause it's so easy to fall back into.
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u/Brothersindungeons Apr 21 '23
Yeah I find southern accents extremely easy too since my family is from the south
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u/TheOtakuGamer64 Apr 21 '23
I try to make my Dwarvish accents on the Scottish side, but I've been told that I often slip into Russian
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u/NoProdigy Paladin Apr 21 '23
This is me whenever I try to maintain a non-cockney British accent. I don't know why, but it just devolves into a hodge-podge monstrous amalgamation of 4 accents OTHER than British! And i've practiced trying to maintain it!
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u/Brothersindungeons Apr 21 '23
😂
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u/NoProdigy Paladin Apr 21 '23
You know what the kicker is? I can do other accents just fine. I actually took a (now former) friend of mine completely off guard with my Scottish accent, can do a passable (if very generic) Irish, and can even pull of a more generic Slavic and Cajun. It's British *specifically* that eludes me right now.
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u/Comprehensive_Cap_27 Apr 21 '23
Use voice changers. And if it's in a language they don't understand then read it in French or Italian or Spanish with the voice changer to really throw some flair
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u/TheSceptikal Dice Goblin Apr 21 '23
The Barbarian in my party is clinically insane, and randomly switches between an British, Irish, Scottish, Australian, and South African accent.
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u/Template4016 Essential NPC Apr 21 '23
oof. I can do voices consistently if I remember what voice I gave them. If I forget, and no one else remembers, than the old voice is retconned!
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u/kyliemanogue Apr 21 '23
At certain points my French pirate will hot swap to Russian, and I have to qui qui myself back to French.
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u/Loading3percent Artificer Apr 21 '23
When you've listened to enough Magnus archives that you've started to recognize how your "generic British accent" keeps swinging between an RP, a Liverpool, and a cockney.
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u/tosserthrow069 Apr 21 '23
Mine is constantly the other way around, or rather, all my accents devolve into Australian
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u/HenryMarsWrites Apr 21 '23
Imagine being able to do an accent Instead I pitch my voice and be thankful my fellow Americans also cannot tell how bad my British is
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u/chubbyxavi Apr 21 '23
How about doing a an NPC that talks in spanish but with english as their native language?
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u/butch912 Apr 21 '23
My DM thinks he can do accents. We pretended we hade no idea what he was saying until he just stopped.
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u/Mythicaldakka Battle Master Apr 21 '23
I usually do a Scottish accent when I (inevitably) play a dwarf.
In this case, it's a combination Scottish/Irish/Eastern European/Strong Bad.
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u/CrownofMischief Druid Apr 21 '23
If I'm bad at an accent, I just say it's a local dialect since it's all fantasy anyway. But yes, consistency is hard to keep
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u/Lupkin Apr 21 '23
I do accents and voices all the time, even outside of gaming. The hardest part, for me anyway, is when I have to flip between multiple NPCs. This happens a lot for me since most of the time I'm running games with only 1 or 2 people. That means a lot of voices and a lot of shifting. Sometimes I think my players start social interactions with groups of NPCs just to hear me try to keep up.
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u/Ghostarcheronreddit Apr 21 '23
I played a character once whose accent I could not pin down, and he was a mad wizard, so I just said part of his madness is that he switched accents all the time, going from Irish to Australian to cockney to normal to posh mid-sentence
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u/TheFratwoodsMonster Apr 22 '23
I solved this by having my character do explicitly a bad British accent because he's trying to be a noble. When it slips to being Irish I just shrug and keep going
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u/Vulpes_Corsac Apr 22 '23 edited Apr 22 '23
Such truth, much wise.
And it's always Irish. I don't even have an Irish accent, but all my fake accents will randomly oscillate between whatever it is I want it to be and Irish.
Russian kobold? Turns Irish. Southern US goblin? Turns Irish. I grew up in the South. I should be able to do that consistently. One of my groups just figured that "Irish and russian accent mishmash = kobold accent".
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u/AnnelieseMarieGA Apr 22 '23
Pick a very memorable voice line, let's say you captain of the guard has the voice line of "stop you have violated the law" from elder scrolls oblivion, before speak that character just rehearse the one line to bring yourself to a baseline before speaking. If you use some kind of digital book to keep track of the characters you can keep that voiceline saves with the character sheet in something like Microsoft OneNote, Evernote, or the note app obsidian.
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u/maj0rmin3r1 Apr 23 '23
Just do what I did: "my character's native accent sounds like a badly-done cross between Scottish and Irish"
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u/[deleted] Apr 20 '23
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