You Can't Do Accents? That's OK.

There is a particular kind of player who can apparently do any accent on command. I can do a handful of voices that are passable accents, but if you put me on the spot and ask me to do a convincing South African or Liverpudlian or Malaysian accent, I’ll sound like a Midwestern American with a speech impediment. And you know what? That's OK.

Despite what you may think from Critical Role or Dimension 20, you don't need to be an actor to play an RPG (nor do you have to be good-looking, but that’s another post). We’re trying to keep track of initiative, adjudicate the rules, describe the room, remember what happened three sessions ago, and keep the adventure moving. Now we're supposed to be Meryl Streep, too? Besides, some of the most successful actors in the world have built entire careers without using different voices. Clint Eastwood is Clint Eastwood in pretty much everything. Bruce Campbell has a little more range, he’s always clearly Bruce Campbell. Harrison Ford has played a wide variety of characters, and yet Indiana Jones, Han Solo and plenty of his other characters still sound like Harrison Ford. Nobody seems to mind. So why should your players or your GM?

The trick is to stop thinking about doing an accent and start thinking about giving a character a voice. You don't have to sound French. You just have to sound different enough that everyone knows they're talking to the French guy.

Change Just One Thing: This is probably the most useful trick of all: don't try to change everything. Pick one thing and exaggerate it slightly. Maybe this character talks very slowly. Maybe they talk extremely fast. Maybe they pause before answering every question. Maybe they speak very quietly or much louder than everyone else. Maybe every sentence sounds like a question. Maybe they carefully pronounce every word. You can create a completely different character without changing your accent at all. Once you've established the voice, you don't have to work very hard to maintain it. If the bartender always talks slowly, the players will recognize him the next time he appears. If the halfling thief always talks too quickly and too much, you don't have to remind anyone who it is (I’m looking at you, Marm). The group will do the remembering for you.

That trick applies to accents, too. I've picked up the following tricks from various sources over the years, and I freely admit that they are more theatrical than accurate. That's fine. We're not trying to win an Oscar. We're trying to make the players go, "Oh! This guy's German." Sometimes that's all you need.

Just Speak Properly: Let's start with the easiest and most common one: British. You can't do British? Don't. Just speak clearly. Slow down a little. Enunciate your words. Finish your consonants. Use slightly more formal language. Instead of "Uh, I dunno," try "I'm afraid I couldn't say, old boy." Congratulations. You're British now. Well, no, you aren't. But this is one of the cool things about accents: the listener’s brains will do the work for you. You don't need to reproduce a real British accent. You need to give them enough so that they can imagine one. Of course, we’re talking posh British. For a Cockney accent, flatten your vowels and drop some consonants. Or just call everyone "guvnah." It’s not perfect, but it’s close enough for a tabletop RPG. 

You can do the same thing with other accents. I've been told that hitting your consonants harder can give you a glimmer of South African. Try changing what you do with your R's. Don't pronounce them at all, pronounce them very strongly, or roll them a little. You can play with TH sounds, too. Turning some TH sounds into something closer to Z or S can give you a useful French or German flavor. None of these tricks is likely to fool even a casual listener, let alone a native speaker, but that's not the point. They’re just little bits of stagecraft that give your friends’ ears something to grab onto.

Change the Rhythm: Changing the rhythm of your speech may actually be more useful than changing individual sounds. A character who speaks very slowly feels different from one who rattles off every sentence. A southern American character can be suggested by slowing down and stretching the vowels. An Italian character can have a more musical rise and fall to the voice. An Irish character can have a noticeable bounce or lilt. A Russian or Eastern European character might speak in a more controlled, deliberate way, with hard consonants. A stereotypical New Yorker might speak quickly and forcefully. Again, these are just theatrical impressions. The important thing is that rhythm is easy to hear. You can forget exactly how you were supposed to pronounce a particular vowel. You're much less likely to forget, "Oh yeah, this guy talks really slowly."

Your Group Will Help You: Here's perhaps the biggest difference between acting and running an RPG: an actor has to convince an audience. A GM has players who, like Fox Mulder, want to believe. That's a huge advantage. If you say, "The old man speaks with a thick French accent," and then give the old man a slightly nasal version of your normal voice, your players will probably hear a French accent. They aren't sitting there scoring you. Give them something to work with and they'll fill in the rest.

You can even tell them what you're attempting. "This guy is supposed to be German. I can't actually do German, so I'm going to do this." Then do your terrible German accent. That's it. The players now know what you intended, and they'll meet you halfway. In fact, admitting the trick can make it more fun. "My character is from Scotland. I can't do Scottish, but I'm going to roll my R's and talk really fast." Now everyone knows what they're listening for, and you can stop worrying about whether you're doing it correctly.

Don’t Forget the Words: Here's a trick that has absolutely nothing to do with accents: change the words. An educated wizard might say, "I'm afraid that would be inadvisable," while the local thug might say, "That's a bad idea, mate." Even with the same accent, it sounds like a completely different person. This is where I think the idea of "doing voices" gets a little misleading. What we're really trying to do is communicate character. Sometimes the best voice for an NPC is just your normal voice with different vocabulary and attitude.

Change Your Mouth: Another useful trick is to change the physical way you speak. Try talking with your lips pushed forward. Try barely opening your mouth. Try keeping your jaw tight. Try moving your lips more than usual. Your voice will change automatically. Pitch helps, too. You don't have to become Kermit the Frog. Just move your voice a little higher or lower than normal. Maybe the ancient wizard has a surprisingly high, dry voice. Maybe the assassin speaks in a deep monotone. Maybe the enormous badass fighter has an ironically soft, gentle voice. In fact, contrasting a character's appearance and voice can be more memorable than a perfectly appropriate voice.

One Last Trick: This is actually my favorite trick and it always works for me. Try doing an impression of a particular celebrity, but don't tell anyone who you're doing. This is especially useful if you're terrible at impressions. You probably won't sound much like the intended celebrity, but you won’t sound like you. And sometimes that's all you need. You may not have successfully become Christopher Walken, but if you've accidentally created a weird little voice that isn't your normal voice, congratulations: you've succeeded.

Save vs. Death: Maybe Your Character Shouldn't Die

One thing I’ve never quite made up my mind about in the OSR is the enthusiasm for extremely low hit points and extremely lethal gameplay. On one hand, I understand the appeal. If your fighter has 6 HP and the ogre can kill you in one hit, you have a very good reason not to fight the ogre. You scout, you plan, you set traps, you look for another way in, and you learn that “we can probably win this fight” is not necessarily the same thing as “we have to fight this fight.” That’s good stuff. It makes combat a choice instead of the assumed solution to every problem.

I’m an older gamer myself (54) and I’ve watched this hobby go through enough editions and fashions to recognize a particular kind of argument often made by gamers my age. There are plenty of us who look at newer games and complain about “power gaming,” “player aggrandizement,” or characters who are simply too capable, and sometimes that turns into sweeping complaints about younger players and what’s supposedly wrong with gaming these days. I don’t want to make that argument in reverse. I’m not interested in saying that newer games have made characters too powerful, or that players today need to be mentally tougher, or that we somehow had better games because our characters died more often. I think that kind of generational gatekeeping is mostly tedious and embarrassing. And honestly, I have a hard time believing that anyone who is genuinely happy with how their life turned out spends much time worrying about how younger people play pretend with their friends. My questions are about game design itself, not about what kind of gamer is playing it. 

I think the problem is that there’s a point where character vulnerability stops producing interesting decisions and starts producing disposable characters to no dramatic purpose. A character dying can certainly be a meaningful consequence, but it can also just mean that six or ten or twenty sessions of character development gets thrown away and you roll up Blargon the Fighter II. If that’s because of foolish play, fine, but a bad die roll shouldn’t permanently end a great character, and I don’t buy the argument that it’s “realistic.” Death from cancer, car wrecks, and other rolls of the dice are common enough in real life. In a game about dragons, don't talk to me about realism. I’m not convinced that “too bad, make another character” is inherently more legitimate than what might have happened to Blargon if he had survived. There’s a difference between making players wary of consequences and making characters disposable for the sake of some nebulous old-school principle. 

In fact, I think there are fates more interesting than death (and in many systems, there are detailed mechanisms for this, but these tend to be a little heavier than I like). A character who survives the dragon fight but loses an eye, their sword, half their friends, and their reputation might have a much more interesting story ahead of them than a character who simply takes 9 damage and dies. Capture, injury, mutilation, lost equipment, ruined relationships, enemies made, objectives failed--these can all make a player find a creative way around a fight. I don’t think the goal should be to make characters safe, but to make failure more interesting than “you’re dead.”

So I’m not sure I’m actually opposed to low hit points or lethal combat per se. I think what I’m questioning is the assumption that character death is automatically a “proper” consequence, or that believing so is somehow proof of a more robust, masculine approach to roleplaying. Risk is good. Fear is good. Failure is good. Consequences are very good. But death is a specific consequence, and sometimes it feels like the least interesting one. If the threat of death makes players think creatively, great. But if the primary result is simply that we keep generating new first-level fighters to show how old-school we are, I’m not sure what we’ve gained.

World-Building Without a Building Permit

Before I get started, I want to make clear that this isn’t a “grognard hates narrative games” post. Quite the opposite. I love narrative play. Our group will sometimes play an entire session without rolling the dice at all, and we usually love it. We talk to NPCs, argue among ourselves, investigate something, make plans, or just follow whatever strange conversational rabbit hole we find ourselves in. That’s one of the things I love about RPGs. 

What I’ve noticed, though, is a trend in newer games toward codifying some of those things that traditionally happened outside the rules: collaborative world-building, interpersonal arguments, relationships, emotional conflicts, and even the process of establishing facts about the setting. Games like The Quiet Year, Fate, or Cortex Prime take various approaches to this, and I can certainly see the appeal. Rules for narration can give everyone a chance to participate, prevent the loudest person at the table from becoming the de facto author, and create prompts to get things moving when a group might otherwise stare at a proverbial blank page. Depending on how you like to play, then formalizing those things may be the right choice. I’m not trying to argue that people shouldn’t enjoy these games. If they produce the experience you want, great.

What I find myself wondering, though, is why many games increasingly seem to assume that everything interesting that could occur during an RPG needs to become a game mechanic. In our group, collaborative storytelling and dramatic interaction just happen. There is a difference, to my mind, between rules that facilitate roleplaying and rules that regulate roleplaying. Combat needs rules because we need some impartial way to determine whether the fighter hits the monster. But if my character insults the duke, I’m not convinced we necessarily need an “argument resolution system.” I can insult the duke, the GM can decide how the duke reacts, and then we can have an actual argument. Likewise, I don’t think collaborative world-building necessarily needs a specific procedure. A game can certainly say, “anyone can add something to the setting,” without saying, “on your turn, you must establish one new fact about the setting.” The latter risks putting people on the spot, especially if they’re shy or not very creative. I’m much more interested in rules creating situations that give us something to roleplay about than rules telling us how to roleplay once we get there.

This is especially true of world-building. I think some of the best world-building in a long-running campaign happens almost accidentally, through accumulation. Everyone realizes that the party has been to the same bar three times, so eventually the bar gets a name. Then the bartender gets a name, then a personality, then maybe a family, then a problem, and six months later that bartender is somehow an important NPC. Nobody sat down and collaboratively designed him. The world acquired detail naturally, over time. The same thing can happen with history, geography, relationships, and all sorts of other things. Collaborative world-building certainly can be a deliberate activity, and I enjoy games that make it a major part of the game. But I don’t think such collaboration can really be forced, and I think it can feel unnatural or contrived if a group tries to do it before the game actually starts. If everyone at the table is comfortable contributing, it will happen naturally over time. And if they aren’t, giving them a rule that says they must contribute doesn’t necessarily make them more creative or more comfortable.

Over 40+ years of gaming, I’ve learned that my preference is for leaving some parts of an RPG deliberately “unmechanized.” Rules are useful when we need them to resolve uncertainty, settle disagreements, or create interesting challenges. But I don’t think every part of the experience needs to be converted into a procedure simply because we could make a procedure for it. There is something valuable about trusting the people at the table to talk, imagine, improvise, argue, invent, and occasionally surprise one another without consulting a subsystem. That is just my own preference--I certainly don’t think it should be some objective law of RPG design, and if a friend wanted to run a game with mechanized world-building and narration, I’d play it. In fact, I can understand perfectly well why someone would prefer a game where those things are explicitly supported by the rules. But more and more, I find myself increasingly convinced that an RPG can have rules for playing the game while leaving some room for the people playing it to simply…play.