I have noticed that many of my players, not only in my current game but in other FTF games I have run in the past, have affected a Texas drawl when speaking in the Dog's voice. It seems to be the "western" thing to do.
I fight the tendency myself; I'm fairly certain that the Faithful, having arrived from Back East, would probably speak more like someone from upstate New York, Ohio, or Illinois, and as a result, wouldn't have much of an accent that I could detect (being from some of those places myself) so I try to pronounce words like I would ordinarily.
I'll occasionally put on an accent if I'm playing a Territorial Authority official or one of the Mountain People.
Do you change the way you speak when you're speaking in a Faithful voice?
I talk like that anyway!
-Vincent
We do, indeed, talk differently. We've hit on a few different accents, and I think we're very slowly trying on different ones, keeping, discarding - we're slowly getting a 'way of talking' that goes with the game.
It's really cool.
I'm such a liar.
I talk like that anyway sometimes, such as when I've been hanging out with Clinton or when I've talked to my grandparents on the phone or when I'm playing Dogs.
My Utah accent isn't super much like a Texas drawl, but it's kind of like one.
-Vincent
I ran a game two weekends ago (must post totally cool AP report -- Chris played a intentionally-demon-possessed Dog) and I slid right into a drawl. I'd been watching the ol' 1989 miniseries "Lonesome Dove" on DVD and probably picked up the accent there. Then again, I think my big dumb guy Dog I played at MACE had a drawl too.
Mostly like an Oxford-educated British guy. Doesn't seem to throw my (damn yankee) players off, though.
Whenever we get the chance to play Dogs with Jason Morningstar I swear he's channeling John Turturro (http://www.imdb.com/gallery/ss/0190590/Ss/0190590/5?path=gallery&path_key=0190590) from Oh Brother, Where Art Tho?
I love it.
-Eric
These are the nuances of play lost to us foreigners...
- Frank
Yup! But you know Frank, sometimes I noticed my players were slightly mimicking the Spanish pronunciation of the translators of the old-western movies. We have our own Spanish way to talk in "western" mood ;-)
Arturo
I affect what I think of as a "country" voice. I don't think it's a Texas drawl -- more a rural California / Nevada deal.
Given that Desert territory was supposed to extend into California, I feel okay about this.
yrs--
--Ben
I drawl a little, but mostly it's a vocabulary change. My accent, such as it is probably comes from Firefly.
The amount of 'I reckon' and 'Now you'd best just think twice about that, mister' and similar goes way up, big words like folks might use out East go way down, and in general, I try to make sure, even when I'm shootin' a man between the eyes for his sins against the Lord of Life, that I'm polite to his missus.
Just sayin.
James
My players affect slightly different accents (this game is online, of course, so these are typed accents). Brother Silas talks like a preacher, with occasional high-flying rhetoric. Brother Peter talks like kind of a good ol' boy. At different times in the last town they were provoked into outbursts of terrifying anger, and I was pleased to see Brother Silas being all like "I shall call down the judgment of the King upon you, whore! Confess your sins!" while Brother Peter just kind of bellowed in incoherent rage.
Back-East NPCs speak in kind of a clipped, vaudeville kind of a way. I don't know how better to describe it than that they kind of talk like Herbert T. Zwiebel, or maybe Benjamin Harrison.
Quote from: Vaxalon on February 17, 2006, 04:48:47 PM
I have noticed that many of my players, not only in my current game but in other FTF games I have run in the past, have affected a Texas drawl when speaking in the Dog's voice. It seems to be the "western" thing to do.
I fight the tendency myself; I'm fairly certain that the Faithful, having arrived from Back East, would probably speak more like someone from upstate New York, Ohio, or Illinois, and as a result, wouldn't have much of an accent that I could detect (being from some of those places myself) so I try to pronounce words like I would ordinarily.
I'll occasionally put on an accent if I'm playing a Territorial Authority official or one of the Mountain People.
Do you change the way you speak when you're speaking in a Faithful voice?
Well, seeing as many Dogs originally grew up in the western towns and then were only sent Back East when they were found to have Dog-potential, I wouldn't see the Dogs having a drawl as a far-stretched thing.
That being said, in the game I play in, the accents are varied because each of the players come from a different background. My character does have a drawl because she was a country girl, whereas one of the other players puts on an italian accent because his character is an Italian ex-Roman Catholic nun. Then we have the player who does talk in his normal voice (something like you might hear Back East, as you put it). So I think for our game, at least, it's not so much a "western-drawl for a western-style game" but moreso an accent that fits the character's history.
We first played Dogs shortly after watching Tombstone, so my back-East educated Dog had a tendency to sound like Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday...
J
I can't do an American accent to save my life, let alone any sort of regional American acccent. So I just speak like me. Which means that, oddly, all Dogs characters I play sound British.
But I do point a lot and stare at people as though I want a fight.
Graham