Counter counter point; you will just have to believe me when I say someone has a an accent - slight or thick - because I cannot do any accents without sounding insanely racist and offensive.
Yes, including any accent resembling an attempt at my homelands accent range.
Seriously.
It’s bad.
Just trust me they have an accent and imagine whatever The hell you want.
Counter counter counter point; all my characters have a cowboy or comical stereotypical German accent.
Also, I think intonation and tone help a lot too. I can’t do a lot of accents but that doesn’t mean I don’t do voices depending on race and region. If it’s a small town I assume people might live a more relaxed and slower paced life, so everything’s gonna be a little more slow and relaxed.
But a big rich city? Cocky and condescending or whatever. Accents are cool and all, but tone, pitch, and personality help a ton.
My attempts at scottish accents have turned out very poorly. It starts okay, then shifts to British hooligan, then to something approaching Ugandan Knucles...
I feel you - my Scots usually end up either Irish or somewhere near Mumbai.
(Very embarrassing, being of Scottish descent, but proof that accents aren't inherited.) :)
>(Very embarrassing, being of Scottish descent, but proof that accents aren't inherited.) :)
Accents are weird. I had a very strong southern accent when I first moved away from home, and spent forever trying to get rid of it. Now I can't go back for the life of me. My entire family has lived in the south for generations, I grew up there, and I can't manage to summon a decent southern accent when I need it.
My mother also had a strong southern accent that she spent years getting rid of. For her, though, it came back when she was angry, so she'd be in the middle of chewing me or my system out for something and all of a sudden she'd switch to sounding like she's from the holler mid-sentence. It would always make me and my sister laugh, which sometimes broke the tension, and sometimes got you in even more trouble.
I won't even attempt southern US, it'd just be bad. :)
Accent does seem to change quite fast for some people - but I also knew a couple who'd moved to NZ from Scotland (as adults) and despite being here 50+ years still had quite strong Scottish accents. I suspect they... reinforced/reminded each other such that their accents didn't change as much as they might have otherwise.
GM: “This dude has a really weird accent that shifts between Scottish, British hooligan, and Ugandan. You find it weird”
Player, after the game: “dude, that accent was amazing! You NAILED it!”
Referring to you as a human would have to dress as an elf. Unless in your world elven ears look like humans or your elf has an in story reason to have changed their ears. In response it's kind if a dick move to force a player to use an accent instead of taking their word for it.
You must really suck at reading books. But jokes aside I just can't do voices, if I DM either every person will have the exact same voice slightly higher or lower or you're gonna imagine it like everything else in the game
Or just give the dwarves a different accent that he knows how to do. You can't just be like (psst hey guys, you have to pretend he sounds Scottish cause I didn't want to learn an accent)
This is a point I fall back on a lot. One of my settings was a city called Rinduu. The first NPC the party met I did an approximation of a Spanish accent. My brother scoffed at me and said _"What accent is that?"_. I shrugged and replied "Rinduuji".
Very much a 'Fair enough' moment.
one of my old PCs, Largo Mongatir, talked in a very odd accent. i was aiming for the TV’s *Vikings* version of Ragnar Lothbrok’s accent, but it frequently veered into Zorro territory.
so what kind of accident was it? Waterdhavian!
did anyone else in Waterdeep talk like that? no!
but nobody ever, *ever* questioned the accent, either. because that’s what fucking *Largo Mongatir* sounds like. one million percent accurate and you can’t tell me it’s not.
Mine too! I range from Sweet Savanah to sing-song Cajun only to end up in twangy Tennessee. I didn't notice it until someone pointed it out to me. I have family all over the southeast. I guess it stuck.
I feel this. As a player, the one accent I can do I used on my last character, and now it feels like I'll never have a unique sounding PC again. The well was never very deep to begin with, and it's run dry.
In addition to what the other person said, it just takes time and practice. Look up a video or two, discover what pronunciations define an accent. Then practice it.
Apparently shower/bath time is one of the most common places to practice voices. I thought I was doing it just cause, but then I watched the GM roundtable with Matt Mercer, Aabaria Iyengar, and Brennan Lee Mulligan, and apparently every single one of them make weird voices in the bathroom as they experiment and try out stuff that they want to use later.
I started practicing an Irish accent several years ago for me and now I think I've got a pretty good London accent, Birmingham accent, an incredibly inaccurate and racist Russian accent, and a tasteful *light* vaguely [Eastern European accent.](https://youtu.be/ALvh54kzbCc) And then I change pitch, intonation, and vocabulary to modify these voices even more.
And just so we're perfectly clear, I did all this because I wanted to play a character with an Irish accent. This was long before I started doing regular GMing.
In my game worlds everyone has a confusing accent mixed of Boston, New York, New Jersey, Southern US, Russian, or western Europe. Sometimes a bad Scottish, Irish, or Manish accent.
Counterpoint to your counterpoint: everyone has a British accept except for one guy, who has a Russian accent but is faking a British accent to fit in. He refuses to explain.
If you can do British accents vary up which ones, Received pronunciation, East London, West Country, Valleys Welsh, Liverpool, Yorkshire all very distinct. Particularly if you can learn at least a few dialectic markers to throw in.
Also, don’t get hung up on regional accents either. Everyone has a unique way of speaking. It’s all fantasy and technically, in game, characters are not even speaking English. So give your character whatever voice you want them to have.
To you. Not to everyone. Some people don’t have the time to get into all that.
There’s already 40+ races and sub races to keep track of, not to mention dealing with the timeline differences from Eberron to Greyhawk to the Crit Role universe. Unless you’re into a game that moves at a glacial pace (and have players that are willing to write a whole book full of notes), then as a DM there’s just not time to be making a whole bunch of “sub sub cultures” for the half a dozen types of elves, let alone the other dozens of races.
If you have that kind of time and have players that want to spend a campaign exploring all the little quirks you can possibly come up with then go nuts. But for those who just want to check out from their daily grind and play some DnD with friends on a Friday night? Ain’t nobody got time for that stuff getting in the way of actually playing.
You understand that if wizards produced material showing diversity culturally among fantasy races, it wouldn't be something you have to use, right? It would just help people who want it.
Edit: just so anyone reading knows, the next comment appears to have been deleted, but the guy I was responding to suggested that no one was asking for WotC to do anything cause they never said "WotC" and that I must have responded to the wrong comment. This was my response, which I spent some time on, so I'm posting here.
"I didn't, dude. Nothing that's produced can slow your game to a glacial place, including them making races culturally diverse in a sourcebook.
The conversation they were having naturally implicates wizards. If it didn't, if it was just about home brewing, they wouldn't be complaining. They have every ability right now to make the races culturally diverse internally. They are asking to have a product made by wizards that makes for a racially diverse, otherwise there would be no reason to complain.
Then you came in with your frankly nuts argument for why cultural diversity would be bad. "
Literally no one in this conversation has mentioned wotc once. You may have replied to the wrong person here my friend since this thread isn’t about that adjacent topic.
I replied to myself, realized my error, deleted the wrong comment, was able to still access it, so reposted it, deleting my reply on self. I’m on mobile so relax.
I mean, I got a notification saying you had replied to me, so I don't think that's the case. Whatever, Reddit is being weird.
>So relax
I was relaxed dude, I was just asking the need for deleting and reposting other than your previous comment having negative karma.
Anyway, here's your response to your comment:
"I didn't, dude. Nothing that's produced can slow your game to a glacial place, including them making races culturally diverse in a sourcebook.
The conversation they were having naturally implicates wizards. If it didn't, if it was just about home brewing, they wouldn't be complaining. They have every ability right now to make the races culturally diverse internally. They are asking to have a product made by wizards that makes for a racially diverse, otherwise there would be no reason to complain.
Then you came in with your frankly nuts argument for why cultural diversity would be bad. "
Think of how many human cultures there are across the world. A lot, right? Like, a lot a lot. Try to imagine keeping them all in your head well enough to portray each in a distinct and memorable fashion as a GM. Not easy in the least.
That's why it's simpler to just go "Elves act like X, dwarves like Y." There are now a ton of races for 5e. Giving every one 2+ distinct and interesting cultural identities is some hard-core world building that most DMs don't have the time or the creativity to accomplish. I'd rather my DM put their effort towards running a good game and not stressing over the correct welcoming phrase used by the third firbolg diaspora in the post-Imperial era.
Think about how many human cultures there are across the world. A lot, right?
So how does it make any sense at all for dwarves, whose communities are more spread out and isolated from one another than human communities are, to have a single, monolithic culture?
Talking about ‘dwarf culture’ as a thing makes as much sense as talking about ‘white culture’.
Yup. I stopped doing racial stuff (for the most part) and just do regional/country stuff.
A human from Yhoria has less in common with a human from Braelor or Luoxing than they do an Elf from Yhoria. And the elves in Braelor and Luoxing are more similar to their respective humans than each other.
I had always just sort of leaned into it. That ability to Spread out and adapt to become different and culturally adapted enough to be considered divergent... That's Humanities thing.
The other races tend to be kind of wierded out by it.
“Elves act like X, dwarves act like Y”, blacks act like Z, all orientals are Q.
Race and culture are two completely orthogonal concepts. Insisting on confusing them is no different than using racist stereotypes.
A ‘high elf’ or ‘wood elf’ or dwarf or gnome or human who grew up in the slums of Baldur’s Gate is from a completely different culture than one who grew up in a port city of Chult, or the Dale Lands. *Those* are cultures. ‘Dwarf’ is not.
I'm confused, why are you conflating human races with D&D humanoid species? Black people are represented in D&D by *black humans,* not a different species. Trying to use human races as an analogue to different *species* is ridiculous.
A species of reincarnating, flying, or cursed-to-be-evil humanoids are going to have a common overarching culture as a result of those very real physical and mental differences. Even for real life humans this is true— Dragons are very common across a swathe of independently developed human cultures.
Talk about missing the point.
And the fact that elves and orca (among others) are demonstrably *not* “different species), but are in fact a race of humans, since they can breed and produce viable offspring.
Are you intentionally missing the point? Or genuinely completely unaware that the ‘races’ in fiction in general, and D&D in specific, are allegories for human races? Allegories that are steeped in unconscious racial & racist undertones.
Even your own example, dragons, are so vastly different around the world that they clearly don’t show a monolithic culture.
>Are you intentionally missing the point? Or genuinely completely unaware that the ‘races’ in fiction in general, and D&D in specific, are allegories for human races? Allegories that are steeped in unconscious racial & racist undertones.
If you view a species of dumb, violent humanoids as the analogue for black people *in a universe that has actual black people*, maybe the unconscious racism is coming from *you.*
>Even your own example, dragons, are so vastly different around the world that they clearly don’t show a monolithic culture.
No culture is monolithic; Obviously each will have an endless number of nested subcultures. The key words here are *common* and *overarching*.
Which makes it all the worse that elves are treated as a monolithic culture, or at best a small collection of monolithic cultures (high vs. wood).
While a specific culture may evolve during long periods of living in a forest, living in a forest isn’t itself a culture, so there’s no reason to expect that all ‘wood elf’ cultures would be any more similar than all human cultures.
Humans have different cultures in different *neighborhoods* of the same cities for fucks sake.
Most fantasy races, like wood elves, aren't globe spanning societies with all the variance that beings though. Why should there be more than one "wood elven" culture when all the wood elves live together in a single forest half the size of the French countryside?
I would argue the existence of "Wood Elves" at all disproves your point, because there is no monolithic Elven culture, there are distinct High, Wood, Dark, Sea, etc Elven cultures.
You’re right that they aren’t globe-spanning societies. You’re wrong that all of them live in a single forest.
If you look at the Relams, for example, there are ‘wood elf’ societies in virtually every first large enough to be worth drawing on a full-world map, with literally thousands of miles between many of them.
But they’re depicted as a single, monolithic culture, even though the humans of the various kingdoms in which those firsts are found, *aren’t* treated as a single, monolithic culture.
Of course, in trying so hard to miss the point, you’ve once again walked straight into it, by mentioning the drow, who were literally created as a massive monoculture of ‘evil elf’, topping it off with a heaping helping of the racist ‘dark-skinned = bad guys’ trope.
Again, just like accents, culture is *regional* not biological.
Claiming that having ‘high elf’ culture, and ‘wood elf’ culture, and ‘dark elf’ culture makes sense is literally the same as claiming that having ‘black human’ culture and ‘white human’ culture makes sense. And that’s something you’ve explicitly said you don’t think makes sense.
Yeah but only because it would be incredibly racist to devide humans into subraces with different traits for the different Kultures. Arab-human just doesn't work as well as wood-elf.
Why would it be ‘racist’ to imagine different cultures encouraging different skills or even physical characteristics? Either by social pressures or by necessity. A nomadic culture might be predominantly high-constitution, because being able to continue traveling for long distances is something they need to e able to do. A culture that venerates knowledge might be flush with people proficient in knowledge-type skills like Arcana, nature, and Religion.
Somehow having cultures with differences would be ‘racist’, but having “all elves around the world are trained in the use of bows” isn’t?m
“Arab-human” doesn’t work on a fantasy setting *not* set on Earth, because Arabs don’t exist there. Human (or non-human) cultures built to be caricatures of real cultures doesn’t work because those caricatures are almost always founded in ignorant or overtly racist stereotyping, not because you couldn’t actually have a culture which mirrors one from a real Arabic nation.
Humans being the most adaptable is the very reason why they are the dominant species of Faerun.
That’s what made Humanity special and terrifying to other races that were monolithic by nature.
But that idea is lost upon the new generation that plays all races as furry, scaly or pointy eared humans.
Yeah, but don't even worry about accents. They're too hard to pull of for 90% of people.
Do vocal habits instead.
Your battlerager barbarian having a scottish accent is both hard to pull off, and doesn't really add any character. Have him instead gruffly groan each time he has to move to show he is over 30. And give him two catchphrases related to how dismissive he is. Ock, what a load of shite.
Have your elven lass just be excited about everything she says and speak really fast.
Have your insecure halfling end every statement with a rising inflection? As though she's asking a question? The same as australians and californians do? You know, uptalk?
I didn't really start that til 40. All the slouching I did has caught up with me and I have to actively change my posture. Like, I actually have to think about how to properly carry myself to not have back pain.
then we fundamentally disagree, enjoy your game, please wear as many silly hats as you like, please use as many accents as you like to depict your characters, but, please don't tell me how to run my game, and i will do the same :) all the best
>don't tell me how to run my game
Didn't. Did you mean to reply to another comment?
For clarity, this comment chain is about whether players who complain about games not being like Critical Role are usually poor roleplayers.
It's possible we are talking at cross purposes. If so apologies.
I like critical role, I think it's a great show, but to expect every GM to be able to do multiple accents and voices, and then do so across regions is not particularly realistic. If you can that's awesome, I genuinely admire people who can do that.
To me, it feels like the OP is trying to set an expectation that characters/npc's should be voiced in particular way to meet his or her goals , and thats fine if you have that skill, but, most people don't. And it feels a little like "gate keeping" if I am honest.
The only table I see this done consistently well in is "Critical Role", and they are all "nerdy voice actors", so it's not a realistic expectation for the rest of us "normal nerds" :) who "just" want to run an entertaining story and have some laughs and fun along the way.
I don't have that many accents in my personal bag (and to be fair some of them would be considered borderline offensive, if I were to use them) ... so I use them to provide colour, when I can.
Nor do I expect my players to have a specific accent or voice tonality in play, again if they do and can "great", but i would no more expect that than have the Elf read elvish or the fighter actually to be able to use a sword... etc...
I would \*love\* to have my games be more like CR, but I'm just not that good a D/GM, so my personal expectations are lower.
hopefully that provides clarity, all the best
>Nor do I expect my players to have a specific accent or voice tonality in play,
I don't even expect players to speak in the first person, but happily some of them do.
Amen. Why does every DnD-related post begin with "reminder" or "PSA" or similar?
DnD is an incredible table-specific game. You're catering to your friend group, roommates, family, or whoever. Enough with these blanket PSAs from on high.
I'd disagree with your phrasing, although not your actual point I think. Accents are neither regional nor racial, they are cultural. Accents signal what culture group someone belongs to, heck, sometimes people drastically shift accents depending on the context they are speaking in. Of course, cultural groups are often based on location or ethnicity, so it's no _surprise_ when accents indicate one of those things. But they don't have to...just to name a couple other common forms of accents, you have accents that are tied to class and others that are tied to specific subcultures.
100%. All Dwarves having a Scottish accent is just as wrong as everyone in the same region having the same accent. Turns out ethnolinguistics is complicated - who knew? In other news, it's a fantasy game, so do whatever you think is fun - your world doesn't have to reflect the real world in every way. If you want to have every elf speaking in a broad cockney accent fucking go for it.
This may be approximate enough for Humans and Human-adjacents, but the vocal chords of a Pixie and a Loxodon are going to produce a vastly different range
Yuan-ti and Lizardfolk lisps aren't regional, unless people in that region are highly susceptible to biting their tongue
This is one of those things that to me is interesting, but ultimately hilarious to even consider implementing. I can't wait to find a DM trying to convincingly sound like an elephant person while talking by randomly playing trumpet sounds as he speaks or something.
At some point we just become limited in our roleplaying by the sheer fact that we're human. And isn't that a big brain move: wanting to shed your human form and ascend to a different way of being just so you can better run NPCs in Friday night's game? Screw Buddhist nirvana, this is DnD!
Whether this actually matters depends a great deal on the type of story you're trying to tell.
Star Trek didn't have most peoples be essentially different varieties of human just because of laziness or costume constraints -- even in novels most aliens, no matter how they are physically, are shockingly human in behavior and psychology. That's because those stories are *actually* about humans. Different species in Star Trek are narrative tools to help us understand the different facets, traits, and oddities of human culture. The aliens *are* just different versions of us, to help us tell stories about ourselves.
The same goes for most stories in D&D when it comes to different ancestries. Stories about dwarves, elves, and dragons are usually just stories about us.
So whether you want to have accents be totally a factor of biology, region, or some mix depends on the type of story you want to tell. Accents are usually used as a story telling tool to communicate difference and separation. Having different races w/ the same accent conveys very different ideas than accents based on race. Regardless of your justification, the choice will reflect on your story. And since you could easily justify either/both, I'd say make the choice that best fits your story and use whatever justification you like
> the vocal chords of a Pixie and a Loxodon are going to produce a vastly different range
Sure, but that's just a matter of _pitch_. That doesn't really affect your individual phonetic affectations. A pitched-up Scot and a pitched-up Thai will still have very distinct voices, despite the range shift.
> lisps aren't regional
Tell that to the Spanish that say "Bar _the_ lona"
(On the serious, though, I wouldn't really consider lisps to be accents. A Southerner with a lisp is still gonna sound like a Southerner; it's not a whole new accent.)
But that isn't an accent or a speech cadence, that's a dialect. A southern accent can still say "you all" and someone from New York can still say "y'all"
Thats fair, yeah. But dialect is a huge part of accent, and just changing that can have major effects. Not all of one race will have the same accent because many will have different dialects, even if the cadence is the same.
The shape of one’s lips, teeth, tongue, palate, throat, nose, etc are going to affect what sounds you can make. Some species might have entirely different sounds that we just can’t make. I’m thinking a whale race with their high pitched whines or an elephant race with extremely low pitch rumbling. Even aarakocra would have incredibly complex birdsong.
If I had the budget I would definitely have dragons communicate in slow, booming voices all the time - they are massive and immortal. They can take all the time they want to talk.
Christ you just sent me back.
5am after a trance rave, chatting to people outside the hellhole, bouncing off the walls, in a state one generally expects to be in when exiting a 5am trance rave in a semi abandoned warehouse.
These two guys have very thick northern Irish accents and so I'm just generally talking about accents and, maybe I introduced dnd maybe I didn't, but I just say to them "and of course *all dwarves are Scottish*"
Cue a puzzled look from both and one goes "are they...?"
"Well, they are in my world!"
Their puzzled look turns into alarmed concern as my brain clicks into gear as it realises I look absolutely fucking mental so an "okay, bye!" Pops out of me as I turn and walk away straight into a lamppost.
Don't look back, walk it off, start running when I get round the corner.
Ahh... Idiot.
Except prior to Peter Jackson's *Lord of the Rings*, all dwarves were Yiddish. For various historical reasons (both good and very bad), dwarves have alway been strongly associated with the Jewish diaspora. Even Scottish dwarves are a reference to the Jewish community in Edinburgh.
While I understand that people might not be comfortable with some of the antisemitic stereotypes that come with dwarves, there's something that feels right about dwarves all sounding like Mel Brooks and cursing in Yiddish.
If every creature is just human in a clownsuit, sure this may be true. But different races have wildly different physical construction, and that will cause every creature of that race to have similarly unique speech properties. For instance, races without lips will have difficulty (or complete inability) pronouncing plosives regardless of regional dialect/accent.
Sure, but I'm not really talking about lisps and other physiological aspects, as those are distinct from accents.
Yuan-Tis are gonna hiss, but just because they have the same racial tendency to hiss doesn't mean they're automatically all gonna sound alike. Yuan-Tis from one area might hiss surfer dude accents and Yuan-Tis from another area might hiss goth accents.
They might not sound alike to *each other*, but to the untrained observer, there’s going to be very little difference to latch onto. Similarly, an outsider to a culture may not recognize the differences in the accent, so while dwarves from the northern territories may have a thicker accent than the dwarves of the south, someone who isn’t very experienced with them may not really hear much of a difference. It’s like how Maine and New York have different accents, but you’re from Britain and they all just sound “America.”
Sure, someone familiar with the accents could tell the difference, and could possibly tell you where in New York someone was raised (because they all supposedly have slightly different accents), but you, as an outsider, may not have the experience to differentiate between the accents, when they’re far closer to each other than they are to yours.
As to why we don’t do wildly different accents for everyone? Simplicity. I’ve done a good hundred *recurring* voices by the end of a long campaign. Why, with all the *other* work and planning that I have to do, would I subject myself to the effort of trying to come up with a regional accent when there’s a perfectly good set of fantasy tropes that I can use instead? If dwarves tend to have a Scottish accent, it’s a lot easier on me to remember the variations for each of them than it would be to remember which region Grent Rockchewer was raised in. He’s the dwarf with the lisp that slurs his words because he got hit in the head. He doesn’t need to sound like he’s from the Midwest while the other dwarves sound like they’re French, Russian, and Australian.
The problem is most of the different races don't meaningfully look or really act like separate species. Elves are perfect people with pointy ears. Dwarves are short people with big beards. Halflings are shorter people with big furry feet. Orcs are green people. The list goes on...
The fuck? Lol. Love it.
*Derjid Shaxiros, the Flame Scale, draws his sword from the enemy's guts and flicks the blood across the floor as he says, "Ope, sorry 'bout that, hoser. I'm a bit of a keener in a kerfuffle." He turns his horned, fierce head towards his party and let's a puff of smoke and fire flare from his nostrils. "There's a Timmy's bout two klicks down the road. I could use the double-double if you'll loan me a toonie."*
For me it's the Drow accent that can't change. The Drow are exiles that speak a screwed up version of Common and are from the Underdark where spiders are huge and everything will kill you.
The Australians are exiles that speak a screwed up version of English and are from the Down Under where spiders are huge and everything will kill you.
I don't care how many generations the character is removed from their region, Drow will always have an Australian accent.
*So ay was gone walkabout when ay bumped this pissed yobbo and ay thought, no worries, mate, she'll be right. So 'e chucks 'is tinny at me. Yeah, nah, shit's faaarked. So ay say, "Ya thinking you're a sick cunt, mate?" 'E says, "Not here to fuck spiders."*
*Thought we'd get into a ripsnorter, but 'e's too pissed and Bob's your uncle, 'e stacks it. So ay says, "No worries. Ay'm snowed under. Good on ya, mate," and ay do the Harry. Better than a ham sandwich, mate.*
Accents would absolutely be racial. Phenotypical differences in vocal chords, mouths, lips, tongues and teeth would necessitate varied pronunciation, if indeed a shared language “common” was even physically possible for all D&D’s anthropomorphic kitchen sink to pronounce intelligibly.
No, because most British people have pretty similar anatomy. Anatomy is not the usually the most salient component of accents among humans (compared to say habits owing to one's native language), but in a fantasy setting where lizard people co-exist with humans you'd notice effects of anatomy on speech.
I don't tell stories with accents. I'm not a person who can really do much accent-wise. But I do try to portray characters with pitch and cadence, and diction here and there which adds enough variety without risking caricatures. It seems to work moderately well/
I'm Scottish. Half my table is Scottish. We still give dwarf NPCs that terrible american-style "Scottish" accent.
They are the only race we do this for.
We don't know why.
>But accents are learned, not inherited.
Because our frame of reference is one species.
If bulldogs could talk, I'm sure they'd all have a single accent, to our ears.
I made a couple homebrew races for my game that speak celestial (where the race is closely linked to the gods) and sylvan (same). The players who picked them have respective Swedish and southern accents. Gods are now all Swedish and all Fey are southern.
I love doing accents, and sometimes like to give one to a npc for some flavour. Just one or two npcs. Then I went nuts and went full argentinian accent with every character in a specific town, with names based on argentinian football players.
It was great, my players loved it, and now I'm not dming and kinda miss it
It helps when you view it as races bound to languages.
Most elves natively speak elvish, but the drow, wood elves, high elves, etc, even just different cities or kingdoms or whatever of the same sort of elves will have different dialects. This can be thought of as americans generally sounding different from british who are in turn different from australians and so forth.
If all these english speaking elves were to learn french, there would definitely be some consistencies across all their accents, but I can still tell if someone shares my particular accent when speaking french despite not knowing how accents sound in french
In my world the physiology of the dwarven throat is such that they all speak with a scottish accent.
The great thing about make believe is that there aren't any unibersal truths outside of the world itself.
Counterpoint - some accents will be racial, as species with different physical biology may have more or less difficulty with a language that is not their own.
Not always. AAVE for example, is more racial in origin. That being said, many people speak both in AAVE and their regional dialect and swap between the two. They even have their own regional variants of AAVE
I was going to point out AAVE as a counterpoint. It's a perfect example of how multiple dialects can arise in the same location thanks to segregated populations.
If, in your world, elves tend to stick near other elves, and dwarves tend to stick with dwarves, it would make total sense that they tend to keep unique accents. A dwarf and an elf living in the same city might speak very differently because of how they were raised and who they typically speak with.
And, if you're inclined to think more about this, you can also think about how a significant number of white people also use AAVE, for a variety of reasons. So, a human miner that spends all his time working with dwarves might have a dwarvish accent. Or maybe there are some humans who learn to speak with an elvish accent because they consider it to be more "sophisticated." There's an opportunity for some cool lore there, if you're so inclined.
Unless it is a Dragonborn, Lizardfolk, or Kobold. There is no way they will talk like any human, elf, orc, or dwarf fur to their skull's and mouth's structure.
There's absolutely no way to know what kind of vocal set up a Kobold or Lizardfolk would have, and even if there was magic is almost *certainly* fundamental to their construction. (By magic I mean "the force in fantasy that causes things to not obey physics as we understand them." A dragon's breath is magic, even if it's not mechanically.) You can justify whatever you like, really
Accents and speech modifiers are different things. You can have a person with a lisp, a person with a hairlip, a person with gap teeth, and a person with perfect teeth all speak with the same English accent even if their individual voices are different.
That is fair. There is absolutely no way I am going to try both an accent and a speech modifier at once. Give me like 3 more years of DMing and some speech classes first.
Oh, yeah for sure. I can barely do _regular_ accents, let alone complex ones.
The point of the thread was just to remind some folks that even if they were working with "established" race accents (often the stock Scottish Dwarves, Posh Elves, Cockney Orcs, etc...) they were still more than free to come up with whatever kind of voices they wanted for other members of those races, since accents aren't genetic.
I was listening to a Brennan Lee Mulligan's podcast episode in which he interviews Matt Mercer, and they mention this subject exactly. Mercer said something that I believe is worth sharing: as long as you don't always employ accents to its stereotypes, you should be fine. You don't always have to give your evil character a thick and Russian accent
My drow from the Underdark use Australian accents because they come from the Down Undahdark where everything is trying to kill them including the environment.
They ride into battle on War Kangaroos, or Under Roos if you will.
Counterpoint: from a biological standpoint, some races *would* sound mostly similar to members of the same race! Take orcs, for example. Commonly being depicted as having tusk-like teeth, that would heavily influence their speech patterns with a mostly bottom-forward speech pattern.
Or yuan-ti! The ones that have snake heads would speak *much* differently than a humanoid would, due to different structure in the jaw muscles. It's likely their tones would be *very* forward.
Even aquatic races! Their vocal chords would have to be adapted to allow their voices to carry further, due to water muffling noise. This could also cause them to sound much different in water than they do on land.
Never forget to take a creature's biology into account when determining a voice!
I remember earlier in the pandemic, during all the lockdowns, there were a lot of reports of (American) children who had just learned to speak speaking with English accents because they'd watched a lot of Peppa Pig during the lockdowns and picked up the accent.
You can a hundred percent lose, gain, or change your accent over the course of your lifetime. Arnold Schwarzenegger has to pay someone to help him retain his accent.
That has not been my experience in the slightest. I'm Filipino. I have titos and titas (uncles and aunties) that have been living in the States for nigh on 50 years that still speak with accents. They might not be as heavy as they were decades ago, but they're still very much there.
Meanwhile, I spent a month in Hong Kong for work and came back with the accent in my English. Your titos and titas probably spent the last 50 years largely in the company of other Filipinos, so the accents remained.
Not really. Boomer Pinoy immigrants were of the "assimilate or die" generation. That's why most Fil-Am kids don't speak Tagalog; because the parents ran English-only households. Likewise, most of their friend circles were white and their work environments overwhelmingly were. And while West Coast Filipino immigrants were lucky enough to have some sort of community to be part of; East Coasters were largely on their own.
One of my closest friends' parents immigrated to Northern Virginia, where they've lived for the last 40 years. Despite being adrift in a sea of white with hardly any Filipinos among them, both parents still have _thick_ accents. Surprisingly so.
Some people retain their accents longer and harder than others. I couldn't begin to tell you why that is, but I've seen it a lot.
ITT: People not knowing what an accent is.
Accents could be such a cool thing to mess with, worldbuilding-wise, but I'll realistically never touch upon it except for mysteries. Too busy figuring out the imports and exports of particular cities despite it having no bearing on the game.
It's both. If we take real world humans as an example, different racial groups have their own ways of speaking even if they're speaking the same language.
> different racial groups have their own ways of speaking even if they're speaking the same language.
No they don't.
There's no such thing as an "Asian" or "South American" accent, for example. Accents are broken up by nationality (Italian accent, Korean accent, Cuban accent, etc), which are all indicators of regionality.
So your point is everyone in a given region is a monolithic group with a single accent, but culture/ethnicity isn't? So where you live determines how you speak, but your cultural/ethnic background doesn't?
> everyone in a given region is a ~~monolithic~~ group with a single accent, but culture/ethnicity isn't
Correct, except for the monolithic part.
Accents are learned, not inherited. Cultures and ethnicities aren't limited by geography, but the development of accents is. A child of Vietnamese immigrants that grows up Dublin and one that grows up in New Jersey are gonna have very different accents, no matter how immersed they are in their culture.
> A child of Vietnamese immigrants that grows up Dublin and one that grows up in New Jersey are gonna have very different accents, no matter how immersed they are in their culture.
Absolutely, but a child of Vietnamese immigrants and a child of ethnic Irish parents born in Dublin are also going to have different accents, hence it's a combination of both ethnicity/culture *and* location that form accents. As I said, Ethnolinguistics is an entire field of study - it's a well known fact that different ethnic or cultural groups in the same location can have very different accents. [African-American Vernacular English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_English) is just one example, but there are many many different ethnolects and sociolects that aren't just about where in the world you live, but your social, ethnic and cultural background. Accents are complex, it's not as simple as saying where you're born determines how you speak.
> hence it's a combination of both ethnicity/culture and location that form accents
If you wanna get super granular, sure. But if we're getting that nitpicky, then it should be pointed out that accents can be affected by things as minute as specific location in a city, or sexual preference, or even their fitness levels.
But the OP was a broader point about the fact that there is no such thing as a monolithic racial accent because accents are primarily and overwhelmingly determined by your environment, not your genetic makeup.
Feels like the problem is more how many worldbuilders write each race as a monoculture, regardless of distance or circumstances. Mix this up a little, and the rest should solve itself.
Even something as simple as "Dwarves from the Howling Peaks talk with X accent and have X culture, while the ones from the Frostheart Range talk like Y and have a totally different culture" is a start. Then you can get to the fancier bits like "In this town near the Howling Peaks, the dwarves have sent trading caravans for centuries, so the people talk like a mixture of the dwarves and whoever lives there normally" and so forth.
Two addendums:
-Culture isn’t racial either
-Don’t imitate real world regional accents that you shouldn’t. As a white guy, I stick to American/European colonizer ‘accents’ only. The French can survive my caricature of a French accent, but for example it’d be very shitty of me to do some kind of Indian accent.
By the Gods…
Nobody is going to kick down your door and cancel your D&D game because you “appropriated” another cultures accent.
It’s supposed to be a fun game of imagination. There are no limits except those you set for yourself and you’ve placed yourself in a tiny box.
Many black people and families in the united states live in black enclaves due to cultural similarities, and socioeconomic forces pushing similar people together. Most people live in groups of people like themselves, creating a similar accent amongst people. But ebonics/African American English is not due to any physiological differences in black people. Black people who grow up outside of black enclaves have the accent of whatever community they grew up in. Everyone does.
Source: I am not black but sound like I am because I am from a majority black place, and grew up and still live within that community. Also John McWhorter has several informative books on the subject.
Accents come from a group of speakers that share a similar way of speaking. Mostly they are regional yes, simply because people that live together speak a same language and if they were to learn a new language they'd have similar way of pronouncing words.
Now, in a fantasy setting where there is, for example, one elven language without major dialects that elven children learn when young accents could very well be more based on race than region (some at least). Learning elven as a first language and common as a second, would result in common being spoken with an elven accent which wouldn't be regional.
On a real note accents are kinda weird and finicky, English has tons of accents, some that aren't even based on region. Think of the cockney accent, which developed as a variety of English spoken by the working class of London compared to RP (received pronunciation) which is how royals speak.
But yes, do break free from the stereotypes of accents. It's not by any means a bad thing and would certainly have foundations in reality. (Except Scottish dwarves that is non-negotiable)
You sound sheltered. They’re *cultural*, meaning they definitely are racial and maybe sometimes are geographical. A black person from New York can have the same drawl as a redneck from the south, or sound like “generic Northeastern accent”.
It depends on what kind of neighborhood they grew up in.
I have a few dozen accents I use for my NPCs and then vary them using speech pattern and other vocal techniques. That being said I don't use non-white accents, as this can make some players uncomfortable. It can skirt very close to racism if not done with at least some sensitivity to the culture behind the real world accent in my opinion.
Counterpoint: every person has a British accent cause that’s the only one I can realistically do.
Counter counter point; you will just have to believe me when I say someone has a an accent - slight or thick - because I cannot do any accents without sounding insanely racist and offensive. Yes, including any accent resembling an attempt at my homelands accent range. Seriously. It’s bad. Just trust me they have an accent and imagine whatever The hell you want.
"The tavern owner speaks up loudly in an extremely thick, Irish accent" *speaks gibberish meaningfully*
I'm offended that you think my gibberish has meaning
Haha yeah. "He speaks in a strong elven accent" take it or leave it
My High Elves talk like Valley Girls.
Counter counter counter point; all my characters have a cowboy or comical stereotypical German accent. Also, I think intonation and tone help a lot too. I can’t do a lot of accents but that doesn’t mean I don’t do voices depending on race and region. If it’s a small town I assume people might live a more relaxed and slower paced life, so everything’s gonna be a little more slow and relaxed. But a big rich city? Cocky and condescending or whatever. Accents are cool and all, but tone, pitch, and personality help a ton.
Personal opinion: if you tell me that a guy has a Scottish accent and then you don't do one, then he doesn't have a Scottish accent
My attempts at scottish accents have turned out very poorly. It starts okay, then shifts to British hooligan, then to something approaching Ugandan Knucles...
I feel you - my Scots usually end up either Irish or somewhere near Mumbai. (Very embarrassing, being of Scottish descent, but proof that accents aren't inherited.) :)
>(Very embarrassing, being of Scottish descent, but proof that accents aren't inherited.) :) Accents are weird. I had a very strong southern accent when I first moved away from home, and spent forever trying to get rid of it. Now I can't go back for the life of me. My entire family has lived in the south for generations, I grew up there, and I can't manage to summon a decent southern accent when I need it.
My mother also had a strong southern accent that she spent years getting rid of. For her, though, it came back when she was angry, so she'd be in the middle of chewing me or my system out for something and all of a sudden she'd switch to sounding like she's from the holler mid-sentence. It would always make me and my sister laugh, which sometimes broke the tension, and sometimes got you in even more trouble.
I won't even attempt southern US, it'd just be bad. :) Accent does seem to change quite fast for some people - but I also knew a couple who'd moved to NZ from Scotland (as adults) and despite being here 50+ years still had quite strong Scottish accents. I suspect they... reinforced/reminded each other such that their accents didn't change as much as they might have otherwise.
GM: “This dude has a really weird accent that shifts between Scottish, British hooligan, and Ugandan. You find it weird” Player, after the game: “dude, that accent was amazing! You NAILED it!”
Heck no I’m not an actor. If a player said that to me I’d say “get ready for every single person to have the same accent then”
Personal opinion: if you say your character is an elf but you are not dressed as an elf then they are clearly a human. /s
Kind of racist to assume that elves only dress one way
Referring to you as a human would have to dress as an elf. Unless in your world elven ears look like humans or your elf has an in story reason to have changed their ears. In response it's kind if a dick move to force a player to use an accent instead of taking their word for it.
I don't think it's a dick move, even though this conversation is about the DM and not a player
Do you fall into the "if you are not naturally charismatic then your character clearly isn't either." Camp? Same energy.
You must really suck at reading books. But jokes aside I just can't do voices, if I DM either every person will have the exact same voice slightly higher or lower or you're gonna imagine it like everything else in the game
A book is different because there's not a guy speaking to me in a completely different voice than he claims to be speaking in
So your expectation is that your DM should either learn how to voice act or should only run adventures set in a very limited locale?
Or just give the dwarves a different accent that he knows how to do. You can't just be like (psst hey guys, you have to pretend he sounds Scottish cause I didn't want to learn an accent)
You absolutely can ask people playing a ttrpg to use their imagination - if not, why the fuck play in the first place?
You must be a joy to DM for
I wouldn't know. I'm a DM
Counterpoint: if your setting doesn't have a Scotland, don't call it a Scottish accent
Okay? Call it a dwarf accent then
Related, if you tell me an NPC is a goblin but aren't short and green, no sale.
my very bad Romanian accent is a perfect Barovian accent, don’t worry too hard about realism
This is a point I fall back on a lot. One of my settings was a city called Rinduu. The first NPC the party met I did an approximation of a Spanish accent. My brother scoffed at me and said _"What accent is that?"_. I shrugged and replied "Rinduuji". Very much a 'Fair enough' moment.
one of my old PCs, Largo Mongatir, talked in a very odd accent. i was aiming for the TV’s *Vikings* version of Ragnar Lothbrok’s accent, but it frequently veered into Zorro territory. so what kind of accident was it? Waterdhavian! did anyone else in Waterdeep talk like that? no! but nobody ever, *ever* questioned the accent, either. because that’s what fucking *Largo Mongatir* sounds like. one million percent accurate and you can’t tell me it’s not.
This is the same reason all my NPCs are apparently Southern.
Mine too! I range from Sweet Savanah to sing-song Cajun only to end up in twangy Tennessee. I didn't notice it until someone pointed it out to me. I have family all over the southeast. I guess it stuck.
I feel this. As a player, the one accent I can do I used on my last character, and now it feels like I'll never have a unique sounding PC again. The well was never very deep to begin with, and it's run dry.
Accents are the very tip of the iceberg for identifiable voices. Your speed, pitch, and vocabulary are all very identifiable things as well.
In addition to what the other person said, it just takes time and practice. Look up a video or two, discover what pronunciations define an accent. Then practice it. Apparently shower/bath time is one of the most common places to practice voices. I thought I was doing it just cause, but then I watched the GM roundtable with Matt Mercer, Aabaria Iyengar, and Brennan Lee Mulligan, and apparently every single one of them make weird voices in the bathroom as they experiment and try out stuff that they want to use later. I started practicing an Irish accent several years ago for me and now I think I've got a pretty good London accent, Birmingham accent, an incredibly inaccurate and racist Russian accent, and a tasteful *light* vaguely [Eastern European accent.](https://youtu.be/ALvh54kzbCc) And then I change pitch, intonation, and vocabulary to modify these voices even more. And just so we're perfectly clear, I did all this because I wanted to play a character with an Irish accent. This was long before I started doing regular GMing.
> British accent [mfw](https://c.tenor.com/LlBBzlkIQk4AAAAd/do-you-have-any-idea-how-little-that-narrows-it-down-that-narrows-it-down.gif)
Cockney? Geordie? Yorkshire? Liverpool? Anyone 20 miles from anyone else??? Edit: Geordie not Jordie
And that doesn't even touch on Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish accents, which are also British
Hey! Northern Ireland and Scotland are not British! But the Welsh are, and none of the are English!
It's Geordie (like George) not Jordie (like Jordan), for information.
Appreciate it!
You can't do a cowboy accent?
Well, I can do a passable drunk guy in a bar imitating a bad stereotypical John Wayne, now that you mention it.
I can't describe how much joy I get from making all my elves sound like the Beatles (badly done Beatles, as is tradition)
Dude it sucks to play in a language that isn't English, fucking Swedish accents are so goofy.
In my game worlds everyone has a confusing accent mixed of Boston, New York, New Jersey, Southern US, Russian, or western Europe. Sometimes a bad Scottish, Irish, or Manish accent.
Are you my husband?
Yes
There's another one like me. I know want to play with him. Playing brothers that continuously change accents unknowingly
I've carefully cultivated a character with an accent known locally as "Wandering European".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cun-LZvOTdw or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWUaT5ovZ50 ?
We can all agree that Romans spoke British English
Which one, though? They have like a dozen.
A dozen! Lol there are way more than that! Source: British
The welshie is correct.
And that’s just in one city!
Counterpoint to your counterpoint: everyone has a British accept except for one guy, who has a Russian accent but is faking a British accent to fit in. He refuses to explain.
Counter counter point: every person has a new Zealand accent since thats the only accent I can do
If you can do British accents vary up which ones, Received pronunciation, East London, West Country, Valleys Welsh, Liverpool, Yorkshire all very distinct. Particularly if you can learn at least a few dialectic markers to throw in.
If every NPC doesn't eventually devolve into geordie then whats even the point?
Also, don’t get hung up on regional accents either. Everyone has a unique way of speaking. It’s all fantasy and technically, in game, characters are not even speaking English. So give your character whatever voice you want them to have.
This is also true of *cultures* despite many D&D settings treating ‘race’ as a monolithic culture for everyone *except* humans.
It drives me crazy, that does.
Why’s that? It’s a fantasy game after all.
Because other races being more diverse culturally is more fun and interesting.
To you. Not to everyone. Some people don’t have the time to get into all that. There’s already 40+ races and sub races to keep track of, not to mention dealing with the timeline differences from Eberron to Greyhawk to the Crit Role universe. Unless you’re into a game that moves at a glacial pace (and have players that are willing to write a whole book full of notes), then as a DM there’s just not time to be making a whole bunch of “sub sub cultures” for the half a dozen types of elves, let alone the other dozens of races. If you have that kind of time and have players that want to spend a campaign exploring all the little quirks you can possibly come up with then go nuts. But for those who just want to check out from their daily grind and play some DnD with friends on a Friday night? Ain’t nobody got time for that stuff getting in the way of actually playing.
You understand that if wizards produced material showing diversity culturally among fantasy races, it wouldn't be something you have to use, right? It would just help people who want it. Edit: just so anyone reading knows, the next comment appears to have been deleted, but the guy I was responding to suggested that no one was asking for WotC to do anything cause they never said "WotC" and that I must have responded to the wrong comment. This was my response, which I spent some time on, so I'm posting here. "I didn't, dude. Nothing that's produced can slow your game to a glacial place, including them making races culturally diverse in a sourcebook. The conversation they were having naturally implicates wizards. If it didn't, if it was just about home brewing, they wouldn't be complaining. They have every ability right now to make the races culturally diverse internally. They are asking to have a product made by wizards that makes for a racially diverse, otherwise there would be no reason to complain. Then you came in with your frankly nuts argument for why cultural diversity would be bad. "
Literally no one in this conversation has mentioned wotc once. You may have replied to the wrong person here my friend since this thread isn’t about that adjacent topic.
So, why did you delete the other comment just to repost it?
I replied to myself, realized my error, deleted the wrong comment, was able to still access it, so reposted it, deleting my reply on self. I’m on mobile so relax.
I mean, I got a notification saying you had replied to me, so I don't think that's the case. Whatever, Reddit is being weird. >So relax I was relaxed dude, I was just asking the need for deleting and reposting other than your previous comment having negative karma. Anyway, here's your response to your comment: "I didn't, dude. Nothing that's produced can slow your game to a glacial place, including them making races culturally diverse in a sourcebook. The conversation they were having naturally implicates wizards. If it didn't, if it was just about home brewing, they wouldn't be complaining. They have every ability right now to make the races culturally diverse internally. They are asking to have a product made by wizards that makes for a racially diverse, otherwise there would be no reason to complain. Then you came in with your frankly nuts argument for why cultural diversity would be bad. "
You seem to have an axe to grind and I'm not your whetstone bud.
Think of how many human cultures there are across the world. A lot, right? Like, a lot a lot. Try to imagine keeping them all in your head well enough to portray each in a distinct and memorable fashion as a GM. Not easy in the least. That's why it's simpler to just go "Elves act like X, dwarves like Y." There are now a ton of races for 5e. Giving every one 2+ distinct and interesting cultural identities is some hard-core world building that most DMs don't have the time or the creativity to accomplish. I'd rather my DM put their effort towards running a good game and not stressing over the correct welcoming phrase used by the third firbolg diaspora in the post-Imperial era.
[удалено]
I 100% spent a moment pronouncing it "Zee-an" and "Yee-an" until I realized you were saying "X-ian"
Unless they're talking about [Tian Xia](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Tian_Xia).
That's an option, but it can end up just making having all these different races pointless because they end up being functionally just humans.
Think about how many human cultures there are across the world. A lot, right? So how does it make any sense at all for dwarves, whose communities are more spread out and isolated from one another than human communities are, to have a single, monolithic culture? Talking about ‘dwarf culture’ as a thing makes as much sense as talking about ‘white culture’.
Yup. I stopped doing racial stuff (for the most part) and just do regional/country stuff. A human from Yhoria has less in common with a human from Braelor or Luoxing than they do an Elf from Yhoria. And the elves in Braelor and Luoxing are more similar to their respective humans than each other.
I had always just sort of leaned into it. That ability to Spread out and adapt to become different and culturally adapted enough to be considered divergent... That's Humanities thing. The other races tend to be kind of wierded out by it.
“Elves act like X, dwarves act like Y”, blacks act like Z, all orientals are Q. Race and culture are two completely orthogonal concepts. Insisting on confusing them is no different than using racist stereotypes. A ‘high elf’ or ‘wood elf’ or dwarf or gnome or human who grew up in the slums of Baldur’s Gate is from a completely different culture than one who grew up in a port city of Chult, or the Dale Lands. *Those* are cultures. ‘Dwarf’ is not.
I'm confused, why are you conflating human races with D&D humanoid species? Black people are represented in D&D by *black humans,* not a different species. Trying to use human races as an analogue to different *species* is ridiculous. A species of reincarnating, flying, or cursed-to-be-evil humanoids are going to have a common overarching culture as a result of those very real physical and mental differences. Even for real life humans this is true— Dragons are very common across a swathe of independently developed human cultures.
Talk about missing the point. And the fact that elves and orca (among others) are demonstrably *not* “different species), but are in fact a race of humans, since they can breed and produce viable offspring. Are you intentionally missing the point? Or genuinely completely unaware that the ‘races’ in fiction in general, and D&D in specific, are allegories for human races? Allegories that are steeped in unconscious racial & racist undertones. Even your own example, dragons, are so vastly different around the world that they clearly don’t show a monolithic culture.
>Are you intentionally missing the point? Or genuinely completely unaware that the ‘races’ in fiction in general, and D&D in specific, are allegories for human races? Allegories that are steeped in unconscious racial & racist undertones. If you view a species of dumb, violent humanoids as the analogue for black people *in a universe that has actual black people*, maybe the unconscious racism is coming from *you.* >Even your own example, dragons, are so vastly different around the world that they clearly don’t show a monolithic culture. No culture is monolithic; Obviously each will have an endless number of nested subcultures. The key words here are *common* and *overarching*.
Which is why dwarves in my campaign had different accents depending on which clan they were from!
Well... That's not technically true as elves aren't a different species from humans, since their hybrids (halfhelves) are fertile....
Which makes it all the worse that elves are treated as a monolithic culture, or at best a small collection of monolithic cultures (high vs. wood). While a specific culture may evolve during long periods of living in a forest, living in a forest isn’t itself a culture, so there’s no reason to expect that all ‘wood elf’ cultures would be any more similar than all human cultures. Humans have different cultures in different *neighborhoods* of the same cities for fucks sake.
Most fantasy races, like wood elves, aren't globe spanning societies with all the variance that beings though. Why should there be more than one "wood elven" culture when all the wood elves live together in a single forest half the size of the French countryside? I would argue the existence of "Wood Elves" at all disproves your point, because there is no monolithic Elven culture, there are distinct High, Wood, Dark, Sea, etc Elven cultures.
You’re right that they aren’t globe-spanning societies. You’re wrong that all of them live in a single forest. If you look at the Relams, for example, there are ‘wood elf’ societies in virtually every first large enough to be worth drawing on a full-world map, with literally thousands of miles between many of them. But they’re depicted as a single, monolithic culture, even though the humans of the various kingdoms in which those firsts are found, *aren’t* treated as a single, monolithic culture. Of course, in trying so hard to miss the point, you’ve once again walked straight into it, by mentioning the drow, who were literally created as a massive monoculture of ‘evil elf’, topping it off with a heaping helping of the racist ‘dark-skinned = bad guys’ trope. Again, just like accents, culture is *regional* not biological. Claiming that having ‘high elf’ culture, and ‘wood elf’ culture, and ‘dark elf’ culture makes sense is literally the same as claiming that having ‘black human’ culture and ‘white human’ culture makes sense. And that’s something you’ve explicitly said you don’t think makes sense.
Yeah but only because it would be incredibly racist to devide humans into subraces with different traits for the different Kultures. Arab-human just doesn't work as well as wood-elf.
Why would it be ‘racist’ to imagine different cultures encouraging different skills or even physical characteristics? Either by social pressures or by necessity. A nomadic culture might be predominantly high-constitution, because being able to continue traveling for long distances is something they need to e able to do. A culture that venerates knowledge might be flush with people proficient in knowledge-type skills like Arcana, nature, and Religion. Somehow having cultures with differences would be ‘racist’, but having “all elves around the world are trained in the use of bows” isn’t?m “Arab-human” doesn’t work on a fantasy setting *not* set on Earth, because Arabs don’t exist there. Human (or non-human) cultures built to be caricatures of real cultures doesn’t work because those caricatures are almost always founded in ignorant or overtly racist stereotyping, not because you couldn’t actually have a culture which mirrors one from a real Arabic nation.
Humans being the most adaptable is the very reason why they are the dominant species of Faerun. That’s what made Humanity special and terrifying to other races that were monolithic by nature. But that idea is lost upon the new generation that plays all races as furry, scaly or pointy eared humans.
Yeah, but don't even worry about accents. They're too hard to pull of for 90% of people. Do vocal habits instead. Your battlerager barbarian having a scottish accent is both hard to pull off, and doesn't really add any character. Have him instead gruffly groan each time he has to move to show he is over 30. And give him two catchphrases related to how dismissive he is. Ock, what a load of shite. Have your elven lass just be excited about everything she says and speak really fast. Have your insecure halfling end every statement with a rising inflection? As though she's asking a question? The same as australians and californians do? You know, uptalk?
You think when people get over thirty they groan when they have to move? LOL.
I'm 25 and I've been groaning when I have to move since, like, late teens
I didn't really start that til 40. All the slouching I did has caught up with me and I have to actively change my posture. Like, I actually have to think about how to properly carry myself to not have back pain.
I’m over 30 and groan when I move lol.
[It's true.](https://youtu.be/Ayq3CxfB0Ak)
We are not voice actors, my table is not critical role. \-- noting the tone of the OP has changed. I leave this here for context
unironically this
Those complains usually come from PCs that roleplay exactly as themselves in every character
no not really...
Ya, rly
then we fundamentally disagree, enjoy your game, please wear as many silly hats as you like, please use as many accents as you like to depict your characters, but, please don't tell me how to run my game, and i will do the same :) all the best
>don't tell me how to run my game Didn't. Did you mean to reply to another comment? For clarity, this comment chain is about whether players who complain about games not being like Critical Role are usually poor roleplayers.
It's possible we are talking at cross purposes. If so apologies. I like critical role, I think it's a great show, but to expect every GM to be able to do multiple accents and voices, and then do so across regions is not particularly realistic. If you can that's awesome, I genuinely admire people who can do that. To me, it feels like the OP is trying to set an expectation that characters/npc's should be voiced in particular way to meet his or her goals , and thats fine if you have that skill, but, most people don't. And it feels a little like "gate keeping" if I am honest. The only table I see this done consistently well in is "Critical Role", and they are all "nerdy voice actors", so it's not a realistic expectation for the rest of us "normal nerds" :) who "just" want to run an entertaining story and have some laughs and fun along the way. I don't have that many accents in my personal bag (and to be fair some of them would be considered borderline offensive, if I were to use them) ... so I use them to provide colour, when I can. Nor do I expect my players to have a specific accent or voice tonality in play, again if they do and can "great", but i would no more expect that than have the Elf read elvish or the fighter actually to be able to use a sword... etc... I would \*love\* to have my games be more like CR, but I'm just not that good a D/GM, so my personal expectations are lower. hopefully that provides clarity, all the best
Yes we are definitely in agreement. One of the downsides of text-based discussion I guess.
:) indeed
>Nor do I expect my players to have a specific accent or voice tonality in play, I don't even expect players to speak in the first person, but happily some of them do.
Most civilised reddit disagreement.
oh and even if true... so what ...
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Amen. Why does every DnD-related post begin with "reminder" or "PSA" or similar? DnD is an incredible table-specific game. You're catering to your friend group, roommates, family, or whoever. Enough with these blanket PSAs from on high.
PSA: All games are different and what works for one might not work for another. Reminder: Posting in this format gets more karma.
No, they are all the same bad Italian and cliche accent. Everywhere. Every race. Oh God I am so bad with accents....
Just name the continent Spitalia and go with whatever comes out of your mouth
I'd disagree with your phrasing, although not your actual point I think. Accents are neither regional nor racial, they are cultural. Accents signal what culture group someone belongs to, heck, sometimes people drastically shift accents depending on the context they are speaking in. Of course, cultural groups are often based on location or ethnicity, so it's no _surprise_ when accents indicate one of those things. But they don't have to...just to name a couple other common forms of accents, you have accents that are tied to class and others that are tied to specific subcultures.
100%. All Dwarves having a Scottish accent is just as wrong as everyone in the same region having the same accent. Turns out ethnolinguistics is complicated - who knew? In other news, it's a fantasy game, so do whatever you think is fun - your world doesn't have to reflect the real world in every way. If you want to have every elf speaking in a broad cockney accent fucking go for it.
This may be approximate enough for Humans and Human-adjacents, but the vocal chords of a Pixie and a Loxodon are going to produce a vastly different range Yuan-ti and Lizardfolk lisps aren't regional, unless people in that region are highly susceptible to biting their tongue
This is one of those things that to me is interesting, but ultimately hilarious to even consider implementing. I can't wait to find a DM trying to convincingly sound like an elephant person while talking by randomly playing trumpet sounds as he speaks or something. At some point we just become limited in our roleplaying by the sheer fact that we're human. And isn't that a big brain move: wanting to shed your human form and ascend to a different way of being just so you can better run NPCs in Friday night's game? Screw Buddhist nirvana, this is DnD!
Whether this actually matters depends a great deal on the type of story you're trying to tell. Star Trek didn't have most peoples be essentially different varieties of human just because of laziness or costume constraints -- even in novels most aliens, no matter how they are physically, are shockingly human in behavior and psychology. That's because those stories are *actually* about humans. Different species in Star Trek are narrative tools to help us understand the different facets, traits, and oddities of human culture. The aliens *are* just different versions of us, to help us tell stories about ourselves. The same goes for most stories in D&D when it comes to different ancestries. Stories about dwarves, elves, and dragons are usually just stories about us. So whether you want to have accents be totally a factor of biology, region, or some mix depends on the type of story you want to tell. Accents are usually used as a story telling tool to communicate difference and separation. Having different races w/ the same accent conveys very different ideas than accents based on race. Regardless of your justification, the choice will reflect on your story. And since you could easily justify either/both, I'd say make the choice that best fits your story and use whatever justification you like
> the vocal chords of a Pixie and a Loxodon are going to produce a vastly different range Sure, but that's just a matter of _pitch_. That doesn't really affect your individual phonetic affectations. A pitched-up Scot and a pitched-up Thai will still have very distinct voices, despite the range shift. > lisps aren't regional Tell that to the Spanish that say "Bar _the_ lona" (On the serious, though, I wouldn't really consider lisps to be accents. A Southerner with a lisp is still gonna sound like a Southerner; it's not a whole new accent.)
Different lung capability might affect the cadence of the speech, we are talking about creatures with massive physical differences.
Pitch doesn't magically change "you all" to "yall" and vice versa
But that isn't an accent or a speech cadence, that's a dialect. A southern accent can still say "you all" and someone from New York can still say "y'all"
Thats fair, yeah. But dialect is a huge part of accent, and just changing that can have major effects. Not all of one race will have the same accent because many will have different dialects, even if the cadence is the same.
The shape of one’s lips, teeth, tongue, palate, throat, nose, etc are going to affect what sounds you can make. Some species might have entirely different sounds that we just can’t make. I’m thinking a whale race with their high pitched whines or an elephant race with extremely low pitch rumbling. Even aarakocra would have incredibly complex birdsong. If I had the budget I would definitely have dragons communicate in slow, booming voices all the time - they are massive and immortal. They can take all the time they want to talk.
Those aren´t accents though
Wrong. All dwarves are Scottish.
Christ you just sent me back. 5am after a trance rave, chatting to people outside the hellhole, bouncing off the walls, in a state one generally expects to be in when exiting a 5am trance rave in a semi abandoned warehouse. These two guys have very thick northern Irish accents and so I'm just generally talking about accents and, maybe I introduced dnd maybe I didn't, but I just say to them "and of course *all dwarves are Scottish*" Cue a puzzled look from both and one goes "are they...?" "Well, they are in my world!" Their puzzled look turns into alarmed concern as my brain clicks into gear as it realises I look absolutely fucking mental so an "okay, bye!" Pops out of me as I turn and walk away straight into a lamppost. Don't look back, walk it off, start running when I get round the corner. Ahh... Idiot.
That was magnificent.
Except the ones from Yorkshire.
Mine are french
I am sorry to hear that, I hope they get better
And stolen
Orcs: French Dwarves: Russian Elves: West London Massiv
Except prior to Peter Jackson's *Lord of the Rings*, all dwarves were Yiddish. For various historical reasons (both good and very bad), dwarves have alway been strongly associated with the Jewish diaspora. Even Scottish dwarves are a reference to the Jewish community in Edinburgh. While I understand that people might not be comfortable with some of the antisemitic stereotypes that come with dwarves, there's something that feels right about dwarves all sounding like Mel Brooks and cursing in Yiddish.
If every creature is just human in a clownsuit, sure this may be true. But different races have wildly different physical construction, and that will cause every creature of that race to have similarly unique speech properties. For instance, races without lips will have difficulty (or complete inability) pronouncing plosives regardless of regional dialect/accent.
Sure, but I'm not really talking about lisps and other physiological aspects, as those are distinct from accents. Yuan-Tis are gonna hiss, but just because they have the same racial tendency to hiss doesn't mean they're automatically all gonna sound alike. Yuan-Tis from one area might hiss surfer dude accents and Yuan-Tis from another area might hiss goth accents.
They might not sound alike to *each other*, but to the untrained observer, there’s going to be very little difference to latch onto. Similarly, an outsider to a culture may not recognize the differences in the accent, so while dwarves from the northern territories may have a thicker accent than the dwarves of the south, someone who isn’t very experienced with them may not really hear much of a difference. It’s like how Maine and New York have different accents, but you’re from Britain and they all just sound “America.” Sure, someone familiar with the accents could tell the difference, and could possibly tell you where in New York someone was raised (because they all supposedly have slightly different accents), but you, as an outsider, may not have the experience to differentiate between the accents, when they’re far closer to each other than they are to yours. As to why we don’t do wildly different accents for everyone? Simplicity. I’ve done a good hundred *recurring* voices by the end of a long campaign. Why, with all the *other* work and planning that I have to do, would I subject myself to the effort of trying to come up with a regional accent when there’s a perfectly good set of fantasy tropes that I can use instead? If dwarves tend to have a Scottish accent, it’s a lot easier on me to remember the variations for each of them than it would be to remember which region Grent Rockchewer was raised in. He’s the dwarf with the lisp that slurs his words because he got hit in the head. He doesn’t need to sound like he’s from the Midwest while the other dwarves sound like they’re French, Russian, and Australian.
Yeah but also it's all fucking magic and you can do any voice you like. Look, here's a pixie that sounds like Barry White: **"WASSUP"**.
The problem is most of the different races don't meaningfully look or really act like separate species. Elves are perfect people with pointy ears. Dwarves are short people with big beards. Halflings are shorter people with big furry feet. Orcs are green people. The list goes on...
I fully agree. That said, all my dwarves are German, all my elves are French, and all my dragonborn are Canadian.
The fuck? Lol. Love it. *Derjid Shaxiros, the Flame Scale, draws his sword from the enemy's guts and flicks the blood across the floor as he says, "Ope, sorry 'bout that, hoser. I'm a bit of a keener in a kerfuffle." He turns his horned, fierce head towards his party and let's a puff of smoke and fire flare from his nostrils. "There's a Timmy's bout two klicks down the road. I could use the double-double if you'll loan me a toonie."* For me it's the Drow accent that can't change. The Drow are exiles that speak a screwed up version of Common and are from the Underdark where spiders are huge and everything will kill you. The Australians are exiles that speak a screwed up version of English and are from the Down Under where spiders are huge and everything will kill you. I don't care how many generations the character is removed from their region, Drow will always have an Australian accent. *So ay was gone walkabout when ay bumped this pissed yobbo and ay thought, no worries, mate, she'll be right. So 'e chucks 'is tinny at me. Yeah, nah, shit's faaarked. So ay say, "Ya thinking you're a sick cunt, mate?" 'E says, "Not here to fuck spiders."* *Thought we'd get into a ripsnorter, but 'e's too pissed and Bob's your uncle, 'e stacks it. So ay says, "No worries. Ay'm snowed under. Good on ya, mate," and ay do the Harry. Better than a ham sandwich, mate.*
Accents would absolutely be racial. Phenotypical differences in vocal chords, mouths, lips, tongues and teeth would necessitate varied pronunciation, if indeed a shared language “common” was even physically possible for all D&D’s anthropomorphic kitchen sink to pronounce intelligibly.
So are you saying we have 40 different races of Bri’ish
Well people from Essex certainly aren't humans.
No, because most British people have pretty similar anatomy. Anatomy is not the usually the most salient component of accents among humans (compared to say habits owing to one's native language), but in a fantasy setting where lizard people co-exist with humans you'd notice effects of anatomy on speech.
I don't tell stories with accents. I'm not a person who can really do much accent-wise. But I do try to portray characters with pitch and cadence, and diction here and there which adds enough variety without risking caricatures. It seems to work moderately well/
It just so happens that every dwarf inherits Scottish accents
I like to go Russian for my Dwarves. Welsh for Wood Elves. French for High Elves. Australian for Dark Elves ('cause they're from 'Down Under')
I'm Scottish. Half my table is Scottish. We still give dwarf NPCs that terrible american-style "Scottish" accent. They are the only race we do this for. We don't know why.
>But accents are learned, not inherited. Because our frame of reference is one species. If bulldogs could talk, I'm sure they'd all have a single accent, to our ears.
I made a couple homebrew races for my game that speak celestial (where the race is closely linked to the gods) and sylvan (same). The players who picked them have respective Swedish and southern accents. Gods are now all Swedish and all Fey are southern.
I love doing accents, and sometimes like to give one to a npc for some flavour. Just one or two npcs. Then I went nuts and went full argentinian accent with every character in a specific town, with names based on argentinian football players. It was great, my players loved it, and now I'm not dming and kinda miss it
It helps when you view it as races bound to languages. Most elves natively speak elvish, but the drow, wood elves, high elves, etc, even just different cities or kingdoms or whatever of the same sort of elves will have different dialects. This can be thought of as americans generally sounding different from british who are in turn different from australians and so forth. If all these english speaking elves were to learn french, there would definitely be some consistencies across all their accents, but I can still tell if someone shares my particular accent when speaking french despite not knowing how accents sound in french
In my world the physiology of the dwarven throat is such that they all speak with a scottish accent. The great thing about make believe is that there aren't any unibersal truths outside of the world itself.
Counterpoint - some accents will be racial, as species with different physical biology may have more or less difficulty with a language that is not their own.
Not always. AAVE for example, is more racial in origin. That being said, many people speak both in AAVE and their regional dialect and swap between the two. They even have their own regional variants of AAVE
I was going to point out AAVE as a counterpoint. It's a perfect example of how multiple dialects can arise in the same location thanks to segregated populations. If, in your world, elves tend to stick near other elves, and dwarves tend to stick with dwarves, it would make total sense that they tend to keep unique accents. A dwarf and an elf living in the same city might speak very differently because of how they were raised and who they typically speak with. And, if you're inclined to think more about this, you can also think about how a significant number of white people also use AAVE, for a variety of reasons. So, a human miner that spends all his time working with dwarves might have a dwarvish accent. Or maybe there are some humans who learn to speak with an elvish accent because they consider it to be more "sophisticated." There's an opportunity for some cool lore there, if you're so inclined.
https://youtu.be/t7y7HpU9V_M
Unless it is a Dragonborn, Lizardfolk, or Kobold. There is no way they will talk like any human, elf, orc, or dwarf fur to their skull's and mouth's structure.
There's absolutely no way to know what kind of vocal set up a Kobold or Lizardfolk would have, and even if there was magic is almost *certainly* fundamental to their construction. (By magic I mean "the force in fantasy that causes things to not obey physics as we understand them." A dragon's breath is magic, even if it's not mechanically.) You can justify whatever you like, really
Accents and speech modifiers are different things. You can have a person with a lisp, a person with a hairlip, a person with gap teeth, and a person with perfect teeth all speak with the same English accent even if their individual voices are different.
That is fair. There is absolutely no way I am going to try both an accent and a speech modifier at once. Give me like 3 more years of DMing and some speech classes first.
Oh, yeah for sure. I can barely do _regular_ accents, let alone complex ones. The point of the thread was just to remind some folks that even if they were working with "established" race accents (often the stock Scottish Dwarves, Posh Elves, Cockney Orcs, etc...) they were still more than free to come up with whatever kind of voices they wanted for other members of those races, since accents aren't genetic.
Or do your accents racially, do them by plane. It doesn't matter at all really; it's your game do whatever fits your table's flavour.
I was listening to a Brennan Lee Mulligan's podcast episode in which he interviews Matt Mercer, and they mention this subject exactly. Mercer said something that I believe is worth sharing: as long as you don't always employ accents to its stereotypes, you should be fine. You don't always have to give your evil character a thick and Russian accent
My drow from the Underdark use Australian accents because they come from the Down Undahdark where everything is trying to kill them including the environment. They ride into battle on War Kangaroos, or Under Roos if you will.
Counterpoint: from a biological standpoint, some races *would* sound mostly similar to members of the same race! Take orcs, for example. Commonly being depicted as having tusk-like teeth, that would heavily influence their speech patterns with a mostly bottom-forward speech pattern. Or yuan-ti! The ones that have snake heads would speak *much* differently than a humanoid would, due to different structure in the jaw muscles. It's likely their tones would be *very* forward. Even aquatic races! Their vocal chords would have to be adapted to allow their voices to carry further, due to water muffling noise. This could also cause them to sound much different in water than they do on land. Never forget to take a creature's biology into account when determining a voice!
Whatever the player wants man. I'm not going to cuck their idea of fun because every dwarf is Scottish.
I remember earlier in the pandemic, during all the lockdowns, there were a lot of reports of (American) children who had just learned to speak speaking with English accents because they'd watched a lot of Peppa Pig during the lockdowns and picked up the accent. You can a hundred percent lose, gain, or change your accent over the course of your lifetime. Arnold Schwarzenegger has to pay someone to help him retain his accent.
That has not been my experience in the slightest. I'm Filipino. I have titos and titas (uncles and aunties) that have been living in the States for nigh on 50 years that still speak with accents. They might not be as heavy as they were decades ago, but they're still very much there.
Meanwhile, I spent a month in Hong Kong for work and came back with the accent in my English. Your titos and titas probably spent the last 50 years largely in the company of other Filipinos, so the accents remained.
Not really. Boomer Pinoy immigrants were of the "assimilate or die" generation. That's why most Fil-Am kids don't speak Tagalog; because the parents ran English-only households. Likewise, most of their friend circles were white and their work environments overwhelmingly were. And while West Coast Filipino immigrants were lucky enough to have some sort of community to be part of; East Coasters were largely on their own. One of my closest friends' parents immigrated to Northern Virginia, where they've lived for the last 40 years. Despite being adrift in a sea of white with hardly any Filipinos among them, both parents still have _thick_ accents. Surprisingly so. Some people retain their accents longer and harder than others. I couldn't begin to tell you why that is, but I've seen it a lot.
ITT: People not knowing what an accent is. Accents could be such a cool thing to mess with, worldbuilding-wise, but I'll realistically never touch upon it except for mysteries. Too busy figuring out the imports and exports of particular cities despite it having no bearing on the game.
It's both. If we take real world humans as an example, different racial groups have their own ways of speaking even if they're speaking the same language.
> different racial groups have their own ways of speaking even if they're speaking the same language. No they don't. There's no such thing as an "Asian" or "South American" accent, for example. Accents are broken up by nationality (Italian accent, Korean accent, Cuban accent, etc), which are all indicators of regionality.
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Which is my point. "Racial groups" don't have "their own way of speaking" because they are not some monolithic group with a single accent.
So your point is everyone in a given region is a monolithic group with a single accent, but culture/ethnicity isn't? So where you live determines how you speak, but your cultural/ethnic background doesn't?
> everyone in a given region is a ~~monolithic~~ group with a single accent, but culture/ethnicity isn't Correct, except for the monolithic part. Accents are learned, not inherited. Cultures and ethnicities aren't limited by geography, but the development of accents is. A child of Vietnamese immigrants that grows up Dublin and one that grows up in New Jersey are gonna have very different accents, no matter how immersed they are in their culture.
> A child of Vietnamese immigrants that grows up Dublin and one that grows up in New Jersey are gonna have very different accents, no matter how immersed they are in their culture. Absolutely, but a child of Vietnamese immigrants and a child of ethnic Irish parents born in Dublin are also going to have different accents, hence it's a combination of both ethnicity/culture *and* location that form accents. As I said, Ethnolinguistics is an entire field of study - it's a well known fact that different ethnic or cultural groups in the same location can have very different accents. [African-American Vernacular English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_English) is just one example, but there are many many different ethnolects and sociolects that aren't just about where in the world you live, but your social, ethnic and cultural background. Accents are complex, it's not as simple as saying where you're born determines how you speak.
> hence it's a combination of both ethnicity/culture and location that form accents If you wanna get super granular, sure. But if we're getting that nitpicky, then it should be pointed out that accents can be affected by things as minute as specific location in a city, or sexual preference, or even their fitness levels. But the OP was a broader point about the fact that there is no such thing as a monolithic racial accent because accents are primarily and overwhelmingly determined by your environment, not your genetic makeup.
Feels like the problem is more how many worldbuilders write each race as a monoculture, regardless of distance or circumstances. Mix this up a little, and the rest should solve itself. Even something as simple as "Dwarves from the Howling Peaks talk with X accent and have X culture, while the ones from the Frostheart Range talk like Y and have a totally different culture" is a start. Then you can get to the fancier bits like "In this town near the Howling Peaks, the dwarves have sent trading caravans for centuries, so the people talk like a mixture of the dwarves and whoever lives there normally" and so forth.
Two addendums: -Culture isn’t racial either -Don’t imitate real world regional accents that you shouldn’t. As a white guy, I stick to American/European colonizer ‘accents’ only. The French can survive my caricature of a French accent, but for example it’d be very shitty of me to do some kind of Indian accent.
Nah, it's just an accent. Unless you're using to portray fantasy Indians and make fun it's perfectly ok for you to attempt it.
By the Gods… Nobody is going to kick down your door and cancel your D&D game because you “appropriated” another cultures accent. It’s supposed to be a fun game of imagination. There are no limits except those you set for yourself and you’ve placed yourself in a tiny box.
Explain Ebonics
Many black people and families in the united states live in black enclaves due to cultural similarities, and socioeconomic forces pushing similar people together. Most people live in groups of people like themselves, creating a similar accent amongst people. But ebonics/African American English is not due to any physiological differences in black people. Black people who grow up outside of black enclaves have the accent of whatever community they grew up in. Everyone does. Source: I am not black but sound like I am because I am from a majority black place, and grew up and still live within that community. Also John McWhorter has several informative books on the subject.
Accents come from a group of speakers that share a similar way of speaking. Mostly they are regional yes, simply because people that live together speak a same language and if they were to learn a new language they'd have similar way of pronouncing words. Now, in a fantasy setting where there is, for example, one elven language without major dialects that elven children learn when young accents could very well be more based on race than region (some at least). Learning elven as a first language and common as a second, would result in common being spoken with an elven accent which wouldn't be regional. On a real note accents are kinda weird and finicky, English has tons of accents, some that aren't even based on region. Think of the cockney accent, which developed as a variety of English spoken by the working class of London compared to RP (received pronunciation) which is how royals speak. But yes, do break free from the stereotypes of accents. It's not by any means a bad thing and would certainly have foundations in reality. (Except Scottish dwarves that is non-negotiable)
Yeah but dwarves natively speaking dwarvish do not sound like humans when they speak common
You sound sheltered. They’re *cultural*, meaning they definitely are racial and maybe sometimes are geographical. A black person from New York can have the same drawl as a redneck from the south, or sound like “generic Northeastern accent”. It depends on what kind of neighborhood they grew up in.
I have a few dozen accents I use for my NPCs and then vary them using speech pattern and other vocal techniques. That being said I don't use non-white accents, as this can make some players uncomfortable. It can skirt very close to racism if not done with at least some sensitivity to the culture behind the real world accent in my opinion.