Back in high school, I went through a long phase where every one of my fantasy games, regardless of system or group — featured a halfling with a (bad) French accent.
Why? I’m not really sure. Halflings are fun to play, and I do love a bad French accent. And my players always seemed to enjoy them. But I’m not the only GM who does this by far, so I think there’s more to it than that.
Do you have cross-game, cross-group or even cross-genre NPCs like this? Why do you use them — and how have your players responded to them?
I can’t say I’ve had a particular NPC in every game, but I do have recurring types. I’ve noticed that at least twice in every campaign, I have a political asshole whose entire purpose seems to be to manipulate the party down the proverbial rail tracks. Oh, and of course he’s untouchable.
Ever since Warcraft II came out back in the day, every dwarf in nearly every game I’ve ran has had the default Scottish accent.
In fact, if I throw a Scottish accent onto another NPC, my players always assume dwarf, even if I explicitly tell them otherwise.
Every campaign I run has Deckard Cain in it. Why? Because he’s awesome, and there’s a guy in my group who can imitate him exactly.
T
The stuttering thief is one of my favorites. Of course his stuttering will increase in fatal situations. I got him as NPC from a guest player in one of my groups. He has stayed around now and then ever after.
I always find myself throwing in the annoying gnome….fulfilling all cliches and my players know him, whatever name he carries around.
No; for some reason, I rarely retread. (At least not consciously.) I suspect it’s because I like for things to fit the setting/world, and our group bops between systems often enough that a halfing’s out of place much of the time.
I’ve got a couple of NPC’s that are well-known in my gaming group: a stuttering wizard who gets really upset if you try to finish his sentences, a sheriff/chief constable with a deeply Southern accent, and a half-orc trader with a lisp. The group hates hearing that Southern drawl behind them when they are caught doing something wrong. But they actively look for reasons to visit the stuttering wizard for advice and the lisping half-orc when they need to fence something.
for a long time, nobody in my group wanted to play a thief, and the party desperately needed one. so there was a long run of NPC halfling thieves named Imriam. they would do their work for the party for a short time, inevitably get eaten by a (mimic|dragon|grue), and a replacement Imriam would show up a short bit later from the guild.
some of the players have since keened on the roguish classes, so Imriam’s services have not been needed. i think, if the next campaign ends up being my planned Eberron/Sharn campaign, he may make a re-appearance (though not working for the party this time).
Trying to read between the lines, it sounds like the main reason GMs include recurring, cross-game/genre NPCs is because it’s fun. Which is a pretty good reason, really. 😉
A lot of the ideas mentioned in your comments sound like they’d be very enjoyable in play — I particularly like the standing order for the a guild thief. 😉
I think accents are one of the best flavour adding devices for NPCs(up there with the salt shaker).My constant favourites are, the hill giant hillbillys(throw anuntha rock at em Paw). Yiddish gnomes, and goblins that sound like the french taunter from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.The one that my players still shudder at most is an evil ancient gold dragon who had the voice and accent of Shere-Khan from Disneys jungle book(highly refined pure eeeevil).
I’m horrible with accents and such (in fact, I’m not terribly good at 1st person dialogue…).
I do have some repeating NPC concepts though. Since I almost always have an NPC member of the party for D&D style games, one of my common concepts (which I just now considered actually somewhat got started back in high school) is the rogueish (or scoutish as appropriate) high DEX low STR female (possibly small). This character is often optimized to be handy in combat, but not dominate the game. And the thief/scout role is often a good one for the GM (traditionally lots of solo play, which can be handled with a roll or two and 30 seconds of thinking when an NPC does it instead of 2 hours in the next room with the rogue player when it’s a PC). Sometimes this character is somewhat accidental (like my Cold Iron instance of this character, who was randomly rolled, with an ok STR, poor (really poor) CON, small size, and awesome DEX. I don’t think I would have forced a player to play the stats – she had 1/2 the hit points, or less, of most of the fighters, and way less than even the spell casters – I think she came into her own when she managed to survive being triple (or maybe it was quad) teamed, and her high dodge saw her through). The D&D instance was a tumbler (using a character class from some British fanzine my friend brought back from Worldcon in Britain in 1979) who wasn’t even as good as a thief in melee, but who could throw a ton of daggers (and then managed to get these really cool daggers…that actually let her, almost, outshine the PCs a bit – they did something like 2d6 damage once a day, and she could throw 3 per round, though I also remember one of the high level fighters, with a potion of super heroism, girdle of giant strength, and a really nice sword, pulling off some amazing damage – of course that was also back before I had learned to be quite so good about downplaying the NPCs).
Actually, as long as the system and campaign support it, I think this is a role I enjoy as a PC also (though my PCs tend to be male most of the time – still, I like the low keyed scout type a lot).
The episodic nature of my games tends not to result in many long standing non-party NPCs, so not so much opportunity for repeating character types there.
Frank
When I wrote the post, I was thinking more about the recurring aspect than the actual accent. My accents are almost universally terrible. 😉
I had a throw-away NPC from a published adventure blossom into a serially immortal NPC to any group I ran in my old 2nd Edition D&D game.
Nork was a goblin provided in an adventure in “Dungeon” magazine who was there to point the party in the right direction. His job was to broker information on his tribe in exchange for his life.
Apparently, Nork’s begging struck a chord with the players because they ended up adopting him as their mascot. At one point, when there was a choice between either one of the PCs or Nork getting killed, the PC in question volunteered to “take one for the Nork-er” (his words, BTW)… 🙂
I’ve used a variety of accents for specific characters and NPC’s (I wouldn’t claim to be good at them but it does provide a hige amount of added colour). Notable amongst these are dwarves with scottish accents (I suppose this is pretty universal) and a mobile trader called Strensversy that I ‘borrowed’ from a friend. Old Strens has a fabulous irish drawl, and a penchance for discounts on all manner of items (the reason for the discount normally arrives later in the form of the city watch or a large 7’2″ Paladin of Hextor! But over the accept helps add to the character, my player only have to hear the irish drawl of Strensversy to start packing!