I was curious how to voice my male NPCs. I don't want to fill my world with female NPCs just because I can't voice male characters. I want to get more into the roleplay aspect of the game, but my friends laugh anytime I try to do a guys voice. I want to make my characters unique as well, not just using the same tone and what not for everyone.
The greatest part of this for me is just voicing males in general. This would include core races like Humans, Dwarves, elves, and also "extra" races, like goblins and Aarakocra, etc. I don't think lowering my voice is a choice here, so I was just wondering what people had to say to help! It's difficult for me to get the "gruff and brute" voices of some of the tougher male races, so I also want to hear about how I might be able to roleplay these voices properly.
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As a DM, I've found that trying to distinguish characters solely by changing my voice doesn't work very well. It's not especially scalable, for one - if you have a full cast of NPCs, you're likely to run out of voices you're physically capable of doing long before you run out of NPCs who need voices. Plus, depending on the voices you have to do and the length of your sessions, you can actually hurt yourself sustaining difficult voices for a long time. (And it's not just doing loud voices; one professional VA injured herself whispering.)
In The Lord of the Rings, Gollum/Smeagol swaps back and forth between two personalities. While some of the change is in the voice, the vast majority of it is in his body language - the way he holds himself, the way he moves. You can tell which one is in control even with the sound off.
When you get your body into your roleplaying, your voice will naturally follow in ways that don't require you to make a huge effort to "Do A Voice". If you're playing a timid character, shrink down and into yourself. Hunch your shoulders, duck your head. You'll find your voice is naturally softer and likely a bit higher-pitched just due to the shape of your body.
Likewise, if you want to portray a brash, bold warrior, thrust out your chest, lift your chin, and speak from your stomach. This naturally deepens and loudens your voice, and especially if you're a woman, makes you sound more "masculine".
If you're a king, command attention by speaking levelly and not especially loudly: a king knows he is so important that everyone else will fall silent to listen to him. If you're a peasant, slouch your shoulders and slap on your favorite country bumpkin drawl.
Using body language to shift your voice and roleplay characters requires that you know what body language to use in the first place. This means knowing your characters - their backgrounds, their personalities, the kinds of language they use, etc. This helps them stand out from one another even when you aren't using any special voices.
For example, I had an NPC who could see all of time at once. This meant she often jumped three or four steps ahead in conversation, answering not the question the PCs had just asked, but the one that would logically follow. She was also very distracted all the time, and would sometimes need to be snapped back to the conversation.
In a different campaign, I had an NPC whom the players adopted after he failed his villainous plot against them. He was an intelligent and haughty high elf, so when I played him, I would lean my head back to look down my nose, and speak with Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness.
I said above to speak from your stomach. I tend to use this trick when I want to be louder, as it's the basis for stage projection, but it has the side effect of making my voice deeper. On average, women tend to speak through our noses and at the front of our mouths. Pay attention to where you feel the vibrations and the movement of air when you're talking; you'll likely find them at the front of your tongue and up in the soft palate under your nose.
Men, on the other hand, tend to speak from deeper in the chest/stomach, at the back of their mouths. Try to let your voice sit at the very back of your tongue, at the top of your throat. Instead of pushing air through your nose to talk, push it all the way up from your stomach. You'll feel your voice resonating in your throat, which has the effect of making it deeper and more masculine.
Your players will likely laugh at first, as you find your way. We laughed at each other a lot back in theatre class. Just like anything new, it takes practice, and you'll sound (and look) a bit silly until you get the hang of it. Practice in front of a mirror, or in the car or shower, or even with a trusted friend or two.
The main thing to remember is to commit. Don't half-ass your body language; it muddies the message and doesn't help your voice cooperate. Just go all-in, and you'll be doing awesome voices in no time - and maybe encouraging your friends to join you.
I have the same problem in reverse. It's hard for me to do "feminine" voices due to my vocal register alone. When I've tried to do a specifically feminine voice (the precise definition of what feminine meant for voices shifted from instance to instance), my results have been unimpressive. The voices are sometimes OK, or even better than OK, but I still didn't feel like I was getting what I wanted.
My big revelation was that trying to directly portray gender, in itself, was not very helpful in accomplishing my goals. What I really wanted was a memorable, engaging character, and what really delivers that is making the voice distinctive.
Something like half of my NPCs that I would consider voicing are female. That suggests that female is not a very distinctive trait to express. I end up with better voices when I think about traits they have, especially when those traits make them different from other NPCs, and then think of vocal details that I feel fit those traits.
In a current game I'm running, there is a female gnome NPC that my players interact with sometimes. She's not particularly feminine, is a very talented engineer, often loses herself in her work, and is quick to see the humor in things but doesn't fixate on it. The vocal details that I chose to apply to her were:
These don't really describe a woman's voice in particular. But they are different from my normal voice, and from the voices I use for other NPCs. It is distinctive and memorable, and attached to a character that is a woman. They accept it not as a woman's voice, but as this woman's voice.
To develop more masculine vocal traits, my advice is to identify a celebrity (in a specific role or not) and then practice delivering dialogue they've recorded that has the feel you want. Pay attention to the tone, pitch, volume, and so on, but also think about word choice, meter, and body language. Think about which elements convey maleness, specifically, to you rather than other characteristics.
When you practice delivering the dialogue yourself, it's helpful to record it and then listen back. Voices sound very different to the person speaking than to people listening, so hearing it as others will is helpful. It's also helpful to have different attempts that you can review and compare-- you might find a trick that delivers the effect that you want but that you would not have identified clearly in the original dialogue you are imitating.
And, when actually deploying your voices during game sessions, really commit to sticking with your planned voices throughout. For some NPCs I write out brief reference cards that help me remember vocal details and other character traits, and pull them out when I'm portraying that character so that they're fresh in my mind.
It's easy to fall back to a compromise between your real voice and your character voice, but doing so will wipe out a lot of the subtleties that made the voice appealing and distinctive in the first place.
There isn't really an easy solution, and optimal tactics will depend on your abilities for modulating voices, your knowledge of different dialects and modes of speech, how good an ear you have for different vocabulary choices, and how your group receives what you do.
Fundamentally men have deeper voices than women with rare exceptions. I'm guessing you've already tried deepening your voice, so I'll assume there's a limit to what you can do with that. I have a relatively high male voice and I still struggle with female voices so I understand that this can be difficult, and cross-gender often sounds ridiculous even when you do have a good range because there are simply other qualities to the sounds of voices.
If you are any good with dialects that can help considerably, because you are burying the oddness in a manner of speech less familiar to your group. About a third to half of my female characters have some sort of accent, be it real, made up, or real but so butchered that it seems made up. Of course this can easily make things even sillier, so there's that.
Another aspect of dialects is that, returning to vocal pitch, both men and women speak a bit higher or lower in some cultures (and sub-cultures) than others. The majority of other English speaking countries predominantly speak in a higher register than most North Americans, in part because of variations in how various vowels are pronounced (some New Zealanders tend to turn a lot of vowel sounds into a high "i", Rhys Darby on Flight of the Conchords is an extreme example). A higher register male speech pattern is presumably easier for most women to get close to.
A major issue with accents, however, is that if it is not one with which you can speak (even wildly inaccurately) without thinking too much about it, then you're really just adding one more challenge to characterization.
Personally I usually come up with an accent or other verbal mannerism for my characters as a player (mostly because it makes it easier to distinguish my personality from the characters) and for cross-gender characters it seems to make it a little easier for most other players to accept the gender mismatch. I do it for some NPC's when I DM, but only when I think they are likely to become important. 152ee80cbc