The Blog of Roon

This week’s WISH asks about physical and verbal schtick that helps with characterization.

My characters do verbal schtick, practically all of them—from not speaking at all to very odd speech mannerisms indeed. What I don’t typically do, I notice, is come up with the schtick beforehand, during character creation. Each new character’s speech tics develop during play, and eventually become habit.

This isn’t to say their speech necessarily comes from some great well of fundamental character knowledge. I happened to be reading Jane Austen when the Grand Ellipse started, and that’s how Shirley got his strait, studied, over-formal mode of speech. (Do you have any idea how hard it is to write without contractions? Sheesh.) Shirley, by the way, has a voice very like that of David Wenham playing Diver Dan on Seachange. The accent is all wrong, of course, and the inflections are a little different, but that is Shirley’s voice.

Verbal tics? “To be sure” and contraction avoidance are his major ones.

Tamasi is also formal and studied in her speech, but generally less stilted (and certainly less British!) than Shirley, with an edge of long-repressed frustration that the warm-hearted Yorkshireman doesn’t have. Her verbal tic is opening or closing statements with “Well.” By itself. Almost a scop’s Hwæt!

Hannah gives me a chance to remember how I talked when I was growing up in North Carolina. Not a rural Southern accent by any means—I never had such, growing up in Raleigh—but the elongated vowels and the speech rhythms and the word choice. Hannah, like any educated Southern woman, has a repertoire of obscenity-avoiding exclamations that constitute her verbal tic.

The oddest speech I’ve ever entertained as a player was Rat’s low-class, sentence-fragmented idiolect. That her problem was lack of education rather than lack of intelligence showed when her thoughtful, formal lizard-man mentor started teaching her his language, and when speaking it she sounded just like him. I enjoyed switching verbal horses in midstream.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2003 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.