Hello fellow adventurers, scoundrels, and heroes! I am a relatively new DM but this is not my first time running a campaign however this is the first time I've made a homebrew campaign this in-depth. I want to voice act, but not just gravelly voices and bad accents, I want to sound old and young and innocent and evil and anything else that will help immerse my players in this story I spent MONTHS writing. I guess you could say I'm suffering heavily from the Mercer Effect. Any veteran dungeon masters out there have any tips and hacks to improve my voice acting game?

Not sure if this will be helpful, but here goes... I'm not great at voices or accents, so I try to focus on inflection, volume, cadence, rhythm, etc. of what a character is saying. So, essentially I just think of whatever is impacting the character in the moment they are speaking (events, emotions, conditions, etc) and 'react' to that in my delivery. 

tl;dr: I focus on how they speak rather than what they sound like.

That actually is a help, I get a little shy when I have to act out bold emotion so maybe focusing more on that aspect will help the rest flow better.

As I have said before, I do not indulge in accents and "voices" for my NPC characterizations.  I do however try to figure out who that NPC really is and come up with a vocabulary of sorts for them.  Some NPCs are very straight forward and almost blunt in their interactions.  As such long sentences and flowery speech are beyond them.   Other NPCs are the opposite, and they literally can't condense a story down, constantly spinning a tale to the PCs questions like they were Luis's spiritual double from the Ant-Man movies.  

If voices and inflections are what you are interested in, Taliesin Jaffe appeared on DM tips with Satine and recorded his method of voice acting.  I think is the correct link:

https://binged.it/2B9qWqh

Happy Gaming.

My two cents: physicality is really important. Speech, as in the physical way we make sounds, is a physical act. What helps me more than anything is to really act the character, not just the voice. If you're playing an orc, hunch your shoulders, jut out your jaw, imagine you have tusks sticking out of your mouth. The voice will come. Adapting the physical postures and ticks of your characters will really help improve the quality of the voice acting.

You mentioned Mercer, watch him next time you tune in to CritRole. He doesn't just do a voice, he takes on their physicalities. Ask any VO artist, getting physical is more than half the job.

After I write up a npc background I come up with a voice. Can be a child, elderly and everything in between including monsters.

I talk to myself aloud. In normal voice I ask the npc questions then answer in the npc voice until I have it down well enough.

Like others have said a voice is much easier when you take on that personality. To do that a fair background makes it easier.

As someone with years of theatre training, two things:

No. No-one can impart years of experience, and-- lets be honest-- being naturally gifted (I don't mean to be a jerk, but most people who do voices, have been impersonating and mimicking voices since they were a small child. They're good at it as adults, because they have a gift.)  Could someone explain to you how to do it? Probably. Will I try here? ... a little.

The second thing was : don't underestimate bad accents, celebrity impersonations and other "cheap" effects. They're easy, they communicate a lot of information and they're fun. If you make the ship captain Sean Connery, people will latch on to that and believe it is Sean Connery. Sure, that undermines a detailed backstory, but if you want effective acting: there you go.

The person who talked about physicality isn't wrong. By which I mean they are completely right. Acting is about buying into the role yourself. If you can't convince yourself that you are something, no-one else is going to believe it either. Good news: you are an idiot. I mean that not you specifically are an idiot, but rather that we are very good at fooling ourselves into believing things that are clearly not true. Open your eyes wide and say "Wow!" Congratulations, you are probably about to do something else that is childish. Conversely, hunch over uncomfortably to one side and now you are a crotchety old man. Sit up unnaturally straight and put your hand under your chin: you are now a fop. The bad news? This is exactly the same cheap charleton's trick of doing a gravelly voice or a bad accent, but physically portrayed. It's about using stereotypes and whole package concepts to convey detailed information quickly. The alternative is spending weeks getting into the headspace of every character and pouring over every line of text and really understanding what they do and how their background informs their mannerisms and thought processess. Pro-tip: don't do that. You aren't playing Hamlet.

If you really want to get good at doing voices, just do voices. ALL OF THE TIME. I'm not even joking. When I am in the shower, I do voices. When I spend time with friends, I do voices. When I go for walks, I do voices. When I have a cool idea and want to hear how it would play out, I do voices. Find out what you are good at and do it and experiment and try to reproduce sounds you hear (not just voices, but just cool sounds.)

And if all of this sounds a bit much, then remember, you don't have to do a one man show to run a good game of D&D.

I plan on running Tomb of Annihilation one day, and imagine Chultans having African accents, so looked that up. I don’t want to nail an African accent (for a start, which part of Africa!?), but I figure if I can add one or two inflections to my voice, along with the other advice here, it should give the players some fun, which is the goal. Full disclosure: I am lousy at accents.

I just returned to the game a couple of months ago, got roped into being the DM because I'm the only one who played any substantial amount before. It's been decades since I did any DMing, and I'm an artist not an actor so... analogous situation in that I need to work extra hard to bring the campaign to life. I am seconding (thirding?) using posture and physical gestures to help. People don't need much to stoke the imagination, and hitting more than one sense (sight as well as sound for your players, kinesthesia as well as sound for you) just makes it that much easier. It also makes for more opportunities for humor - last session an intimidation roll got roleplayed and generated some real laughs mostly from the physicality of the portrayal across the table.

I'll also put in a vote for props, even if they are just "found objects". Popping a hat on your head to "switch over" to another NPC can be another cue to get you into the role, even if it's just your favorite old baseball hat. Popping on a set of reading glasses or a clip on earring - anything fast without a fuss - can also make it easier. Pro tip from years of parenting: the best time to buy costumes and accessories just for fun is when they're 75% off the last week of October - if the pop up store stays open until Nov. 1st (or it's a brick and mortar like Joanns) and they go to 90% off all the better.

Also - practice by mimicking other people. I just kind of do it all the time - always have.

But eventually you get to a point where you can start analyzing what makes a person's voice "theirs" beyond just picking up catchphrases. Where is their voice positioned? Front of the mouth? Back of the throat? Breathy / rough / smooth? How do they shape their vowels? If the voice fits broadly-speaking into an "accent" what makes theirs unique? What are the vocal mannerisms - where do they pause, where do they slur words together, do they drop the final letters of words lazily (like Americans do) or do they carefully pronounce hard consonants and word endings (think Djimon Hounsou in Gladiator, the way he delivers "I will see you again... but not yet." The way he meticulously pronounces each T on the end of "but not yet.") What do they say when they're thinking - do they say uh or um or er or just pause before continuing? Do they have unusual vocal tics (like Data prefacing every question with "Query...")

When you have that - consciously or unconsciously - then you're at a point where you can have a conversation in someone else's voice. Actually the JJ Abrams Star Trek movies are pretty good examples of this. Karl Urban isn't straight-up trying to sound like Deforest Kelley, but he has Bones' vocal mannerisms NAILED to the point that it doesn't really matter which actor is piloting Bones - it's still Bones. The same for Zachary Quinto as Spock.

Thank you, this is amazing, you're a hero

Brilliant, y'all are fantastic, this will help me so much, thank you thank you thank you

The thing I've found most helpful when starting out with accents is to rewatch a TV show or movie series you like and try to sound like some of the characters. For example, if you like Harry Potter, you can try to make your innkeeper sound like Snape and your noble like McGonagall. If you sound nothing like the character, that's okay! It'll be unique...and the players will have a harder time recognizing where the accent comes from. :-)

Just keep in mind, with all the stuff I said earlier - I am absolutely not a voice actor. Just some guy that finds amusement from talking in different voices. I'm also a professional musician, so I'm used to really paying attention to how things *sound* so I can do more than just repeat things that already exist.

Like, you can listen to Yo-Yo Ma play Bach cello suites and practice until you can play a Bach cello suite just like Yo-Yo Ma. But it's not you, and you can't apply that sound to anything other than reproducing that specific performance. But if you really grok your Bach, you can use that Bach "sound" to make virtually anything sound like Bach, even if it's something you're making up on the spot. And you start to notice the differences between how Yo-Yo Ma plays Bach and how, say, Rostropovich plays Bach.

Bonus points for your use of the word grok!