I've always been bad at role-playing in general and accents in general. I want to get better so I can add cooler stuff to my campaign that I DM and when I play also. The only issue is that I not too good at accents and stuff and I find it hard to kind of let myself really express that type of stuff. Any tips on letting myself actually roleplay and get better at it?

Not everyone has the same talents. Play to yours. 

Roleplaying isn't about voices or accents. It is about creating a story and a world with friends. It is simply pretending to be someone else. 

When you watch something like Critical Role it seems like a DM (and players) need cool voices and quirky characters, but it is equally valid to play like Matt Colville in The Chain campaign. No accents there but the choices the players make are at least equally impressive roleplay, if not superior. 

Not to say accents are bad - if you really want to get better at it, practice. Look up some examples of different accents and try to emulate them as much as possible. I would suggest taping yourself and playing it back - you will sound a lot different to other people than you do yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ouDcXRU-rs could start at this youtube site and deep dive from there (I just picked one at random). Have fun. 

But honestly I have run and played in entire campaigns where there were no (or limited) accents and voices. The thing I remember isn't the kitschy voice or strange NPCs - it is the weird solutions, the Nat 20 that saved everyone's bacon, the Nat 1 that was a sure thing and completely derailed everything.

Accents have nothing to do with roleplaying. If you are having your character do what your character would do, and not what you, the player, would do, you are roleplaying. 

The key to all RP, just as to all storytelling (which is why people often confuse RP with storytelling -- they are not the same thing) is motivation. Make sure you understand your character's motivation, and have the character act in line with his/her motivations, and you are RPing. Accents and voices have nothing to do with it. Frankly I have found that several of the supposed "great RPers" who do fantastic voices, are honestly not really doing much of what I would call RP.

Protip on an easy way to run a character who behaves differently from you: Make one up who is wildly different in some aspect. If you are good, make up an evil character, and then have it act evil. If you are male, make up a female. If you are female, make up a male. Such differences force you to think like someone other than yourself, to put yourself in a different mindset. Very different character from you + clear motivation = perfect fodder for RP.

Don't be afraid to just describe out loud the specifics of what happens regardless of accent or acting ability. Like, you can say, "in a heavy scottish accent, the knight says _____", then just say what they're saying in your normal voice. It's not as casually immersive as voices and accents, but it works fine, especially if you're not streaming and expecting to entertain a casual audience.

Well first of all, I watched Monty Python obsessively as a young'un, so my advice to you is to watch clips of Graham Chapman obsessively 16 hours a day for the next 15 years, and before you know it, you too can have a fantastically screeching falsetto!

Now, in seriousness, practice really does make perfect.  whenever you have just a couple moments to yourself, try out using the voice you wanted to have for your character, and don't worry about whether you think it sounds good or bad.  Just get it to a point where you feel comfortable with it, and once  you do, start using it with the table; you may feel a little awkward when you do, but it's just a matter of getting to the point where you feel comfortable.

And, as everyone else says, you don't actually have to use voices, but if you really do want to use them at your table, it's mostly a matter of confidence than anything else.

Do the other players/DM in your game(s) act out dialogue with different voices? I've found in games that simply having a go can encourage others to try - creating the environment around the "table" for people to experiment. Doesn't always work, and I've dropped in and out of accents many times myself, but does add a little extra to the character interaction when it can be played out as a conversation without so much 3rd person narration.

I would not say I am good at accents or impersonation; I can simply do "versions" of certain regional or national accents that I fall back on regularly. No one from those places would recognise what I do as their accent, but then, I am not playing someone from that place!

As long as you can hold the accent for a sentence or two - so don't go overboard at first - you're fine.

Accents aren't role play.

Pretending to be somebody else, is role play.

Don't worry about it. Do the best you can and enjoy yourself. Having different voices for every npc isn't necessary.

Not everyone can be a professional voice actor on Critical role...

Imo, it's more important to focus on giving each npc a different personality and motivations. That's was really makes things interesting and engaging.

OrangeYosh,

I believe you may find some useful information here:

I hope it helps.

You don’t have to do accents to role play. The more you do anything the better you’ll get at it and this goes for role playing too. Unfortunately I’ve not found the same to be true for accents lol. It can be difficult at times separating your motivations from the character, just write a couple traits down and reference them frequently as a reminder. If you want to do accents, do them even if you suck at it, nobody should be expecting you to be good at. It’s fun and your players may appreciate the effort. You can set an example for the players and may inspire them to take more creative risks without fear of being judged themselves. Also, you’re in a fictional world, a terrible British/French/Russian accent is a spot on perfect Waterdeep accent, at least you can tell yourself that, lol.

edit: physicality to a character can be great too. I did an NPC that clutched her pearl necklace as she spoke in a soft creepy voice while tilting my head toward the players and my friends loved it and wanted to interact with that NPC more because of it. 

eye contact is important too, not necessarily for role playing, just in general. I hate eye contact and DMing has been a great way to work through my severe social anxiety, my friends saw a side of me DMing they never knew existed and for whatever reason dungeons and dragons was the necessary medium.

If accents, despite not being necessary, are something you really, really want to do, step one is to get past the self-conscious impression that you're not good at it. This is the most difficult part. We look at people whose performances we admire and compare ourselves to them. That's the wrong way to look at it. Look at it that they were where you are and you can get there the same way they did - practice.

They didn't magically become character actors. It took practice. ...and... it took practice in front of people, not just a mirror.

Letting people see where we are now while hoping to become better is scary, but we have to practice somehow.

People have suggested mimicking people you see. That's something you definitely should add to your practice, but how if mimicry is not something you've really done before?

What helps me (and this is only me - YMMV because you're not me) is thinking of words as presented in the early parts of Pygmalion by The Flower Girl - replacing the words with spellings that would be read in approximation to the target accent.

"The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain," would become "The rhine in spine sties minely on the pline," (which is reversing the process in the story of Pygmalion using a line from My Fair Lady - eye not A, ow not O).

Read the first few bits of The Flower Girl's part in Pygmalion to get an understanding of what I'm trying to convey. Read them aloud and hear yourself.

This can be applied to many different accents, but it takes practice to do it impromptu.

If you really want to get better at accents, my advice is to listen to your local NPR affiliate station (or some other talk radio). They do a lot of interviews with people from all over the world. In my car with nobody around, I can mimic and parrot the accents I hear with no thought to any audience since I’m all by myself for that 40 minute commute to/from work. It’s kinda like a smorgasbord of accents every day.

Like, folks from Texas usually either speak with a drawl or a lilt. Massachusetts got rid of all of their “Rs” and Arkansas scooped them all up and stuck them to the ends of every word that usually ends in a vowel sound. Folks from Connecticut barely move their jaws when they speak, and Canadians tend to keep their cheeks tucked in against their teeth. East coaster talk quickly like even our words are in a hurry, West coasters tend to do the exact opposite.

I hope that helps.

Weird thing: A lot of the accents rely on where you position your tongue when you speak. It's not the only part of it, but it's a significant part of it. There are lots of videos out there that cover this topic. Many of those videos include "exercises" for familiarizing oneself with the proper positioning for certain accents.

This still means... practice. Practice, practice, practice. ...and also practicing in front of people to get you past that most difficult first step I mentioned.

...but it still doesn't make it a necessity for RPing as a DM or player. This is only if you really, really want to use accents in D&D.

As others have said, voices do not really matter.

But if you want to add some difference to your voice, I find it very easy to just change my posture / body language. The way you sit or stand automatically changes how your voice sounds a bit.

E.g. if you want to sound like a poor, downtrotten beggar, try making a hunch. In Covid times with just a microphone nobody is going to see it anyways. ;-)

For a lawful guard, sit or stand upright, chest out, shoulders back and you will probably sound different than the beggar version.

Also, avoid stereotyping. Every time we come across a dwarf NPC, our DM uses a Scottish accent. It get's kind of old :)

As a side note, it's hilarious to listen to him trying to imitate a female voice. 

A slight deviation of topic (without going completely off the rails)...

Trivia: Dwarves as used in LotR and D&D originate from Old Germanic mythology. The "Scottish" Dwarf is the entertainment media's influence. Norse mythology is the next (and more recent) abundant source for Dwarven mythology, but even that is a far cry from Scottish. Scottish Dwarves make me shake my head, but I don't start getting all fidgety and antsy like I do with improper Old/Middle English.

I don't know much about Old Germanic beyond a few angst-filled, naughty poems about society, and those were all the "High" dialect which is less likely to apply anyway. So, I prefer to use no particular accent for Dwarves.

To try to stick closer to the topic: Any suggestions on general cultural accents across the D&D 5e origins?

To approach the same answer from a different angle, roleplay is to put yourself into the shoes of the character and act and react as this fictional person would.

You don't have to be an actor at the table to play out IRL what your character would say or do. There is another approach, that is just as valid, which is narration. You can describe what and how your character does and says.

Here is my favorite video about using that technique (the intro story is nice, but the 'meat' starts at 3:33):

I would not force roleplaying. Just let it come to you. You will eventually get better at it.

For voices and accents, I do them for me, because I find it fun, although I am pretty horrible at it too. My players honestly do not care whether I do voices or not, although they do get a good laugh occasionally if my voice suddenly cracks or I try to do an accent that I am horrible at mimicking. My players are content with grinding through quests, killing monsters, getting loot, and enjoy the plot casually, so do not worry about your voice acting if no one else at the table cares about it. I also would not bother trying to uniquely voice most NPCs. I only try to voice the important or frequently encountered NPCs, and even then, I only do some of them and not all of them. And out of the ones I do voice, I mostly voice NPCs I like, find interesting, or have a connection to, cause that is fun; I do not bother voicing NPCs I do not care too much about since I do not find that fun.

If you are following an official adventuring module, they often tell you the personality, goals, and background of important and frequently encountered NPCs, or at least enough of it for readers to extrapolate their personality, so it is not too hard to make up reasonable responses or decisions for them if the adventure goes off script. For NPCs with less details though, you can give them any personality you want, so go wild.

Sometimes it's easier envision somebody that you know well or have interacted with regularly. For instance, a teacher that you liked or didn't like; a favorite or rude waiter. You know how they behave and how they make you feel so if you pretend to be like them it helps to add color to the NPC.You don't have to imitate their voice.

I'm not saying you should be like Seth Skokowsky, but in this vid he gives some good advice on mannerisms.