[RPG] How to roleplay a vulgar character without using profanity

gm-techniquesroleplayingtone

In my new campaign, I have an NPC who I would like to have the personality trait of being extremely and unexpectedly vulgar. However I also have a few players who prefer not to use to hear profanity on a regular basis.

How can I portray a vulgar or crass personality while refraining from actually using profanity at the gaming table?


My current plan is to use something like a Shakespeare insult generator or similar to create rude but clean language insults. However I often find these (or similar non-Shakespearean) generators to be hard to include in normal dialogue while playing the character. I find that they break the flow of conversation or simply don't quite suit the scene and make the character sound foolish rather than crude.

I'm looking for how to properly roleplay vulgar language on the fly without constantly referring to lists of 'clean' insults.

Best Answer

It takes some discipline, but develop and use fake profanity, specific to the setting. You have an advantage here, as the GM (which I infer, since this is about an NPC, not a PC) because it is perfectly within your purview to simply say, "These phrases are mild blasphemies, these ones are mid-range vulgarities, and this one here is fightin' words." Your other NPCs can react appropriately, too.

An excellent written example of this is in Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" where, expressions like "blood and ashes!" or "bloody flaming ashes!" are understood to be at least mid-level adult vulgarities in the setting-- used by one character in particular, to the vast disapproval of several others.

But it works in games, too: In in Amber game I'm in, a Rebman character has a fairly extensive catalog of fishy metaphors as vulgarities. They're not vulgar in English, and probably not in Amber, but they are in Rebma, by my understanding.

It should be pretty easy to adapt this to a typical game setting.

As an afterthought, this might be an example of what you mean by a list of "clean insults." If so, I will add only that in my experience, the list doesn't need to be that long, if it's evocative.

Possibly worth noting that I take a different approach with my character in the same game: He is also known to be able to strip paint and turn the air blue, but rather than using my own extensive talents in that direction, I'll often just describe him as saying something presumptively foul in his native, non-Thari language. If NPCs or PCs who understand the language are in the same scene, they'll sometimes react appropriately, if they are easily offended.