How Do You Use Music In Your Game?

[Oryan77]

I use Winamp and created playlists for my MP3s. I have tons of music. I only use stuff that has no lyrics. Usually video game, movie soundtracks, and world music.

I run a 3.5 Planescape game, so I have playlists for each plane. Here is the list:

Random - played at times that is meant to give a generic atmosphere (or when I'm tired of hearing the current playlist.
Battle - played during combats
Tavern - consists of slow music for low-key taverns, & up-beat music for rowdy taverns.
City - mellow music for elven cities, eerie music for scary cities, etc
Forest - played while in a forest
Cave - played while in a cave
Sewers - played while in a sewer
Desert - played while in a desert
Nature Sounds - these are things like rain falling, rivers flowing, birds chirping, etc etc, that I just started using. I play them in another player simultaneously with the background music. Wow, it really spices up the atmosphere when not only is Forest music playing, but birds are chirping too
Planar music:
Abyss
Acheron
Arborea
Arcadia
Baator
Beastlands
Bytopia
Carceri
Elysium
Gehenna
Gray Waste
Limbo
Mechanus
Mt Celestia
Pandemonium
Ysgard
Outlands
Elem. Air
Elem. Earth
Elem. Fire
Elem. Water
Astral
Ethereal

 

[Desdichado]

I don't divide my music up by category, I just burn a CD-R full of mp3s of stuff that's thematically appropriate for the campaign as a whole, and let 'er rip during the session by throwing it in my DVD player and putting it on shuffle. At some other locations, we've done the same thing with an iPod docking station, but it's still just shuffling the right music.

I don't necessarily have the same thematic breaks you do, i.e., it's not a good assumption that towns are safe, and the dungeons are common, etc. Any moment could be adventure waiting to happen, no matter where the PCs find themselves.

Frankly, as I GM, I'd be concerned with trying to spend too much time fiddling with specific music for specific scenes or NPCs. That works great in a cinema or TV environment, but behind the scenes, that's because the editors can spend who knows how many hours making sure that the music matches up to the action on the screen. In game, you run the risk of letting your musical gimmick take over. If you spend more than a second or two switching music around, or searching for tracks, then most likely you've distracted your players and broken the momentum of the session, which obviously offsets whatever benefit you get from having "appropriate" music for the scene.

If you can find a way to mitigate that, by jumping from one playlist or folder to another with the push of a single button, then you'll probably be fine. For my money, it's not worth the hassle, though.

 

[Amaroq]

We've got two games going.

One DM has a "basic ambient" playlist, which I suspect the party are beginning to think of as "our theme songs" as they typically come out when we're resting, or moving the plot along through story rather than combat.

Then he's got playlists set up for individual encounters, with music that fits the "theme" of the encounter to his mind. Random/shuffle.

Our current Gm has a number of playlists for our game. "Town", "Ambient", "Combat" and the like.

It's actually pretty cool if you can swap 'em out quickly and smoothly.

For my game, we do almost exactly what Wormwood describes here.

I actually have one of my players "writing the soundtrack". (Wik, she's the resident "music geek" in our game, so this was a fun way to get her engaged, invested, etc., plus it solves the 'distracted by the music' problem - she just gets a smile on her face that the rest of us don't get, sometimes.)

She came up with about eight to ten categories: Tavern, City, Traveling, Resting, Tragic, Creepy, Tension, Standard Combat, Epic Combat, etc, as well as a "party theme" and individual "character themes" for each of the PC's.

For specific villains, I give her, say, thematic descriptions of villains and trust her judgment in picking the "score" to match the theme I've given her. In general, for recurring villains especially, we try to give the villain a theme song which I play every time s/he appears, and then build a soundtrack around the way I imagine that going: e.g., it may be villain song plus tension, or for the final showdown with him it's likely to be villain song plus epic combat music.

. . .

Some discoveries:

Never ever ever pick a playlist with just one song; even if its appropriately themed it will get repetitive far too quickly.

Music with lyrics distracts more players, and by a larger margin, than instrumental soundtracks.

Volume is important: you're aiming for "loud enough to hear, quiet enough to talk over even with the most boisterous combat sequence."

Volume consistency is even more important: you don't want to have to futz with the volume repeatedly if songs are significantly off volume from each other. Its better to scrap the "perfect" piece of music if you can't get it equalized appropriately. (Combat pieces can be a smidge louder than non-combat pieces, as the group tends to raise their volumes during the excitement of a fight, but the difference is less in practice than it will be in your head.)

 

[Oryan77]

Never ever ever pick a playlist with just one song; even if its appropriately themed it will get repetitive far too quickly.

Uhg, that's completely true. Just recently I got a $3 bonus to purchase mp3s on Amazon. So I spent a good hour searching for world music to use in my game. I was listening to the preview clips on amazon and found a really cool African song. The file info said it was an hour long and only cost $1. So I bought it and thought I just got the coolest mp3 ever.

Then when it finished downloading and I listened to it (wondering what the rest of the song sounded like), it turns out that the drum beat that I heard in the preview was just repeated over and over for an hour. The beat was only 20 seconds long! Twenty seconds of the same beat for an hour will drive you insane. It's hard to hear the same beat for even 3 minutes

At least it wasn't a $1 out of my own pocket

 

[brainstorm]

I don't use music as much as I'd like to, but whenever any power with the word "thunder" in it's name is used, then I play the intro to Thunder Kiss '65 by White Zombie.

 

[Hereticus]

"This is your home, and you're dead..."

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW5lu9pGSlI]YouTube - Intermix - Dead Ladder[/ame]

 

[Nebulous]

We started using Conan and Ride of the Valkyeries in 2nd edition. I don't think i've stopped using music since. Now i have a program that queues up tracks at the touch of a button, and i have them organized by campaign or session, with probably a hundred different sound effects and theme songs available at any given time. Thunder, wind, fire, growling demon, a lot of stuff has built up in the database over time.

 

[Wolf1066]

Which program, Nebulous. Would be handy having something like that...

 

[ProfessorCirno]

I typically find music more distracting then anything else. Recently I've been playing music for a game, but that's because it's a modern game, and the group is in an underground concert. I'm playing the music their characters are hearing

 

[Wolf1066]

Having the sounds that would be expected to be heard at the location would be good fun - players go to a bar or a concert, have appropriate music and possibly crowd noise; outdoor sounds for when they're out of doors... need to find a tinny muzak version of Girl From Ipanema for whenever the characters step into an elevator...