jedavis
First Post
I finally got around to watching The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly last night. One of the things that struck me was the use of audio cues; whenever one of the three main characters was about to arrive on the scene, a short sound (kind of a modulated bird call) played, with the tone indicating which character was incoming. It's an interesting notion, and I think it could be applied to D&D (and other games with fairly fixed, looped linear initiative systems) using a laptop as follows:
Thoughts? Has anybody here seen or tried something similar before?
- For each PC, find a track of music. Cut it down to a certain length, leave the first couple of seconds strong and then fade the rest of it out slowly (nothing Audacity can't handle). Also do one for the monsters (I tend to just have all the monsters act simultaneously, except for named notable villains (who probably warrant their own theme tracks anyways)).
- Queue the cue tracks in a music player of your choice (probably WinAmp for me) and set it to loop. When initiative is rolled, order the songs by initiative and fire up the first track.
- When a PC's turn ends, skip to the next track. The fact that track length is limited also imposes a mechanically-enforced time restriction on PC turns (this could be good or bad. On the other hand, track length can be tailored individually, so if a new player needs more time, he might warrant a longer track).
Thoughts? Has anybody here seen or tried something similar before?