Music and D&D

[Sacrosanct]

For background music, the old video games that came on CD Roms work great because you can easily find the audio files. Things like heroes of might and magic, mechwarrior, and Witcher.

 

[JonnyP71]

I've always associated The Levellers album Levelling the Land and Nirvana's Nevermind with playing 2E in the summer of 1992 - it was the last time we played at Uni, and the last time I played any RPGs until 2012 - and those albums were our student anthems of that hot Summer.

Nowadays, I listen to music while writing material, I'm currently using the lyrics of 80s Goth band Fields of the Nephilim to inspire aspects of a campaign. If anyone knows their stuff, I've done chapters so far based on Secrets, For Her Light and The Tower, and am writing one at present based on their track Dust. With other such titles as Submission, At the Gates of Silent Memory, Endemoniada, The Watchman and Last Exit for the Lost their songs really do make for ripe pickings!!!

As for music actually during play, that's a complete deal breaker for me - I have ADHD and find it too distracting. If a group insist on playing music during games then I will not be part of that group. And that's not negotiable.

 

[billd91]

We used to play a lot of the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack. "Anvil of Crom" was always particularly good for us.

But the phenomenon of linking songs with particular memories has always been strongest for me with one case - I got a copy of X-Men #135, the one where Jean Grey transforms into Dark Phoenix, a bit late - a year after original publication. The strength of the imagery in the story and the recently released "The Breakup Song (They Don't Write 'Em)" by the Greg Kihn Band forged what seems to be an unbreakable bond in my brain. I can't see or hear one of them without the other coming to mind.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

I was first introduced to D&D in the early 80s when my young mind was obsessed with music (radio), cartoons, and Star Wars. I would spend hours every day listening to the radio, recording my songs on blank cassettes, and making dungeons filled with every monster I could find in the books. I could list every song played on the radio at the time and associate it with that part of my youth, but there is one song in particular that still takes me back to that specific time in my life.


It wasn't the lyrics or the video, specifically. It was the title in the lyrics, "Do you come from a land down under?", that made me think of a world filled with endless dungeons and creatures living beneath the surface. I knew the song had nothing to do with that, but my young, unbridled imagination did not care. In some ways, I guess it still doesn't.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

We play in a pub, where they sometimes have random music playing. D&D to the strains of Abba's Dancing Queen can be quite surreal.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I mean, on the one hand, awesome job getting your kid so involved! That's great! Also a great age for RPGing.

On the other hand, friends don't let friends bard.

I swear if I thought you really hated all the things you poke fun at on here, I’d think you just hate DnD!

Bards are great!

 

[doctorbadwolf]

As for music actually during play, that's a complete deal breaker for me - I have ADHD and find it too distracting. If a group insist on playing music during games then I will not be part of that group. And that's not negotiable.

The biggest challenge of DnD with ADHD is that ADHD can have such directly oppositional expressions in different people, with things like music.

I cannot concentrate with background noise. It is genuinely impossible for me, at least 80% of the time. I can’t even track what someone is saying to me, even with sustained eye contact, without extreme concentration/effort, I’d there is just dead silence outside of their voice.

The “track” of my mind that is engaged by music will be engaged. If not by music, then it will grab the rest of my mind in a vice grip and scream into its face until my entire mind is focused on a rambling dissertation about the similarities between most ensemble cast hero movies and archetypal expressions of aspects of human experience, and how Star Trek instead pursues this in the form of its societies.

On of my favorite players is like you. It is...very challenging.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

One of my groups meets in a gaming cafe. Occasionally people play Rockband. We've been stuck gaming to off-key renditions of Queen, Survivor (Yes, Eye of the Tiger itself), the Offspring, and more.

We play in a pub, where they sometimes have random music playing. D&D to the strains of Abba's Dancing Queen can be quite surreal.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Bards are what happen when someone takes the sanctimony and smugness of the Paladin and inverts it into pure silliness.

One day, I can hope that all the Paladins and Bards rush toward each other, and like matter and anti-matter, cancel each other out in an explosion of holy avenger and lute confetti.

Oh, lowkey, you know that won't be what happens.

They'll raise their rapiers in salute, turn their pony, unicorn, and giant critter mounts in a surprisingly well executed cavalry line, and charge forward, gnomish, drow, and tabaxi voices raised together in a silly song about fairies in a glen, laughter flowing like spring water through a brook as their swords pierce and slash, as hoof and claw and horn rend and tear and pummel.

And, to quote the satanic southern gospel inspired black metal band Zeal and Ardor, "the riverbed will run red with the blood of the saints and the blood of the holy!" Except like, the blood of people who don't like gnomes and drow and bards.