Music and gaming, setting the mood

[Desdichado]

Back when I started playing, I would use some modern music (mostly heavy metal or classic rock) but it was usually soft and in the background in my D&D games. I could never do it these days. I try to not use music that contains lyrics as it is distracting and takes away from the mood. If I am running modern/future/scifi game I have a good chunk of techno/orchestral type stuff but for D&D I always stick to the music that suits it.

Yeah, lots of folks do, but to me it ruins the mood rather than enhances it. Just a personal preference, but one that I'm a bit of a stickler for. I totally agree with lyrical music too: nothing worse than someone getting out of the game to start singing along, or worse, get up and start doing air guitar or something stupid like that. For modern and/or futuristic, I've got plenty of lyric-less techno I can drop into the machine.

 

[John Crichton]

I totally agree with lyrical music too: nothing worse than someone getting out of the game to start singing along, or worse, get up and start doing air guitar or something stupid like that. For modern and/or futuristic, I've got plenty of lyric-less techno I can drop into the machine.

Oh, those wacky sing-alongs. Yeah, that's another reason why I got rid of the music that everyone knew with words. I haven't run into the air guitar thing yet but I bet it sure kills the mood.

 

[sellars]

I very much like to use music to set the cultural atmosphere of for instance a city in which the players are. in our standard-fanasy setting i like to use some irish folk things or things like the pogues etc. in an al-qadim type of setting i like to use either arabian pop music or arabian folk music

S

 

[ladyofdragons]

I've long been an advocate of using music for background in D&D. A ways back I started the RPG Music Project to collect a listing of CDs that worked well with RPGs, there's a list of more than 50 available at The RPG Music Project. Mostly movie music because shorter, more emotionally pointed pieces that are used in movie scores tend to lend themselves to gaming better than classical pieces that may change mood mid-movement, or pop/rock music that tends to be more distracting.

Also monte cook has a couple of lists of music here and here. I've found his lists to be quite good. You can find a few articles on using music aside from the Dragon article at roleplayingtips.com, and this article by scott waisner.

My biggest tip is that if you want to use music in your game, take the extra effort to make a compilation for each mood. Single-mood music goes much further to adding ambience than music that switches moods from song to song. I mean, nobody wants to hear something soft and sweet in the middle of battle. Carl Orff's Carmina Burana has a great first (and last, they're practically the same) movement, and a couple other good battle-ish movements, but some of the other movements are just way too frilly. Then if the mood of the moment changes, you just change music.

Some ideas for how exactly to do this are:
1) use your computer to make separate MP3 playlists from your various recordings, divided by mood. Of course, then you have to play in the same room as your computer.
2) burn CDs with each mood. if you have a multi-disk changer to play them back on this is best, cause otherwise you have to change CDs when you should just be gaming.