Who Uses Music in their Game?

[Ryltar]

I definitely use music in my games, to the extent that every important PC / NPC / location / group has his, her or its own theme music. Those are interspersed with battle music and misc. ambient sounds.

Works pretty well for my group, and it helps set the mood .

 

[Calico_Jack73]

Be cautious with music... done right it can add great feeling to a scene, done poorly it can be a distraction. Make sure if you use music in a scene that you don't have the same song repeat over and over if the scene takes an hour. Play the song maybe once or twice but then kill it. As an alternative you could have a playlist for a particular scene. Put the key song you want to use first but then have complimentary songs follow. You could repeat that for much longer.

By the way, Midnight Syndicate has some decent RPG based CD's that you might look into. Movie soundtracks are good too but often times players associate too closely the movie with the song and will start talking about the movie instead of your game.

Edit: By the way, if you have Quake 1 the music tracks on the CD make GREAT creepy suspense music. It'll play on any CD player, just switch to track 2 as soon as you put the CD in (track 1 is the data).

 

[JoeGKushner]

I think movie scores are great for this.

Conan the Barbarian

Many different classic music CDs

Star Wars

Lord of the Rings

Depending on the genre, Cyberpunk for example, Anime has some great soundtracks.

I personally wish I could find the Excaliber soundtrack for less than $30 bones. One of my favorite soundtracks.

 

[MarauderX]

I used to, but they just don't write that many good trombone pieces to play at the table.

Might be a bit distracting, but good stuff.

http://www.bonerama.net/

 

[Psion]

I tried one a long time ago, and one player could not stand to have music playing while trying to game / couldn't hear over it / whatever. So I shelved the notion for a long time.

I recently started using the Midnight Syndicate D&D soundtrack and the Sharn soundtrack, and it works out pretty well. May have to add more to my rotation soon.

 

[Desdichado]

I do, yes. I didn't buy anything much new, either, except a few more movie soundtracks. I've essentially ripped all my movie soundtracks to mp3, edited out the songs I don't like, put the entire thing (for a given campaign, anyway) on CD-R and toss it into my DVD player (we play in the front room) on shuffle and turn the volume down fairly low.

The advantages of doing it this way? Lots of variety of music without me having to think about it much, and orchestral soundtracks from movies aren't usually very distracting. I can also get the "themes" and tone of the campaign overall on a single CD-R, which I like. I can't, with this method, however, have music that is appropriate for the actual scene that's going on. I don't mind that too much, though, as that'd be too much work for me to worry about as a GM anyway.

My current campaign, which is a kind of pulp-horror fantasy thingy uses music from Bram Stoker's Dracula, End of Days, From Hell, Sleepy Hollow, Minority Report, the Last Samurai, Last of the Mohicans, the MummySigns, Sum of All Fears and a few other soundtracks as well, again edited out to remove songs that I don't want (notably the Annie Lennox Dracula song...)

For a more straightforward fantasy, I still use a lot of those, but add in the Stargate, and the three Lord of the Rings soundtracks, and the Pirates of the Caribean soundtrack and Conan the Barbarian, Gladiator, etc.

 

[Desdichado]

Another quick thought; you probably want to stay away from very recognizable themes here, though. I mean, John Williams is great and all, but hearing Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark is distracting, unless your playing in a Star Wars campaign, or one that focuses on Raiders like themes (I can actually see that working in, say, Eberron.) Otherwise, his hook and Harry Potter themes are pretty good for standard fantasy.