Every now and then the internet throws out the idea of having a soundtrack to your D&D game. This is a concept that I’ve played around with for some time and never quite got where I wanted to be with it.
On one hand, I listen to Icosahedraphelia (the actual play podcast) and hear background music work to good effect, however, keeping a playlist of music has a few flaws that always kept me away from that solution. On one hand, creating a playlist of music from various movie soundtracks can be time consuming. Finding all the right music to purchase, making playlists appropriate for certain situations, and then managing those playlists during the game all create barriers to giving this a meaningful try. Many songs are in soundtracks are too short to last for an entire encounter without looping and looping starts to get tired after a while. Thus playlists of similar music is needed, and preferably a new playlist for any given situation (i.e. fighting a dragon would sound different than taking on the palace guard or skulking through the sewers).
Other options include going with some music specifically designed for using in games and have very long running times…but those tend to be quite expensive compared to purchasing other sorts of music.
I went simple and easy for my first real try at using background music for my game. I set my iPod Touch up to use the speakers in the game room, launched Pandora, and set a station based on D&D-appropriate music, like the Midnight Syndicate. And then I just let it run for the night. The upside, it was really easy to set up and run. The downside, the music became repetitive (we actually heard the same song three times in one game session, which is disappointing for a service like Pandora that has such a large library of music), we were interrupted by ads (although a monthly payment can solve that), and the customizability of the service is practically nil for uses like this. We did it twice, and when I stopped doing it I think the players welcomed the silence and lack of distraction.
And then there was a dearth of music at my table for some time. Then I was approached by the fine folks who make DMDJ at Blueface Games and given a review copy of the iOS app. I played around with it for a bit at first. After 15 minutes of playing with it and no instructions I was able to get a strong handle on how to use it pretty easily. It includes a bevy of features, some of which I like, some of which I think could be cool with some work, some of which I could probably do without.
The primary feature is the ambient sound effects. PCs running through a forest? Let them hear the birds chirping and the wind whistling through the leaves. It includes nature locations (like forest and rainstorm), it has town locations, elemental planes, dungeons, and more. And it’s not just a loop of a track. It’s a library of sounds that occur randomly using an algorithm that makes it sound realistic without being repetitive. It also allows them to add intensity levels. You can have low, medium, or high insanity and it changes how often certain sounds occur. The rainstorm is the best example of this. You start with a rainy day at low, at medium you get more of a driving rain, and by the time you ramp it up to high you start being bombarded with peals of thunder. My only complaint with this feature is that there just aren’t enough options yet…but they do promise that they will add to the location options as they continue to provide updates to the app.
And they are adding more things to the app. In the time that I’ve used it there has been one update and it included a batch of new sound effects and music selections. That’s right, there’s music and sound effects in the app as well. Both of these are also incredible…but they both have one flaw that I really hope to see resolved. For the sound effects you get magic sounds, evil growls and laughs, and more. They’re great, but they’re I wish there was a way to preload a handful of effects into buttons on the front screen. The few times I’ve managed to drill down several levels of menus in order to hit a fireball sound at an appropriate time it worked great.
The music is actually the most used feature of the app at my table. It also requires some drilling down through menus, but it’s not too big of a deal since the music runs for a while and is made to loop. But, the selections of music that are there are fairly short. The first time I used the app I picked a song for each encounter and let it run. After one encounter we discovered that wasn’t going to work as we quickly tired of the selection. I found a compromise where I change the song after every round of an encounter…but that means we end up using the same songs in many encounters. It works, but it’s not ideal (I have to manage what’s playing regularly, and we don’t have a unique sound for each encounter). If I had my own wish list for the app to make it perfect for my use I would also ask that I be able to point it to music that I have in my iTunes library in addition to the music provided. That level of customization would be extra cool.
Lastly, the app has dice-rolling features. With standard dice and various customized effects. This seems a cool thing…but also feels out of place in the app. It has nothing to do with an audio experience, and I’d just as soon see this rolled into a separate dice-rolling app…if at all. Because you again have to dig down and input information to make it really work, or set up a bunch of stuff ahead of time, I found it was easier to just use real dice in every situation. Having a customized dice-roller that can be made into a random selector for various things is cool…it just doesn’t fit what the rest of this app is doing. If it were up to me, I’d lose the dice here and make those buttons customized sound effect pre-sets. But I’m no programer.
So, is DMDJ the perfect solution to including an audio component to my D&D game? I guess not, there’s always room to grow. But DMDJ is the best solution I’ve found for engaging my table’s senses to another level and the proof is in the pudding. The same players who thought music was distracting when I’ve used it in the past came to the table last week asking, “What, we’re not going to have music this week?”…and so DMDJ became a regular feature at my table.
Do you use music in your games? How do you mange it? I’m curious to hear your success and failure stories.