Yudhishthira’s Dice

I’ve always been a big one for soundtracks in game. The addition of music adds another level of sense and verisimilitude that is most helpful to my gaming. However, it also took me a long time to work out the way I wanted to use soundtracks and to make them actually work in game. My early attempts were often rough, overly controlled, required constant fidgeting, and often ended up distracting from the game as much as they helped. The magic combination to make it work consisted of the following:

1) Player generated songlists. In early attempts I picked and arranged all the songs myself. That worked really well for me, but less well for the game. Now days, at the very least, I have each player select two to three themesongs or highlight tracks for their character. These will then form the core of the soundtrack, and everything else will be built thematically off of them. The cool thing about it is that this can help generate investment and interest in the game and each other’s characters before play even starts, and keeps a background audio-cue for each of the characters “things” in the air around the table.

2) The right technology. Early attempts at soundtracks were done with cassets or audio-CDs in a single disk player. This resulted in lots of shuffling. Attempts to run it off of a computer were more successful, but often lead to to much fiddling, and/or computer shit getting in the way. These days I use burned MP3 CDs, which can hold hours upon hours of song (so you’ll never run out and never have to repeat the same hour of music in an endless cycle), and run it from a DVD player with a nice remote that lets me shuffle through without having to fiddle.

3) Correct Organization. These days I break down the very, very long playlists into folders. How I organize the folders depends on the game, but the general breakdown is “core songs” and then a few theme folders (”friendship” or “the violence that men do”) and then some more generic folders (”easy listening” and “sad”). That way when I hit a scene with a particular mood or theme I can easily flip to the folder and pick a good start up song (usually as part of scene framing), and then let the rest play without worrying about “Highway to Hell” coming up during the touching Romantic break up.

4) Volume control. Too much noise and you can’t hear each other speak, too little and you can’t hear the sound. Finding the right level (which I can now do without looking at the stereo) is a real trick, and really important. Having a surround sound system helped with this one — as there are speakers at all points of the room, and so the sound level can be individually customized to each person. The old days of one speaker blasting from one corner of the room were tougher.

5) Work it in with scene framing. I talked about this a little above, but these days I always think up a song as I’m framing a scene, and put it on to reinforce the scene’s start up. Games with longer scenes with less direction are harder to soundtrack, but any game done in a TV or movie style is pretty easy to work with. Similarly, while people are doing game stuff — figuring stats, rolling dice, whatever — I’ll often have a moment to flip to a new track, as I tend to be the fastest of the fast about that.

6) Breadth of Choice. These days I listen to a lot more music than I used to. I listen to movie and TV soundtracks, street stuff that I buy from guys dealing on the subway platform, random stuff from pandora.com, and music recommended by friends that might not be my normal playlist type material to see what catches a specific mood, tone, or feeling. Having something other than Rage Against the Machine and the Violent Femmes is very helpful to rounding out your soundtrack.

So there it is, no big tricks, but things that have turned soundtracks from an occasional and sometimes annoying trick into an easy, fun part of my games.