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A way back in November I mentioned that I make use of a soundtrack during my games. It’s not a stirring emotional epic by any means (turns out that I’m not the best at arranging mixes), but it adds a dimension to Up From the Dust that would otherwise be missing. My players have come to recognize the standard cues and know what to expect from a scene based upon them. And despite the repetition, they still get into the tracks during fights, helping me keep things moving along.

Despite not yet earning my gold baton, music at the game table has become a necessity for me, even though I've only been using it for the last few years. I learned the technique from Will Hindmarch, a true master of the art, and I was inspired to include it in my discussion of table dynamics by his article in last week’s Escapist. In it, he covers the basics of track selection as well as the difference between the score and source music.

Honestly, Will covers the breadth of this much better than I can, so I’ll leave you to read his article and check out his iTunes playlist for some excellent advice. Instead of retreading that ground, I want to offer up some practical reasons I, as an amateur maestro, choose to slap together tracks from two or three movie soundtracks to play during my game.

Mood
The first reason is really the most obvious: it helps me, as the DM, set a mood without requiring me to narrate the characters' emotions to the players. Instead of telling them "Dread settles over your hearts as you enter the tomb," I can just play some creepy music. The soundtrack does a lot of the emotional heavy lifting, freeing me up to spend time on physical descriptions and rules management.

I admit that I forget to take the time to build up a scene for my players more often than I would like, which is why the emotions triggered by my soundtrack are great. They act as a safety net, an emotional baseline that I can fall back on when I get distracted, making my stories that much more meaningful without eating up game time to make sure I’m hitting the right emotional triggers.

Lest I make it sound like this use of music is so easy as to accomplish with no thought whatsoever, there is a pitfall DMs can encounter here. If, like me, you come to rely upon a set number of playlists, the player response can become muted, if not altogether deadened. Changing up tracks occasionally, or even faking your group out with some misleading cues, can go a long way to keeping things aurally interesting.

Tone Shifts
The second-most frequent use of music in my game is to indicate dramatic beats and tone shifts. As with setting the initial mood of a scene, music operates as emotional shorthand during narrative transitions. The time this can save is valuable, but my primary reason for this use of music is to provide more robust feedback to player decisions.

For example, way back when the party was run out of Tyr for the first time, they encountered some travelers out in the desert. I played several tracks of atmospheric desert music while the characters talked with the travelers and arranged to share their camp. Things were peaceful until one of the characters shared her name, whereupon I switched the music over to a track I used during combats. The players immediately knew something went wrong, and that revelation played out as the travelers revealed themselves to be bounty hunters and set upon the party.

This setup and resolution, ultra-fast as it was, provided a much more satisfying narrative turn than I could have without music. It allowed my players a couple seconds of anticipation before I revealed the truth of the situation, thus deepening the emotional reaction to the ambush.

Fill the Silence
Finally -- and really, most practically -- music just helps fill the silences. Whenever the DM has to check notes, or a player needs to look up the specifics of a power in a source book still tucked away in the cabinet across the room, the music just keeps playing. The sensory input is certainly welcome during lulls in the action, but the presence of repetitive music can also help prevent such lulls in the first place. People tend to align their actions with whatever music is playing around them, so providing a beat for players to follow can keep things moving.

I’ve found that driving, dramatic music during combat is especially helpful. It keeps everyone describing their actions briskly and makes digressions seem that much more out of place. I mean, have you ever tried to tell a Monty Python joke over a song featuring a frantically driving bongo beat? You just feel silly.

I've barely even scratched the surface with this introduction to using music in your game, but I hope I've at least gotten you thinking about it. Music can be an incredibly powerful storytelling aid and it’s a shame more isn’t done to encourage its use by DMs.

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