Using audio in RPGs

I'm gonna try to think of a topic each week we can discuss, relating to RPGs in some way or another. Knowing me, I'm gonna run out of ideas somewhat quickly, but hopefully once this gets rolling, some of you will have topics you want to bring up.

My first topic is chosen both because I think its awesome and because I've formed an informal partnership of sorts with BattleBards. If you haven't seen their Kickstarter yet, you should check it out. BattleBards is aiming to setup a mixing board for audio, primarily for RPGs (though I see it as being useful for other situations as well). As you guys know, I've been slowly assembling a list of music useful for RPG games as well. We have details to sort out over time, but BattleBards is going to help augment that list, and so its in my interest to make sure their KS succeeds! But even if it weren't the case, I thought the project was awesome the first time I saw it; its what spurred me to contact them.

That said: do you use audio in your RPG games? Whether playing in RL or online? Where do you find your music? Do you use whole songs, clips, or some other format? How much preparation do you do for it? How important is audio for an RPG game?

As I've only recently gotten back into RPGs in RL and have only had a smattering of online games in the last few years, my experience with audio is limited. I've always had a hard time finding clips (thus the music tool!), but when I am looking, its pretty much all on YouTube. In the Edge of the Empire game I'm currently running, the guys who's place we play at bring up tracks from the Star Wars movies. Our Deadlands game is likewise music from wild west video games and movies. We do often use clips to add emotion, and switch songs from more background, low key stuff to more riled material when its called for.

All in all, I think music is vitally important for a game. It adds emotion and allows a GM to influence player emotions. Also, just like a good movie, it provides cues that add immersion. Even if its just light background music, everything helps.

I absolutely love using audio in my games. I've used audio cues in game for initiative, music to set a scenes's mood and recorded npc monologue/dialogue between sessions. They all add something wonderful to the game. For me, I've found that the npc recordings work best. They are fun for me and get the players jazzed up for the next session. It was also a wonderful way to hand out plot hooks. So, yes, audio in games is a wonderful too. One of my preferred.

I tend to not use audio in my games. I play at a friends house and often have enough trouble keeping my players focused and on task. I like not having much tech around so they don't feel compelled to play games (as one former player would be doing DURING the game and thus very disengaged).
I prefer giving a description of what's going on. Last game my players were on a boat in dense mist, the mist could be seen swirling a bit and huge skull appeared heading right towards the ship, mouth gaping open and eyes glowing. A scary sight to behold as they couldn't even see more than 5ft from the edge of the ship, but could see this 100ft off ;).

Setting the ambiance is best IMO if they get to use their imagination to full effect. This requires much less prep work, so if you're an on-the-fly type of GM like I tend to be, it's probably your best option to let their minds do all the heavy lifting. :)

I used to use audio a lot when playing WEG D6 Star Wars. I had the 5- or 6-CD soundtrack, so we kept the most appropriate song on loop until the scene changed, then changed the track.

It was cool, but took a bit of time to find the right track for the right situation.

I use tons of audio, but soundtracks/playlists rather than special effects. That is, I rarely feel the need to interject the sound of "mace on shield" or tavern background noises. I focus on mood and ambiance rather than texture.

I've built a bunch of playlists in Winamp on my PC, and I use Playa Control for Winamp on my droid, so I can control the music on the PC (switch playlists / throttle the volume / etc.) from my couch at the gaming area which is well away from the PC. The Battlebards software looks like a great set of additional tools for a bunch of what I do if I had a laptop at the game. It's tempting, though.

Love the variety of different use cases for audio here. :-) We love using audio, whether they are NPC VOs like with @shark_Bone or background scores like @Qralloq does and @EldritchFire used to. We also love including the On-The-Fly stuff like the casting of a lightning bolt spell or NPC interactions at an Inn. It adds a bit of flavor when appropriate. I don't spam them but when it's an important moment, effects can really add that punch.

Some of the planned stuff does require a little prep. Having an organized audio library helps so that you ready the tune whether in Winamp/YouTube or some other media player. We use a custom made Soundboard and Mixer that we developed for our games. And it's helped us to stay sane cause opening like 5-10 media player and shuffling between them while GMing is certainly a nightmare.

Is there is a key moment in one of your campaigns when audio really added value to the scene? Curious when

I love many of these ideas. I'd probably use more audio in my games if I had a good soundboard/mixer application for iPad (because I dislike having a laptop screen up, and the touch interface is just so much easier to use). As it stands, I mostly set up a playlist (usually video game music - for instance, a recent horror-themed game I ran I used the Amnesia: Dark Descent Soundtrack) and let it run quietly in the background just setting the mood. In high fantasy games, during epic boss fights, I'll have ready a youtube loop of boss battle music (gets players jazzed, and usually at least one person knows the game it came from which creates a nice meta-moment for them).

I'd love to be able to add SFX to the game (fireball sounds, background combat noises, ambient sounds for when the party is in an inn, market or sneaking through a dungeon) and even pepper in some meaningful noise (say ambient cave sounds, then as they move into the next room I press a button to blend a low growl or snoring sound into the ambience - forewarning of danger ahead to those listening to the music/ambience). But, this takes a lot of work and I don't think it's got enough payoff for me to spend so much of my time doing that (when I could spend it tailoring loot to the players, designing encounters tailored to the parties strengths and developing NPC plots tailored to the players play styles).

What I *really* want is a soundboard app for my iPad that I can load music into, and create a little soundboard on that has some quick buttons for switching between main background sound-tracks (categorized to music, ambience etc) and other quick buttons for blending in pre-selected sound effects (snoring, fire blasts, lightning bolts, sword clashing, etc) -- probably the SFX quick buttons need to be 10 on screen with the ability to "flip page" to access 10 more etc (so I can have several premade pages). If the app came preloaded with a ton of music and let me set up and save "Soundboards" (so I can prep some templates that I modify the SFX pages on for specific encounter needs) I'd be all over it in a heart beat.

Be sure to checkout BattleBards KS when it gets back off the group Candi! Sounds like its just what you're looking for, and I suspect they're pretty open to suggestions from potential users: just see how they handled their first KS attempt! (If you missed it, originally it was going to be a subscription model, but people wanted the ability to purchase tracks. They cancelled a KS that most certainly would have funded anyway and are starting a new one that allows both subscription and purchasing. Correct me if I'm wrong BattleBards!)

Also, feature idea... using @username to change it to a link to the user's profile...

@Candi, awesome use case there. And yeah setting things up can be a real pain without the right tools for sure. We use our Mixer to "blend" as you say other effects or voice overs on top of the music that's playing. Of course any combination is possible. Our soundboard also allows for the importing and organization of tracks however we like. So we could create categories, name them what we want, say 'ambiance', and throw in every ambient track under the sun in there. Then we could swap over to another category... like sword strikes or what have you to have access on-the-fly.

And yeah I hear you on having a native iPad App. The soundboard we are building for our upcoming Kickstarter is browser-based which can be used across multiple devices (including tablets). In the future we'll also be building native apps for mobile/tablet devices to make it even easier to use and access our library of 500+ tracks from the getgo. Cause yeah I would be really kicked to have some touch screen action going on.

Very cool stuff!

@Keleth, damn, you got it pretty much all right! Wow. One minor correction is we are moving away from subscription for now. It will be purely for purchase. And if later we find that subscription is something of desire we'll tinker with adding it back in. Want to keep things as simple as we can to start with :)

Makes sense. I suspect you'll find that people will be into a subscription model as well. I can say personally, having some audio will always be good, but sometimes I want access to everything, even if just for a short period of time. I'm sure a number of people will see it that way too (use for specific purposes).

@Keleth, totally agree. Don't get me wrong, we actually love the subscription model idea for the exact same reasons you brought up. The other advantage is that it would give users access to audio they may not otherwise have tried, like perhaps NPC voices, which is totally new at this point. So it's something we would love to explore when the time is right for sure.

@BattleBards (is this a thing we do here now? :P) Your upcoming KS sounds awesome! I'll keep my eyes peeled for it.

Another dream feature would be to have an "overlay" or "mix" button feature where you have the button pick a random SFX from the list to mix into the current sound stream. Here's the use I'm imagining, say the party is in a big fight against a bunch of goblins. Background noise is cave sounds and I have three "weapon attack" buttons defined. One is for hits, one for misses and one for critical hits. Whenever a player attacks, or a goblin attacks, after the result is in, just as I narrate (or declare) the outcome, I press the appropriate button and it mixes in an appropriate SFX (because I defined the list it pulls from). The "hit" list would be 5 or 6 different "sword attack" sounds, the critical hit would be 5 or 6 "heavy hit" sounds etc.

That said, I'd be 100% happy with an audio stream and a visual interface with buttons that I can define the function of (and one of the functions is 'mix SFX' and I can customize that). Save button settings and save groups of buttons as layouts. Everything else is gravy :)

Candi, given how popular @(username) is among different services these days, I'm actually considering making the shortcode for linking to a user @(username).

Wow, @(username) is going to be getting a lot of messages.

Hey Everyone. Just wanted you to know we launched our Kickstarter last night... and we're already past the 100% funded mark! Holy crap is all I could think. Let me share a link here to it. Happy to answer any questions about it. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/battlebards/battlebards-epic-fantasy-audio-for-tabletop-rpgs

@Candi, Interesting feature. Right now we have it so you can set up a series of Effects under your own categories. And while you're playing your session and have some BG music going, you can on-the-fly select the effect you want. Now, the randomness factor we don't have in place right now. But it's a cool idea and one I'll add to our idea repository. Thank you for that!

Thats awesome news, Battlebards. I know that my wife balked at the idea of a subscription, but with your new model, I'm sure that I will talk her into it.

@Qralloq Thanks, man! And haha yeah I understand your wife's reaction! We still think there is room for a subscription model and it will likely materialize again (alongside the Pay-Per-Download model), though probably in a modified form once we better understand how to implement it in a way that will be attractive. But, yeah, please talk to you wife and, hey, if it helps you can even tell her that we changed the model because we just felt that chilling reaction from her from thousands of miles away! ;-)

So ok, here's a question for all of you. What genre of audio do you guys use most based on the games you play. (1) Fantasy (2) Sci-Fi (3) Horror (4) Other?

For me it would be horror. From experience, I've learned that when playing an horror game, it helps a lot with the ambiance when using soundtracks from horror movies or games. While this can hold true for all genres, it seems to be holding doubly true for horror games.

@kalajel keeping your players jittery and on alert is what it seems you're doing with the audio. That sounds really cool. Do you change the music up mid-game, like accenting specific scenes for those that are more ominous than others? Or what's your system?