Soundtrack Your Game | Mastery

Why I got a Stream Deck for DMing

This publication, recently called The Circle, is now Wayside Games. Do not be alarmed.

Rowan woke surrounded by an opulence they had spent their life trying to escape. Lady Duskin’s bedsheets even felt like those of Rowan’s childhood. Too soft. Too light. No texture to catch or drag on your skin and remind you that you were, in fact, a mortal being bound by the world you occupied.

That it would be over soon was a small comfort. That they were here to rob the Lady Duskin was a greater one.

As Rowan untangled themselves from the elaborate dressings of the four-post bed, Pepper entered from the next chamber. There was a haggard look about their eyes and a regal bearing in their shoulders Rowan had not seen before. It seemed, to Rowan at least, the two might have more in common than they’d first thought.

At the table, Zoe hesitated. Was this the right time? They’d waited a half dozen sessions already to share any piece of Rowan’s backstory. Was now dramatic enough? Would now disrupt the flow of the game?

Through the room, a timid violin began to sing out the first few measures of Craig Armstrong’s “Opening”. Rowan’s character theme. Zoe made eye contact with the DM. Someone thought that the moment was right.

“I see I’m not the only royal here, Pepper.”

---

Tabletop Gaming is a massively multidisciplinary medium. By necessity of play, we participate in improvisational storytelling. By necessity of facilitation, we engage in game design. By necessity of preparation, we write. We draw characters and maps. We sculpt terrain and paint miniatures. At the table, we act when we speak as our characters. Whatever your disparate art is, odds are that it can find a supporting role in your campaign.

In this way, the tabletop is very similar to theater. And like in theater, stories told at the tabletop have massive potential to be improved by well-executed technical craft.

The first Mork Borg session where I experimented with interesting lighting

Technical elements like sound, lighting, and sets can direct attention, conjure emotion, and enhance the play happening at your table. Frankly, I think they deserve more attention in the tabletop space.

I think the biggest reason they don’t get that attention is the limited capacity of facilitators. In a traditional roleplaying game, a game master is responsible for the steady motion of an intricate clockwork; at any moment, they will have a dozen narrative, mechanical, and social responsibilities demanding their attention. This leaves little space for them to attend to additional game elements.

This is a very real obstacle for tech in tabletop, but I think it is an obstacle well worth overcoming. So today we’re zooming in on one slice of tabletop tech: music. When should you use ambient music, how should you use specific musical motifs, and how can you manage music under highly limited bandwidth?

Ambient Music

If you use music at the table, this is likely what you’re already doing: during your session, you put on themed music. Maybe you have a handful of playlists for different vibes.

If you’re not doing this right now, you should probably start.

Ambient music is mostly about focus. When we play tabletop games, we exist simultaneously in two spheres. The first is the magic circle. The magic circle is (as it’s relevant to us here) the collective make-believe that our game takes place in. We agree that the rules of our game are real, that dragons exist, and that it matters whether Sutgr the Vile is allowed to complete her evil plan. The other sphere is the real world. We’re all sitting around Justin’s dining room table. It smells like pizza, and I’m exhausted after an eight-hour work shift. For fairly obvious reasons, we want our players to spend most of their time in the magic circle.

Good ambient music shortens the distance between these two spheres. It creates a stimulus in the real world that engages players with the magic circle. Instead of losing focus on the game and hearing the TV in the next room over, a player loses focus and hears the driving soundtrack of a fantasy adventure.

The more specific that musical hook is, the more effective it will be. With several playlists organized around player action (combat, travel, negotiation, rest, etc.) or around mood (somber, excited, relaxed, dangerous, etc.), you can curate specific emotional reactions from your music. You won’t just be pulling a player out of the real world and into the game generally, you’ll be pulling them into the specific activity that is the game’s current focus.

When you’re choosing your music, there’s one big thing you’re trying to avoid: tracks that will pull players out of the magic circle and into the real world. Sudden changes in volume or vibe will do that. So will music that your players recognize. “Ride of the Rohirrim” and “Buckbeak’s Flight” are both excellent, evocative pieces of soundtrack. If either of them comes on during a session of mine, every person there will stop playing to comment on them. Bad background music.

My Music

Historically, I’ve played my music through Spotify. It creates the least friction between me and the music, which is is essential for limiting the GM attention music takes up.
The playlists I’ve been using for years come from this reddit post. Lately, I’ve preferred using the kind of hours-long ambient tracks you find on YouTube, but I’ve had a harder time making these accessible while I’m facilitating.

Find obscure tracks with consistent energy, and your soundtrack will weave a subtle magic that holds your players’ attention on the game. It will also do this without commanding too much of your attention. You only need to worry about changing the music when the game is transitioning between moods, and this is usually an ideal time for you to take a few seconds of attention away from the table to shuffle a new playlist.

Musical Themes

We can use music more pointedly than that, though. Rather than just holding player attention on the task at hand, we can use music to drive player focus in new directions. We can use specific tracks with specific intents.

Now, I’m not about to suggest that you curate your game’s whole soundtrack like a composer or a filmmaker. Our work is improvisational and vast in scope; we can’t have a unique piece of soundtrack curated for every moment. Even if we had such a wealth of music available, no GM has the at-table bandwidth to curate it.

What I am suggesting is that you choose a small number of important game elements to give this attention to. Most of your campaign will get generic background music, but your main villain? An essential magic item? Your player characters?

If you decide you want to prepare music like this, sit down and identify what it is your game is really about (this is important for a lot of reasons, but soundtracking engages with it very directly). If your game is about the heroic journeys of your player characters, ask them each to send you an instrumental track to be their character’s theme. If your game is about overcoming a terrible villain, give that villain a theme and play it whenever the party encounters their villainy. If the heart of your game is a mystery, select a theme that you’ll play whenever the party finds an essential clue. If your game is about saving people, choose a track to play every time your party rescues someone.

These tracks, deployed well, will create emotional continuity between thematically related scenes. The first time players hear a track, the music will color their understanding of its associated game element. From that point forward, that theme will summon not only the emotion of its own musicality, but the memories of every other time that music has played. The impact of each track builds over time as it calls to mind more and more building action which has led to this point.

Beyond that, themes can help to prompt player action. When you’re running a mystery, playing the big clue theme indicates to your players that this is something they should pay attention to. If your game strongly emphasizes individual PC stories, playing a PCs theme gives one player an invitation to take center stage and the other players a queue to turn focus onto that character.

All of this helps to manage focus in a really powerful way. It gives the chosen elements an increased emotional impact, gives you a way to connect otherwise unrelated scenes in the minds of your players, and lets you subtly communicate your intent with your players.

Increasing Your Capacity

What I have described so far is what I do at the table now. It is highly effective, and I would regret to lose any piece of it.

It can also be challenging to manage sometimes.

Using Spotify on my phone while I DM means navigating between several playlists (and sometimes between songs within certain playlists) under pressure. It’s not impossible, but frankly, it can be stressful. It also means I make mistakes sometimes. A character will have their big moment, and I’ll forget to put their theme on. The party will be infiltrating a refined masquerade, and I’ll accidentally put on the tavern playlist. None of this is catastrophic, but it is evidence of the way I am pushing the boundaries of my capacity as a facilitator.

I’ve got two solutions to reduce the burden of music: one is simple but expensive, and the other is experimental.

Lets start with the simple one. For Christmas this year, I got a Stream Deck. This wonderful tool from Elgato is a 3x4 grid of buttons that are assigned hotkeys on a computer. Because the buttons have screens set behind them, you are able to build easily navigable menus and submenus. For me, one of those submenus is now [Music].

My Stream Deck’s Music Tab

I’ve got volume and playback controls, as well as dedicated buttons to shuffle each of my ambient playlists. Key themes each get their own button. All are well-labeled and highly visible.

Running music with this thing is absolutely effortless. When I used it for the first time, my partner told me afterward that they couldn’t tell at all when I was using it. They’ve always been the player most aware of when my attention has switched to my phone, and now that friction is completely gone. If you have the option of running with a dedicated tool for music, I can vouch personally for the impact it will have.

With that said, a Stream Deck is an enormous investment to make if you’re only planning on using it to manage music as a DM. It’s also not very portable; I got mine because I almost exclusively DM out of my own house, but if you travel to run games, you’ll want a different solution.

The Music Wrangler

When I don’t have access to my tech setup, I choose a player to DJ. I pick someone with their feet solidly under them and give them the added responsibility of adjusting the music as we play. They get license to decide what the right music is for a given moment, and if we’re using specific themes, I tell that player what they are. This is a similar approach to music that some DMs take to running monsters in combat.

The entire mental load of managing music gets lifted off of you, the DM, and placed on a player. Players have a lot less to manage at the table, and most can handle music without it impacting their ability to play. The only real cost of this is your singular authority.

D&D is a very traditional RPG, and traditional RPGs consolidate most creative control under the GM. The music wrangler represents a break from that ethos; it marginally democratizes narrative control by giving a player authority over something besides their character. Some DMs are not going to like that.

Honestly, that’s valid.

I think our medium is more interesting when players are more involved in constructing narrative at the table (and roles like the music wrangler help with that), but I also think that our medium is most effective when we’re not battling the systems we’re operating (and D&D is not a system built for players to play more than their characters).

If you’re running a system less bound by traditional RPG table dynamics (a FitD or PbtA system, maybe), then the music wrangler is a no-brainer. In a more traditionally structured RPG, it’s more of a decision. Ultimately, I don’t think that giving a player control of your soundtracking shifts the dynamic of your table all that much, and it wins you a massively increased capacity for interesting music at your table.

Wrapup

Those are my takes on music at the table. Boiled down, it’s basically three things:

Music Action Items

1. Use ambient music to guide player attention onto the game. Seperate your ambient music into focused playlists to do that more effectively.

2. Figure out what your game is about. Give those things their own theme songs. Use those theme songs to emphasize those elements across different scenes.

3. Manage the added strain of running music at the table with either technical solutions (a Stream Deck) or social solutions (a music wrangler).

Pretty soon, we’re going to be giving the same treatment to lights. Two of my besties (one of whom happens to be my partner) are professional lighting designers, so the Stream Deck increasing my tech capacity made it basically inevitable that my lighting setup was going to get involved.

Also on the docket are articles about running Villains and Bosses (different things) as well as a first paid Correspondence all about stage combat. Since the last time we talked, the production of Macbeth that I was fight directing for both opened and closed, and it’s time for me to talk about it!

As usual, it’s been a blast writing for y’all, and I’m doing more of it right now. Look for my next article on Monday!

Love and power to you,

Sam <3