Hills I'll Die On: Music is Integral to TTRPGs

Since the inception of this blog, Webby and I have been trying to figure out articles to express our hottest, spiciest, and most infuriating takes on what we believe is important to D&D and other TTRPGs on the market. We’ve gone back and forth on playing edgy loners, types of gaming styles, and why elves deserve to be made fun of (don’t worry, I know we’ve been teasing that one for a while, Webby will get to it). As I was sitting on my balcony in Orlando, pondering my orb and thinking about what makes me tick in this community, I couldn’t help but focus on music. As part of a recurring series, this is the inaugural article of “Hills I will Die On.” Today, we’re going to focus on music and why I believe that it’s more important than any other aspect of TTRPGs, including even seeing facial expressions from your friends… (cue several emojis that express shock and how this is tea and how I’m crazy for even putting this thought into the world). 

So I said it, and I meant it! Music is the single most important thing to run an effective session in my humble opinion. For those who don’t know, I’ve been a game-master now for two years, I’ve been a player for almost a decade and I just generally have lots of opinions that I like to peddle to my friends and you, our humble readers. Music just makes you feel so f***ing cool when you’re doing cool stuff in game. Oh you pushed that person off a cliff? Play a super cinematic and dramatic track. Two of your friends FINALLY said that they love each other in character? Make the other players cry with some orchestral love music. It seriously makes you feel like you’re in a movie and Hans Zimmer is cooking something special up back there for Christopher Nolan’s next project. The point is, music gives people such an emotional tie-in to the game at large and as a GM, that’s the whole purpose of what we’re trying to do. 

To me (and I give you full permission to call me crazy) Audio is the single most important aspect of a narrative driven game. Without good audio, nothing else matters. Webby and I have been playing in multiple home games for the better part of three years now, and during that whole time, we’ve never once had a session where our cameras have been on, crazy right? I even kinda forget what some of my friends look like in between yearly interactions in person. Despite not being able to see them, I can hear them, and feel the interactions between our characters because of the commitment to using music, and high quality audio. 

Think about a movie, or a youtube video, or a video essay on FNAF, idrc what comes to your mind right now. What do you remember most? I’m willing to bet it has something to do with the audio. Yeah, EVERYONE remembers the Battle of Helm’s Deep in LOTR 2, but we all think about it not because of how important it is to the plot and how they built a castle with miniatures and there were 10,000 extras and everyone got cool shirts after filming (can you tell I’m a LOTR fan?), but instead we remember the little things. The sounds of the orcs breathing and screaming when they die. We remember the raindrops hitting the armor and asking “how did they do that? Is it real rain?” We remember the beautiful and looming music when Legolas is shooting the orc with the torch and we the viewer can understand the stress these characters may have felt in this moment.

Music adds to the drama, the intrigue and can increase tension without you even having to narrate as a GM. You can simply play a song and feel the shift in how people are roleplaying. Go into your next game where something tense needs to happen, put on a track from a horror movie and see what happens to your players. Seriously, go try it. I’ll wait right here. Okay, are you back? Great! Creating artificial tension is what TTRPGs are all about. We often go back and forth on how we get player buy-in and my solution is all about music and creating your game into an audio drama that would’ve been listened to in the 1960’s on the radio. 

Immersion is what we’re aiming for in this game. I don’t know about you, but my D&D sessions are some of the best times in my life for escapism that I’ve ever gotten. For like eight hours a week I get to be someone else and forget about the real problems in our world like the impending climate crisis, or how I can’t find a new job because the market is awful, or even that I’m sick today. I get to sit and live in a fantasy world where I can be a gun-slinging criminal who used to run a circus. To me, music and audio ambience are some of the biggest immersion building elements that can be included. Yeah narration is cool and all and will set the scene but if I can hear glasses clinking and a cask of ale being tapped in the tavern, it’s going to draw me further into the game and what you as the GM are saying to me. 

You might be wondering how I get music into my game, especially if you recall that Webby and I play in a virtual campaign. There’s tons of ways to do it! My personal favorite is using a discord bot to play the songs for me. Currently, I use Jockie Music because they allow Spotify and Youtube links. This is a hot commodity lately in the Discord bot game. There’s other great alternatives like Fredboat and Maki. Both are great options but don’t work for certain songs anymore! This is because of some lawsuit with copyright problems, idk it goes over my head. Another great way to accomplish this but requires more from your players online is using Discord’s streaming feature to share your screen for a video or a song. This isn’t as nice, but gets the point across. If you want to play music in person, and don’t know how. I’m not sure I can help you much. I believe in you to use your critical thinking human brain to reason your way through how to play music when all of your friends are in one room together. You’ve got this pookie bear, I know it. 

At the end of the day, every table is different and will want different things. Maybe your players are weird and don’t like music. Maybe you run more of a war-game rather than trying to just have all of your people talk for four hours - not my style but go off king, queen or non-binary ruler. LISTEN to your players, let one of them be a party DJ if you have too much going through your mind to also remember to change the music or the ambience for a scene. This will let some of our more ADHD friends stay engaged when they aren’t in the spotlight. These games are all about collaborative storytelling, and you as the GM aren’t the one in charge, you’re merely facilitating problems for the players to solve, so let them feel like they’re in a movie solving problems.

Hey if you got to the bottom of this article and you’re still skeptical, don’t take it from me, listen to my players and read some of their reactions to having music in the background and what it does for their immersion.