Sing Us a Song

Question: Do you use music in your games? My long Scion campaign is the first in which I am extensively using it, and I would never go back in any setting without it. I was wondering how you addressed and used music in your games.

Different Storytellers all have different styles on music, I think, and how it helps (or doesn't) their games. I've played in games with no music at all and games where the Storyteller kept a constant loop of music playing at all times; they tend to have very different feels, which means it depends on the group how useful music can be.

For us, we use music occasionally but not all the time; we've found that having music on constantly during a game is distracting, especially when social characters need to have conversations or description-intensive moments benefit from everyone's attention being on the Storyteller instead of the soundtrack, and sometimes it can stifle some players who have a particular image of the scene if the music seems to be more geared toward a different interpretation. However, we do use music once in a while because it's great for specific mood purposes; when the Strawberry Fields game stumbled into a situation similar to a zombie movie we played creepy horror scores to highlight the scariness, and during Ragnarok we often played epic symphonic music during the large battle scenes to help lend them more gravitas. What the characters are doing in a scene can also bring music to the forefront; if a character happens to actually perform some music or specifically get music into the scene, we'll often play something appropriate to show off what they're doing.

And, of course, characters with Theme Music get to bust that out whenever they spend for the power (most of them have their Theme Music saved on their phones or tablets so they can just hit a button and jam on with their bad selves). We also play music for NPCs that have Theme Music, and it's a fun audio cue for the players - they know that if "The Saints Go Marching In" starts playing over the emergency loudspeakers, the Baron is about to make an appearance, or that when AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" starts blaring out of every passing car radio, they're about to be descended on by Mamaragan.

When and how much you want to use music in your games really depends on the preferences of the Storyteller and players; I know that when I was in a game where the Storyteller played music the entire time I was always pretty annoyed about it, because I personally have trouble not paying attention to music when it's playing and was therefore always mildly distracted from what was going on, especially if the music didn't match the scene. But I also know many players who feel that it really adds to the game and love to have as much of it as possible, so if that's the case for your group, keep on rockin' all the way into the wee hours of your games!