Immersion Through Sound…

There’s a lot of ways for immersion to be audible.  Music, sound effects and voicing. Obviously, if you’re playing a board game, voicing might not fit in, so again, we’re concentrating on RPGs.

If possible, always use multiple speakers for sounds and music.  Like always. OK, you’re playing at the game shop or something, you need to be considerate, and maybe you can only bring a cheap Bluetooth speaker or something set low, but if you’re in a place you can, go for stereo.

Music is an accepted theatrical addition.  Real life tends not to have an actual background score, so we use music to evoke emotional responses like feeling scared or excited.  Music is a strongly immersive device used properly. Don’t mess it up. By that I mean, don’t have the characters trekking the haunted swamp, low tonal cellos feeding the sense of dire dread, and then have the next track come up as Baby Got Back.  Know your software, know your system, choose your music. There’s a ton of free apps out there that will do various background music for RPGs if you aren’t comfortable finding the right moods yourself. I’ll cover those in another post at some point.

OK, as already declared, music is somewhat unnatural.  Real life isn’t orchestrally scored for those of us that are considered sane.  But sound effects. Wow, sound effects rock. Yes, of course, you can vocally clang and woosh each sword hit, but more important are the environmental sounds.  Crickets and crackling campfire at night. Chains and creaking floors in the abandoned prison. The market p[lace. The tavern. Again, there are apps out there that will provide a slew of sound effects for you.  Environmental sound effects are a HUGE step in immersive playing.

Also think of giving certain character s or locations audio cues.  Maybe whenever a certain bad guy shows up, he has a theme song, a la Darth Vader.  Maybe all temples of a certain god have the same environmental aura. Mark and remember these things and they will trigger memories and moods in the players of the last time that character or location was encountered.  It gets truly awesome when you cue up a music track and the players all shriek, knowing that they’re meeting HIM again.

Game masters doing voices for characters is an entirely different level of immersion and that will be covered in a separate post.