"Side-Topic" Post Week of 03/31/2014

I use a lot of music and sound effects personally and plenty of visual aids. Even during face to face games, I liked having a way to show the players images of monsters they might not be familiar with or pictures of important NPCs. No voices, though, I'm terrible at voices. :)

It works while folks are starting to log into the session, I find it is not missed as things start to roll

I normally toss up a single image or two onto the table, and play some ambient sounds to accompany it. Most of the actual atmosphere building however's done through text. Lots of it. It can get wordy at times and can get slightly confusing in combat (I don't use battlemaps) but overall, it works fine and the players enjoy it. It's a pain though when I have to access the massive chat archive :(

I've found the best way of doing atmosphere isn't sound, or voices, though they help, but is to make the NPC's act sensibly and with motive. For example, why on earth would 3 goblins attack 5 guys, that makes no sense. So I give them a net, and a bounty reward for catching dwarves. Of all the feedback I get about my GMing, it's that my NPC's make the world seem realistic, since each has a motive and isn't NPC#2361 who has knowledge of items 14-23. It's the people, not the mood or the visuals that create that spark of life and wonder in a setting. They make you sit down and wonder how Officer Chocolate became a security guard for this corporation, who is this brother he's talking about, and why is he eating 3 foot long subs at 2am. Remember that it is the through NPC's that the players should interact with the rest of the world with, and I'm not talking about Gods and Demons, but the common folk that they see on the street. A good recommendation if you're not on the spot creative, is to make a list of 100 or so names, and write 3-5 adjectives next to each one, and select one. That way when a player talks to them, the NPC has a personality. Of course you should vary this based on location and events going on in town. Another thing that always has been given me praise for my settings is the sense of scale. I never scale enemies based on the party ability. I have a normal range of very easy to very hard for encounters, and I expect the players to run if they're fighting something stronger than them. The world doesn't fall into your lap how you like, you're never gonna fight stuff easy every time, you have to earn what you want. So as the players get incredibly strong, I still throw common thugs at them, which can see them sent to the jailhouse fast if they just openly murder them. Guards don't favor you because you're a PC. If your go to solution for every problem is just to stab them, then you will get arrested eventually, like in real life. Exceptional individual or not, you're still bound to the laws of society. This I have been told is one of the best things about me GMing since it adds a facet of realism. Also I hate murderhobo, so it keeps those kinds of players out.

All of the above, I like to call dynamic lighting, Dramatic lighting, I will paint the light in certain scenes to give more of an effect visually. I will layer music and sound effects. For one of my current campaigns I layer wind noise, distant howling wolves and a Russian folk song. The characters emerge onto an icy plain from a cave where they have been traveling for several weeks they hear the song and the wind and the wolves and see: There are about 200 Orcs and Giants about to fall on a tribe of reindeer herders (The Russian Folk Song), then two different Satanic chants begin to rise with a drum loop, The scene is lit by the torches, and a tiny moon, lit 700,0, all players see light which moves along the bottom of the page, there are tiny blobs on the dynamic lighting level which cause the moon beams to move and shift, I can only move it manually at this point, but I intend to figure how to automate it at a later date.