For session 3 and I decided to try some new music. After browsing the last.fm gamer stations I found that most of them were not all that great. After an hour or so of trying I decided to quickly try and find a John Williams station but because it was mid game and I was DMing at the time I settled on the Classical/Contemporary station. I have to say that it worked extremely well.

More than once someone would mention how fitting the music seemed, and indeed so when I had the players fighting ghouls in a graveyard it set the scene very nicely.  I think it fit better than the Minibosses station, and for tonight’s session I will attempt to find a John Williams station prior to starting.

Music is a rather controversial issue surprisingly. Many groups play with no background music so as to have complete focus; however the majority of groups I have played with have some sort of music on. Generally it’s at a low level in the back and more often than not is light on lyrics. In one group I play with Dub-Step is generally the genre of choice and while I myself am not a fan of the genre it works well for this purpose.

This seems to be a general consensus for gaming. If there are no lyrics then you are far less likely to have people continuously asking what the song is or people complaining over the music. All in all it all falls back to the DM’s choice.

For the Alpha group session 1 was played without any music. This went unnoticed seeing as how most people were talking so loudly that the music would have been drowned out anyways. For the second session however I decided to tap into the depths of xbox live and use the Last.fm features. I’ve used them all of once before but after a bit of cruising I decided to try the 8bit channel. After about 15 minutes I decided it wasn’t right and went with a channel called Minibosses which I later realized was the band. This remained on the rest of the night.

The group didn’t seem to mind the music at all which I consider an accomplishment seeing as the musical preferences in the group range from Harry and the Potters to Skrillex. I expect to try another station for Session 3 though, its always good to experiment.