8 D&D Soundboard Tools DM’s Can Use While DMIng

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you crest a hill and finally see it dinar your second childhood home a flood

of mixed memories enters your mind stop and your companions follow suit you look over

the large city and you see tall sturdy stone buildings you see precise streets and

roads laid out in a grid pattern see a very very large wall all the

way around the city but what catches your attention most the lack of livery don't

see the traditional flag featuring a golden deer with enormous antlers each one tipped with

a candle all on a field of deep green you don't see any of that

instead see white flags blowing silently on a chill breeze instead of a golden deer

with candles you see the head of a deer with antlers of fire and in

the fire the symbol of the elemental cult of fire yes it looks like the

cult have yes it looks like the cultists have been here the whole time a

light of snow begins to fall you look at your companions and ask

anyone got any ideas on how to get past the wall guard what would you

like to do welcome back to how to be a better d m i'm justin

lewis and i'm your d m today and together you and i will learn how

to craft better stories for you and your friends as your dungeon master sessions of

d and d five will help the nub dum and the master dem and everyone

in between and as a d m your highest goal will naturally be to achieve

full immersion into the world you create oh you want your players to feel like

they are in the scenes you're describing and there are many tools out there to

help you do this but to really achieve the height of emerge and you need

to engage all the senses including hearing therefore many d ms have turned towards music

and ambionce to help achieve this today i'll be shared some dandy sound board tools

that you can use to help enhance your experience but before i get to the

tools let me go through a few housekeeping items first a big thank you to

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all right i think that is way too many announcements so before i say anything

else let's actually get to the meat of the and actually i spoke to ou

soon but before i get to the list let me first give you a few

caveats cave number one i have only compiled tools that are free to use in

some capacity i want you to be able to be a better d m without

breaking the bank and i know and understand what it's like to have a limited

amount of time and resources to put towards this hobby just because we're podcast which

doesn't mean we are made of money these are free so you can spend money

on other things like rent or groceries in some cases caveat number two your ambiance

slash music situation largely depend on your available equipment if you have a cynematic surround

sound system great if you only have a phone great at all works how you

use it is what matters so for the purposes of this episode just so you

know my system has access to and aleccess speaker my computer my phone and a

blue tooth hand held speaker in the case of the two speakers it's in either

or scenario i haven't really figured out a way to hook them both up together

m m oh oh so we don't really have kind of the full surround sound

set up maybe in the future i will set up a better sound system but

that will probably be much farther down the line when i actually have a dedicated

ing room rather than just my dining room in the town house that i live

in so in the list of d n d sound boards that you can use

while deming in person games and some on online games and some online games number

one is youtube now i don't even know if i have to mention this one

youtube is the obvious choice because it is so wild widely used not only for

music but for videos oh there are so many choices out there that it is

inexcusable if you want to add music to your game but you've been too lazy

or you haven't found the right method because youtube is the right place to start

because it works you know you can work up from there to anything else really

and this is assuming of course that you have some method of playing the music

if you don't then just disregard this whole episode one note that when i have

used youtube i found that it's kind of easy to forget the music and then

suddenly an add pops up or it moves from one song to another that is

totally wrong for the mood so just be aware of this and know that it

can have the opposite effect rather than emerging your players it can be somewhat jarring

i do believe that there is an option to create play lists on youtube so

that might be something to investigate number two is spotify so i kind of like

a little bit spotify is free however you do get adds just about every other

song luckily for me or unluckily depending on how you look at it my wife

makes me pay spotify so we have it without adds regardless spotify is a great

option for making those play lists

for excellent d and playing it has a lot of options and you can even

use some sound tracks from your favorite video games or movies cave here though if

you are in some way monetizing your dandy sessions or your deming you have to

be very careful with which music you use and how copyright is in fact a

thing and you can get in trouble if you don't abide buy it plus who

it's their stuff stolen and sold without their knowledge so if you're playing with your

friends you can basically use anything but if you're playing for money you need to

make sure you use copy right free of music and just so you know when

i tried to spotify i found it somewhat difficult to curate a play list that

really fit the moods that i was looking for and that's more so because i

don't i'm not very good at creating play lists generally i don't do that oh

i don't do that for my own music listening anyway so if you're good at

making play lists then spotify is a perfect choice for you number three is r

p g fantasy app it's literally r p g fantasy in the up store at

least on i phones this is the one that i'm actually currently using right now

it's it's a basic sound board that allows you to play both ambiance and music

at the same time and i can even throw sound effects though i never do

because that seems a bit corner or over produce it really depends on how you

play but this app has a free version and a paid one so the free

version doesn't really allow you to close your phone while you're playing have to have

the phone open and and the music playing so you're gonna have to have a

charging cord near by but the paid version does i haven't figured out a way

to upload my own music to it though which is kind of a drawback but

it would be much nicer to be able to add music to it that i

pull from other places and things but over all it's an excellent out of the

box solution for you know any demean d m

yeah

yeah

yeah oh

oh

all right number four is rolled twenty we obviously can't talk about deming and basically

almost any context without mentioning roll twenty there are other platforms out there but i've

used role twenty the most and for those of you who haven't heard of it

it's a platform for playing dandy online but it also has a feature that allows

you to upload and play music so your players can listen to it specifically in

the online space and to be honest i'm actually not a huge fan of the

user experience or the user inter face i think it could be a little bit

more streamline what are yu goin a do anyway role twenty comes with some pre

loaded songs as well so if you plan on using role went during a session

and you specifically want to use the role playing sound board capabilities make sure to

spend some time testing out exactly which songs you want to use so you know

what to use before the game starts number five is siren scape fantasy player also

another app or you can use it on a browser so it is a bit

heavy on the up side because because you kind of have to siren scape is

a bit heavy on the mobile devices you have to download certain packs as it

were but it has a lot of situational specific options which does make for great

role playing experience so if you know your players are going to be in a

tavern or a market you can get that specific pack as it were but it

also has other paid options that you can get if you create an account with

sarinscape and kind go that route i think i would maybe use this tool in

conjunction with other tools as it's not really might go to one thing in particular

that i don't like is that you do have to download the packs for each

scenario you want to try and it's it's separated by that uh so if you're

looking for music you can't just browse all the music you have to go into

each individual pack it's a little bit more sound effect heavy though as well but

it does have some background music and ambiance that worked right for any d n

d scene

am you and your companions walk through the gates you'd have ah you've had to

leave he deer's bear outside but you and your companions finally walk through the gates

you had to leave deer's bear outside and you don't know how he's going to

find the bear again but he deer doesn't seem concerned and after making it pass

the wall and the guards you all immediately look for a side alley way where

you can depart down and draw less attention you find it and move down the

alleyway and then art peeling off your disguises ye it worked but i don't it

worked but i won't ever do that again dressing up as women how in the

world did you come up with that idea kajar you ask jory shrugs as he

undoes a corset and starts to wipe make up off his face infiltration makes you

think of oh infiltration makes you think up all sorts of crazy ideas believe me

this ain't the worst way of getting in somewhere not by long shot he pumps

snickers and points at a grumpy huger yeah but at least this way we got

to see he look like a lady that's a memory i'll be keeping for a

long time he throws a bonnet he am those two were becoming fast friends you're

in the city now next step is to look for decadents so what would you

like to do number six is table toppy one of the things i like most

about table top is the simplicity you can use it in a browser form and

it's not too complicated the are icons demas writing what the sound slash musics would

sound like and you can click that and actually click more than one and use

multiple at the same time and then there are icons above each one with infinity

symbols and others just one and that describes whether it goes on a loop or

whether it just plays once and it's pretty simple which is which is necessary in

my opinion for d n d because there's so many things going on as a

d m so you want the simplest thing you can get as well there is

also a software version of the sound board that i have not yet downloaded because

i prefer to not overload my computer as it is super old but the browser

version is simple enough and useful enough that anyone can open it up and start

using it right away number seven is table top audio while table topic is beautiful

in its simplicity table top audio is rugged in its complexity there are a lot

of options on table top audio for both paid and free users the paid users

support the creator's via their patron but there are enough free res sources to wet

your whistle i particularly like the sound pad feature where you can click on a

motive such as dark forest or dungeon and then there are a handful of resources

from sound effects to background music and ambiance that you can meet le play and

there's even a broadcast feature within the sound pad that you can send as a

link to your players if you aren't playing in the same local and that allows

them to digitally hear what music you are playing and stay tuned in that way

if you're you're playing online and you prefer to not go the role twenty route

number eight is ambient mixer and as its name suggests it's a tool primarily for

creating amba you can find the right mix of natural and unnatural sounds that would

be occurring within the scene you are creating in d and d as a d

and sound board it's useful only as much as you want to create though scenes

it does not help with music as far as i can tell though more often

than not audience does the trick just fine and with this tool you do need

to look for the moods you want beforehand because searching the whole site can get

fairly difficult and complicated and take up some precious time if you're attempting to do

it during the game but over all it's a great free option for the dungeon

master looking to help their players hear the game as well as play it of

you're alive i thought you were dead stand silently facing heli she was a friend

of yours when you were younger and she had both gone to the academy together

and because you weren't slated for the throne you'd actually entertain thoughts of courting her

that was before things were so different now you have responsibilities and much bigger problems

yeah i know it's been a while but we're here for a reason hobart my

brother he's destroying the kingdom and we are here to stop that i saw you

and knew you'd help us you know of any discidences in the city or anyone

unhappy with the king's rule thank you so much for listening to today's show we

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again we couldn't do this without you so i'm gonna end this episode with a

massive massive thank you and we'll be next week but until then let's go ahead

and roll initiative