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Tanarii
2020-05-03, 08:13 AM
I assume some or many of you have tried mood lighting when dungeoneering. Turning the lights down. How well or poorly did that work?

My main concern is being able to see character sheets and die. That seems like it would outweigh the benefit of setting the mood. Similar to playing music, unless it's very, very low volume. Maybe just turn them down from 'blindingly glaring' to something slightly less?

In this specific case, I can see phones apps lighting up people's faces and causing pools of light to be appropriately evocative. But I still don't see that outweighing the inherent distraction that phones/laptops bring to the table.

I used to run games mostly in game stores, where lighting wasn't under my control, so not something I'd previously thought about much. :smallamused:

OldTrees1
2020-05-04, 05:41 PM
It did not seem to work for me. I stopped short of impacting the ability to read. The outcome was I did not hear any comments about the lighting itself.

Dimers
2020-05-05, 12:11 AM
I've had it tried on me, to ill effect, for exactly the reason you mention.

Mood music, likewise -- it just makes it hard to hear the group's voices and distracts attention from the mind's eye. Mind's ear. You know what I mean. :smalltongue:

Khedrac
2020-05-05, 02:25 AM
A many many years ago I once had to endure trying to play a session of Call of Cthulhu by candlight - it wasn't an enhancement of the mood, it was simply a right nuisance for the reasons you predicted.

More recently I DM'd at a Living Greyhawk event inside the London Dungeon - and we had a single table lamp per small table to increase the lighing above the baseline. Again all the same problems of not enough light (made worse for me as to get more light on the adventure I needed to angle it towards the light i.e. the players) added to not enough table (it would have been small for a gaming group of 4, we were 6+DM).

These days the only new dice that get my main gaming group excited are the large sized ones - easier to read. In fact legibility has been my main concern when buying dice for years now. [You know you're getting old when everyone in the group gets out their reading glasses to play the game.]

The other thing to remember is that as players (including the DM) you are all there to have fun. Not everyone's fun is feeling the atmosphere of the place where their characters are (imagining it is another thing). The players usually are there to enjoy themselves with their friends without spending a fortune on alcohol or lane fees or similar.

In general "mood enhancement" effects add nothing to an rpg, in fact they usually detract (a bit like elements in films that break the suspension of disbelief). This isn't just the darker mood enhancers, anything you bring to the table is likely to disrupt the flow of play, and that very much includes audio recordings.

So, it's not just that the downsides outweigh the benfits of "setting the mood" - there are no benefits, as the mood for the PCs is not the mood for the characters, and all you do is distract from the actual game.

Scripten
2020-05-05, 08:26 AM
I've become pretty accustomed to playing mood music, atmospheric ambiance, etc. while DMing. I didn't like to do so at first but my players insisted on it and I got used to it. Granted, that is specifically for D&D. I've also run some horror games in the Haunt system, and for that I found that mood music is actually an effective DMing tool for creating dread and suspense (since those two feelings, together, can approximate fear). Even if the GM doesn't announce "something is coming", the change in music keys players onto the idea that they should be vigilant.

I've used lighting a little bit, but since we're using paper, it's generally more a case of employing tricks of light to make things seem darker without actually removing light from the table itself. Overhead lights with dimmer switches and some candles tend to do the trick. Someday I want to try colored lighting.