Michael Drew & Ross McLennan Part of CW17
Traditional table-top roleplaying games offer a more agile, imaginative and physical experience than video games. The table-top roleplaying game, Dungeons and Dragons, has been popular since its creation in 1974 by American game designers, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. The game involves players roleplaying characters while the Dungeon Master (or DM) describes the game’s world, its narrative and controls destiny with a set of many-sided di. In recent years, DM’s have been attempting to seamlessly integrate sound effects and music into the gameplay to create a more cinematic experience for the character players. This paper explores the efficacy of these attempts and suggests an improved method for the creation and control of interactive music to enhance cinematic-style immersion during gameplay. Utilising Apple’s Logic Pro software to explore conventions of film and game music composition and Audiokinetic’s WWise audio middleware for integration into game engines like Unity and Unreal, a final prototype iPhone app will be demonstrated. This prototype has the potential to greatly enhance the Dungeons and Dragons game experience, but also has the capacity to be incorporated into myriad other table-top roleplaying games that exist on the market.