How to run sound during combat

Boards, buttons and notes — keeping up with a fight without losing the thread.

About 4 minutes · you need Thaumaturgy open, and a speaker or headphones.

1. Build the board before the session

   Combat is the worst time to be searching a sound library. Make a board for the fight you expect — a swing, a hit on armour, a miss, the monster's noise, a death — and load it before anyone rolls initiative.

2. Name the buttons for the moment, not the file

   The label on a button is yours to write. \u201cSwing and a miss\u201d is findable mid-fight; \u201cwhoosh_03\u201d is not. Use the note underneath for the tell — who it belongs to, when to hit it.

3. Keep the board short

   Six to nine buttons is about the limit of what you can hit without looking. If a board is growing past that, it is really two boards — split it and load both; they stack.

4. Let the ambience keep running

   Do not stop the environment for a fight. The room does not stop existing because someone drew a sword, and a background that keeps going makes the effects sit in the space instead of on top of it.

5. Use takes so the same hit is never identical

   Most buttons carry several takes and pick one at random each press. If one of them does not fit your monster, untick it — the button then only uses the ones you kept.

Swapping boards mid-fight

You do not have to leave the scene to change your tools. Drop a board and load another from the Session screen while the environment keeps playing — useful when a fight turns into a chase, or when the thing they were fighting turns out to be the small problem.

What not to do

Do not play a sound for every attack. Sound for every single roll becomes noise and slows the table down. Save it for the hits that matter — a critical, a kill, the moment the door comes down.

Next

• How to add ambient sound to a D&D game — What to play, when to play it, and how to keep it from becoming a distraction.
• How to build a tavern soundscape — A worked example: crowd, fire and the occasional mug, built from scratch in about five minutes.
• How to build a dungeon soundscape — Drips, air and distance — how to make stone feel like stone without putting players to sleep.
• All the documentation — every screen and every dial.

Ready? Open Thaumaturgy — it is free, and there is nothing to install.