Looping Tabletop Music: The Do’s and Don’ts

You run the music for your tabletop RPG campaign. Maybe you’re the GM, or maybe you’re just the designated DJ. There are dozens or hundreds of tracks for you to choose from for each scenario. Let me ask you a simple question: once you press play, do you loop the individual tracks? 

People feel very strongly about whether or not it’s best to repeat a piece of music when scoring a TTRPG session, but it’s actually a complex question that depends on a number of factors. You may have an instinctive answer, but I want you to really consider the reasons why you might loop or not loop. 

The Case for Looping

• Looping keeps the mood and theme consistent
• If you’ve already chosen the perfect track, you can just press play and forget about it
• No gaps and pauses during track transitions because there are no track transitions

The Case Against Looping

• A looping track gets tiresome
• Not enough variety
• If the track isn’t just right, you end up undercutting the intended mood

That’s the big picture. If you value consistency and really want to find the right track, just pick a track for each encounter, loop it, and call it a day. However, I think the decision tree is a bit trickier than that. Let’s dig deeper.

The Five Loop Rule

When designing music for video games, there’s a good rule of thumb that you should try to avoid any scenario in which players will hear one piece of music loop five times in a row. The idea is that if your music is looping so regularly, your players will probably get sick of the music. It’s up to the composer/sound team to either 1. make the offending track longer (meaning it won’t loop as frequently), 2. create additional music tracks, or 3. change how the music is implemented in-game (perhaps including moments of silence or audio logic that causes more frequent track transitions).

This is a pretty good rule of thumb for TTRPG music as well. If you’re GMing a quick exchange between the party and an NPC and expect the conversation to be about 10 minutes, you can probably get away with looping a 2-minute track. If it’s an hourlong combat, though, a 2-minute track will simply not suffice. 

This isn’t a hard and fast rule, and there is, of course, no way to perfectly predict how long a given encounter will be. It’s a good baseline, though. If you do want to loop tracks, your best bet is to either find long tracks that won’t repeat as frequently or to simply find more more moments to switch tracks. 

How Distracting is the Track?

It’s easier to get away with looping a track that isn’t distracting. A track with a bold melody, noteworthy shifts in dynamics, or unusual chord changes is much more likely to stick out. As such, your players are more likely to notice that a track has played 10 times in a row. On the flipside, something slow, ambient, and textural can loop as many times as you want, and there’s a good chance your players won’t realize at all.

Here are a couple examples from my own library to highlight this point.

Lenneton is a piece of calm fantasy music that evokes peaceful forests or quiet villages at night. The melodies move slowly and the harmonies even more so. The texture is not abrasive, and the mood is a bit pleasant but mostly ambiguous. You could loop this 10 times, and your players would not bat an eye. Hell, if you’re using the seamlessly looping version available at the Music d20 Patreon, your players might not even notice that it's looping at all.

Unwaning (Instrumental) is melodramatic, features bold shifts in key and tempo, and has a melody designed to drill its way into your ear. This is potentially a great track to play exactly once during a dramatic moment in your campaign, but if you loop it, it may drive your players insane. They’ll hear that big build-up at 02:30 or that insistent trumpet melody at 02:57 a few times and start losing their minds. Repeating a track with a big build like that over and over is both fatiguing for players and undercuts the intended effect. 

Your exact tolerance for distracting tracks may vary, and the types of music you enjoy will dramatically affect whether you choose to loop or not. For example, I love bold and sonically adventurous music, and thus I very rarely loop music in my campaigns. That’s just my preference! I’d rather hear tunes with crazy time signatures and crunchy chords and then just not loop them to avoid annoying my players. If you pretty much always play slow, meandering, ambient string music or unobtrusive war drums with minimal melody, you can probably get away with looping.

Seamless Loops

The moment your players are most likely to catch a loop is in the moment between the end of the track and when it starts up again… that is, unless your track loops seamlessly. When I say “seamlessly,” I mean seamlessly. I don’t just mean hitting the “Repeat 1” button on Spotify. A seamless loop requires two things: 

1. An audio player that is built to handle seamless loops
2. An audio file rendered to be looped seamlessly

If you don’t know if you have either of those things, you probably don’t. Most playback apps (Spotify, VLC, whatever) will automatically insert a small, distracting silence between repetitions of a track. Likewise, just about every track on streaming services and the majority of mp3s you grab off of Bandcamp / Patreon / whatever will have a natural beginning and end. Seamlessly looping tracks are rendered in such that the very end of a track perfectly leads back into the start, and you generally don’t find those unless you’re specifically looking for them.

Let’s say you really want to roll with some seamless loops. Well, first you need a playback app that can do that. Foundry VTT’s audio player handles loops beautifully, and there are a handful of dedicated playback apps that do the same. This is NOT the norm however. You’ll also need looping tracks. Luckily, every track in my library comes with a looping variant, and most of my peers do the same. 

Alternatively, you can seek out YouTube uploads that explicitly refer to themselves as “hour-long loop” or some such. Lots of tabletop composers upload extra long versions of the music that are already looped, so you can just fire up one of those YouTube videos, let it run, and forget about it. Some kind souls also upload looped versions of tracks from video games for your use, though those regularly get taken down for copyright violations. In either case, if you really want a perfect piece of looping music with 0 hiccups, these YouTube uploads are invaluable. 

The Impact of Volume

I love playing music at a healthy volume when running D&D or some other RPG in person. It’s great! Of course, it should never be so loud that it becomes difficult for your players to hear each other, but the louder your music it is, the more impactful it becomes. I’m not going to go into the details, but there is plenty of psychoacoustic research to back this up.

That said, the louder you play your music, the more distracting it is. Higher volume makes looping more noticeable and potentially annoying.

However, the opposite is also true. If you don’t want your players to get bothered by repetitions, you can just play the music at a quieter volume. This is especially true and useful online. If you’re streaming music to your pals via a VTT or over a Discord call, you probably don’t want the music to be too loud anyway. If your players are totally invested in the scene and the volume is low, you can get away with quite a few loops without your players getting bothered.

One final trick: you can always lower the volume of the music only after the first or second loop. Podcasters will often play the first few seconds of a track at full volume while no one is talking before reducing it to mix better with the dialogue. This provides a great opportunity for audiences to hear the vibe of a track and lock in with the tempo before settling into a more narrative-focused mixed. 

A Little Bit of Silence

There’s no rule that says you have to score every single moment of every single session. There is virtue in silence. The most common reason I might recommend tabletop DJs turn off the music is to highlight emotional scenes, nerve-racking stealth sequences, or quiet campfire conversations. However, you can also give the music a rest either for variety’s sake or to avoid fatigue. If you’re worried you might wear out one track if you repeat it too many times, remember that you don’t have to loop it indefinitely. 

One strategy I find works wonders is to loop a combat track a few times at the start of combat—or at the start of each new round—and then turn it off and tackle the rest of your fight in focused silence. One of the primary reasons to use music is to enhance immersion; sometimes all you need is to set the stage and then let the strategy and roleplaying doing the heavy lifting. 

Actual Play Podcast Considerations

I recently scored a tabletop podcast with some original music for the first time in a few years. There were many scenes for which I could get away with writing a little nugget of an idea and looping it a good number of times. Those moments were often the least action-focused: discussions of mechanics, lore, or lots of scene setting. When characters are moving all over, the GM is dropping huge revelations, and the tenor of a scene is shifting dramatically, you really ought to be scoring the action more “1-to-1” (i.e. creating or selecting different music to appropriately fit each beat of the evolving scene). 

This was a gig where I was paid to score the whole episode, but I still found that the 90ish minute program only needed about 50 minutes of music, loops included. That’s a big departure from my home games where I like to have music playing 100% of the time! When you keep a figure like that in mind, it becomes much easier to justify looping a track 3, 4, or 5 times before settling into a bit of silence. 

Beyond that, much of what I discussed above still applies: looping more than 5 times can be draining, audiences are less forgiving of looped music that is particularly assertive or abrasive, and seamless loops really make a world of difference. On the topic of volume, there are a few actual play shows I listen to that mix the music so quietly that the producers could basically loop one track the whole way though, and the audience wouldn't notice because they can barely hear the music anyway! Obviously, I think that’s just bad mixing, but there is potentially a happy medium. For this episode I scored, the tracks I looped the most number of times were also mixed the quietest. 

Summing It Up: What Do You Really Want?

Despite everything I said above, the main factor you should consider when deciding how to score your game is one of workflow. Do you want to pick the perfect track for every scene? If so, then you can probably get away with looping. If you’d rather throw on a playlist, use a service like Soncraft, or place blind faith in Spotify’s algorithm, do that. At the end of the day, you need to find the right balance of reasonable prep work, in-game mental load, and the ideal ambience for your specific table.