ADSR for GMs

Using Synthesizer Logic to Tune the Flow of Your RPG Sessions

I’m a graphic designer by trade. I went to school for it because my whole life doodling pictures and reading comics, crystallized very early on that I needed to do some kind of art as a career. I just knew that I didn’t want to be destitute and surfing couches, so design seemed like a happy medium, and I chose it as my speciality in college.

Once there, we had a professor arrive at the beginning of our third year, whom I had an affinity towards. He expressed things in a way that made design feel less like echoes of the Bauhaus movement and more like a way of interacting with the reality we inhabit.

After graduation, I learned that many of the lessons he taught us were, in fact, from his teacher at the Cranbrook Academy of Art: Elliott Earls.

Earls has a YouTube channel with truly useful design knowledge. I don’t agree with everything he puts out there, but I appreciate how it challenges my view on design and what design means.

One of his videos talks about critique. Critique, in art school, consists of the artist putting their work up in a gallery-like space for their peers and instructors to discuss formally. At my school, critique took around 3-6 hours to get through all 20 of us. We would put the work up, discuss how it made us feel, talk about what worked and what didn’t, and then move on to the next work.

Earls suggests that this model is inherently flawed and that, instead, critique should (or just naturally does) mirror the foundational structure found, surprisingly, in music synthesization.

In music synthesizers, an envelope describes how a sound changes over time, broken into four stages:

• Attack: how quickly the sound begins.

• Decay: how it settles after the initial burst.

• Sustain: the level it holds as long as the key is pressed.

• Release: how it fades when the key is let go.

You may already see where I’m going with this. 😉

RPGs, like music, are collaborative engines of synthesis. After reading and interpreting a scenario, a GM either writes one or brings a pre-written one to the table, describes it to the players (who in turn interpret it in their own way), and synthesizes those two approaches to create the rest of the game.

And games, much like music, have their own forms of attack, decay, sustain, and release.

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Breakdown of Phases

🟢 Attack: Initiation

In a roleplaying game, we can interpret the attack phase as how the session begins. These can be slow or fast, looking very different depending on which you choose:

• A fast attack might be:

  • In medias res.

  • A chase, a fight, a cold open.

• A slow attack might be:

  • A soft open in a tavern.

  • A cutscene without the players.

  • A gentle re-entry after a long break.

The speed of the attack dictates the shape of what comes next. A fast opening demands a fast transition, while a slow one needs space to breathe. This directly correlates to…

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🟡 Decay: Interpretation

When the GM opens with the attack, the players need time to (a) understand what was told to them and (b) synthesize that information with the options they have available to them. This is the decay phase—the moments before a core play loop is established.

This can be some (or all) of the following:

• Players digest what just happened.

• Rules get clarifed.

• Stakes are set.

• Table chatter shifts from meta to in-character.

The decay is the moment players orient themselves within the fiction. It’s how the energy of the opening begins to flow into consistent motion. It sets the basis for how the remainder of the session (or campaign!) are going to play out.

If there is buy-in during the decay phase, there will be buy-in in all subsequent phases. If there’s confusion and dissatisfaction, it collapses.

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🔵 Sustain: Play Itself

The sustain phase is the entire rest of the game:

• At the session level, sustain is the minute-to-minute rhythm: player actions, GM responses, mechanics resolving, world reacting.

• At the campaign level, sustain is the enduring interplay between intent and improvisation. The game text will be changed by play.

At the ground level, this can be abstracted into pacing (more on that by clicking here). But ultimately, sustain is the core element of RPGs and is what makes them games.

It’s the core repeatable loop that actually makes the gameplay.

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🔴 Release: Closure

All things end, whether it be a grand finale or a silent ghosting. In the release phase, we leave the fiction, return to the meta, and agree that play is over. Not all releases look the same:

• Release can be abrupt: a TPK, a rage quit, a shoddy internet connection.

• Or it can be gradual: post-session reflection, downtime play, a final epilogue.

Something that comes and goes quickly can feel cheap, which can lead to nobody at the table taking anything seriously. Conversely, a release that lingers too long can feel overly melodramatic or like overindulgence.

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This is a diagnostic, not a hard and fast rule!

You can’t prep for everything. Nor should you. But thinking in terms of ADSR can help you:

• Understand pacing problems

• Diagnose awkward transitions

• Adjust energy in real time

• Match tone to tempo

If you’re preemptively setting attack phases and trying to write in how long your sustain phase is going to last, you’re fighting an uphill battle. Instead, try thinking of this more like a diagnostic utility that helps find issues during and after play. 🟦

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