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The Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D

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Re: The Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D

#71

Post by ska »

b3kart wrote: post #68
ska wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forget the step where when we get comfortable enough with something we stop calling X AI at all because obviously it' just Z. NB: I'm not convinced this is the wrong thing to do, many of the things we've historically labeled "AI" are very obviously not, at least in retrospect. Perhaps the cycle ends only when an AI can explain to us how we are getting it wrong.

We just don't have a very good definition of what "intelligence" actually is. Hence we're trying to set the bar somewhere. "Surely a machine that can play chess is intelligent". Nope, that's not it. "But surely a machine that recognizes objects in images is intelligent". Nah, it's just good at recognizing patterns of pixels. And so on and so forth. It's a noisy process, but we're slowly moving in the right direction.

Right, we've been doing this for coming on 60 years now, and we have a much better idea of what isn't intelligence than what is. But that's still useful.

Re: The Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D

#72

Post by ajuc »

dreen wrote: post #8

Of course the article is actually about writing a digital DM not a player. But isn't the main problem with this defining win conditions? Pretty easy to define win condition for chess or go. Now, I haven't really played DnD (much to my sadness), but how do you win? edit: I know the answer but I'm making a point with my question

You don't need win condition. Tetris has no win condition yet it's easily trainable. You want some kind of feedback, and human players can just have a 2 buttons in the interface - "Good DM" and "Bad DM".

Re: The Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D

#73

Post by ajuc »

carapace wrote: post #52
com2kid wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO one of the hardest parts of DMing is building tension and a sense that there is real danger, without just bringing out enemies that can completely roll over the players. Ideally the group should survive, but constantly feel threatened and like they "just barely" made it through a story's climax. In other words those victories need to be earned, which is a fine balancing act since dice rolls are random and bad th…

I still remember a friend of mine telling me that he had been genuinely scared at one point in an adventure. Like watching-a-horror-movie scared. (A flying castle attacks the city; it's made to crash; someone has to go in there and find out what's up; cue our heros; they enter through a breach in the wall into a kind of internal moat; it's dark, you're up to your waist in water, and there's something in here with you…

My best horror dungeon so far was a 3-level abandoned dwarven mine. 2 first levels are infested with kobolds and pseudodragons, players kill some kobolds, block off some others with explosions, solve puzzles to get through blocked lift to the last level and see that it was blocked from inside on purpose, there are dwarven runes on the walls written with blood warning not to speak to each other and not to read anything or you'll get infected by HIM.

I borrowed it from SCP series - it's a "memetic hazard" - nonmagically infects brains when it's thought of or spoken of. Mechanically players roll a Wisdom save whenever there's infection opportunity, on a fail they start shouting the meme (then others have to roll :)), on a bad fail they become possesed and run somewhere. You of course don't explain it to the players, just ask them to roll when needed :)

As they explore searching for the artifact they were hired to recover they find the whole mine is full of dead bodies calmly sitting in circles, pools of dried blood, all the books are burned and there are bodies of dwarves who were fighting each other before they died. Then there's the last room with a huge portal that starts to activate when players who got possesed run into it.

The climax is a big pvp fight between the players that try to teleport to their new god and the rest of the party trying to knock them unconscious and drag them away before the portal activates :)

Re: The Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D

#74

Post by naniwaduni »

chongli wrote: post #48
xamuel wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It was solved (for AI) by Stuart Russell in his new book Human Compatible Correction: it was downplayed by Stuart Russell. Stuart took simplistic strawman examples and made them look silly by assuming perfectly calibrated common sense in the hypothetical AGI. (Based on skimming the link you posted; I haven't read Stuart's book.)

You should read instead of skim. Stuart Russell specifically rejects the idea of “perfectly calibrated common sense” in AI. He says AI should not interpret any command literally, but instead take a Bayesian approach. This is much closer to how humans respond to one another’s demands.

Congratulations, you've reduced a hard problem to a harder problem!

Re: The Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D

#75

Post by RhysU »

ajuc wrote: post #73
carapace wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remember a friend of mine telling me that he had been genuinely scared at one point in an adventure. Like watching-a-horror-movie scared. (A flying castle attacks the city; it's made to crash; someone has to go in there and find out what's up; cue our heros; they enter through a breach in the wall into a kind of internal moat; it's dark, you're up to your waist in water, and there's something in here with you…

My best horror dungeon so far was a 3-level abandoned dwarven mine. 2 first levels are infested with kobolds and pseudodragons, players kill some kobolds, block off some others with explosions, solve puzzles to get through blocked lift to the last level and see that it was blocked from inside on purpose, there are dwarven runes on the walls written with blood warning not to speak to each other and not to read anythin…

What is "SCP"?

Re: The Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D

#76

Post by ajuc »

RhysU wrote: post #75
ajuc wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My best horror dungeon so far was a 3-level abandoned dwarven mine. 2 first levels are infested with kobolds and pseudodragons, players kill some kobolds, block off some others with explosions, solve puzzles to get through blocked lift to the last level and see that it was blocked from inside on purpose, there are dwarven runes on the walls written with blood warning not to speak to each other and not to read anythin…

What is "SCP"?

A genre of web fiction with scary x-files like stories.

Great source of ideas for scary monsters/dungeons/villans/legends after reskinning from modern times to whatever setting you need.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation

Re: The Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D

#77

Post by bradknowles »

ajuc wrote: post #69
v01dlight wrote: post #46

A huge part of the charm of TTRPGs is playing a non-digital game face to face with other humans. Even if we had AI that was as entertaining as a skilled human DM (unlikely to be possible IMHO), the human might end up being preferable since hanging out with humans is one of the goals of this particular pursuit. Plus, we already have (weak) AI DMs. They're called video game RPGs. You're the player (as are many others i…

There are ways to play traditional pen and paper rpg over internet now (roll20 for example), and it's actually better than playing them physically in many respects - the system draws the map, allows moving the tokens zooming and scrolling, calculates the distances, shows the fog of war, throws dices and includes bonuses in the rolls. After initial setup it makes it much easier for GM and players because you don't nee…

Roll20 requires a lot of upfront work to create those integrated character sheets. Many games on roll20 are only partially implemented, and many more are not implemented at all. An untold number could not be implemented on roll20 because they have requirements which were not considered early in the development phase for the system, and therefore are impossible to implement.

It also requires a lot of GM research and development, even for those games that are at least partially supported.

Roll20 also has a marginal audio chat solution. It was so bad that we chose to replace that part with Discord in my current campaign.

There is a background music solution available in roll20, but I was never impressed by it.

In my current game, we found it was better in the long run to convert everything to Discord, because it was better on the collaboration and audio chat functions, which helped the humans communicate with each other better and resulted in an overall better game. We lost the interactive mapping functions and the mostly kinda semi sorta integrated character sheets of roll20, but in the end, those were less important to us than the other collaboration functions of Discord.

Re: The Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D

#78

Post by ajuc »

bradknowles wrote: post #77
ajuc wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ways to play traditional pen and paper rpg over internet now (roll20 for example), and it's actually better than playing them physically in many respects - the system draws the map, allows moving the tokens zooming and scrolling, calculates the distances, shows the fog of war, throws dices and includes bonuses in the rolls. After initial setup it makes it much easier for GM and players because you don't nee…

Roll20 requires a lot of upfront work to create those integrated character sheets. Many games on roll20 are only partially implemented, and many more are not implemented at all. An untold number could not be implemented on roll20 because they have requirements which were not considered early in the development phase for the system, and therefore are impossible to implement. It also requires a lot of GM research and d…

Yes the voice chat in roll20 sucks and everybody use discord instead, also for background music as it allows players to set relative volume of each player and music. You can easily keep discord in the background and do everything else on roll20. The system for rolling is pretty good for the games I played (D&D 5th edition and Pathfinder 1st edition).

There's some tips for 5e:

- set "always roll with advantage" in campaign settings to true, it removes the fiddling with the system by the player each time they want to roll, now it's just a click on a weapon or a skill, and it lets DM decide after the roll if it was advantage and change the interpretation without rerolling. You simply ignore the second roll if it was a straight test, take worse or better out of the 2 rolls if player had disadvantage/advantage

- install free chrome extension "vtt enhancement suite" - it allows for executing macros on all selected tokens at once - especially useful for starting combat with lots of enemies - you select for example 10 tokens and click on a macro that rolls initiative for each of them and adds them to the initiative tracker, you ask players to select their tokens and click the same macro - 5 seconds and combat with 16 participants is ready to go - normally I would have to roll physically 10 times, ask players and sort it manually and it would take a minute or 2

- use DM layer for hidden enemies/traps/secret doors/notes/etc - you can then easily move them to map/token layer when players roll perception

- reinforcements in a combat are easy when you put some tokens in DM layer - you can add them all to the combat tracker and the tokens on DM layer will be hidden from the players until you move them to token layer

- make players drag and drop their most used spells and items to a quick-use bar on the bottom left of the screen - it's 15 minutes to set this up on the session 0, but later it eliminates the problem "I closed my character sheet, wait 20 seconds for me to find the button to roll the attack"

- set up tokens to have hitpoints and AC bars on them (keep them hidden from players) - when you click on hitpoints bar on a token and write "-17" it will automatically decrease the hitpoints by 17 points, don't need to substract in your head every time

All of this allows me to run combat several times faster than I could possibly do physically, it adds up quickly.

Re: The Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D

#79

Post by carapace »

ajuc wrote: post #73
carapace wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remember a friend of mine telling me that he had been genuinely scared at one point in an adventure. Like watching-a-horror-movie scared. (A flying castle attacks the city; it's made to crash; someone has to go in there and find out what's up; cue our heros; they enter through a breach in the wall into a kind of internal moat; it's dark, you're up to your waist in water, and there's something in here with you…

My best horror dungeon so far was a 3-level abandoned dwarven mine. 2 first levels are infested with kobolds and pseudodragons, players kill some kobolds, block off some others with explosions, solve puzzles to get through blocked lift to the last level and see that it was blocked from inside on purpose, there are dwarven runes on the walls written with blood warning not to speak to each other and not to read anythin…

That sounds great! The guys I was DM'ing for wouldn't have fallen for it though: they had a knack for confounding your best laid plans. E.g. they would have just read the warnings and bugged out. Or forced captured kobolds to go in first or something.

Later on in the wrecked flying castle there was a room with a clockwork horror in it that I was sure would give them a hard time. They trapped it in a chest right off and ran away before it broke out.

Another time I had a classic dungeon set up for them complete with a lich. They woke up the lich... and ran away. Like all the way out of the dungeon and then halfway across the freaking continent. They just left it for someone else to deal with.

Unrelated story time...

In another campaign one player had this dwarf fighter and he had rules-lawyered and finagled to get him specialized with two axes and multiple attacks per round. Three with the right and two with the left, five attacks per round. We nicknamed him "the Blender" because he could just chop the shit out of anything. He was stupid and reckless, a follower of the great god of war VTRE (Victory Through Reckless Endangerment!) and he was awesome.

This was a Spelljammer campaign (am I the only one who loved/loves Spelljammer!? It was so much fun) and one battle in particular they were fighting a ship of mindflayers. Scary right? The Blender jumps on a loaded ballista and tells the crew to launch him at the Illithid ship. He crashes into the deck, bounces up, grabs his axes from his belt, and proceeds to straight butcher the mindflayers. I forget the details but it was one of those times that the whole table is howling, the dice are hot, and it's just unbelievable but so fun no one cares.

Re: The Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D

#80

Post by RugnirViking »

ajuc wrote: post #69
v01dlight wrote: post #46

A huge part of the charm of TTRPGs is playing a non-digital game face to face with other humans. Even if we had AI that was as entertaining as a skilled human DM (unlikely to be possible IMHO), the human might end up being preferable since hanging out with humans is one of the goals of this particular pursuit. Plus, we already have (weak) AI DMs. They're called video game RPGs. You're the player (as are many others i…

There are ways to play traditional pen and paper rpg over internet now (roll20 for example), and it's actually better than playing them physically in many respects - the system draws the map, allows moving the tokens zooming and scrolling, calculates the distances, shows the fog of war, throws dices and includes bonuses in the rolls. After initial setup it makes it much easier for GM and players because you don't nee…

Roll20 even for what is presumably the best-supported game (DND 5e) has completely unuably broken UI. Something as simple as equipping a piece of armour is an excersise in trying 5 different things, let alone trying to wrangle magical items into the system or get the hp bar to be accruate which almost never works. It takes far longer to teach somebody to use the character sheet system than it does to teach them literally all of the rules of DND, and even then it consistently finds new ways to unexpectedly fuck up stats and bonuses at a rate of about 6 or 7 times per session. Overall, If I must run an online game, I just use pdf character sheets and just have players /roll d20s in chat and ignore all the roll20 functionality as its such a nightmare.

Overall, in trying to reduce the complexity of the game, they gave you a finnicky spreadsheet nightmare of half-baked solutions to problems no-one had.

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