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Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds

dicebreaker.com

31–40 of 106 posts

Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds

#31

I was happy to see that they included Watabou's Medieval Fantasy City Generator, but Oleg has much more to offer: on https://watabou.itch.io/ you can also find: * Cave/Glade Generator * Neighbourhood Generator * Perilous Shores: Fantasy region generator * One page dungeon generator * And my favourite: Village Generator

Came here to share the same One page dungeon generator, direct link https://watabou.itch.io/one-page-dungeon

Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds

#32

Okay, this is probably the right place to say this: You can't play D&D with GPT-3/3.5, but you absolutely can with GPT-4. GPT-4 is a solid DM. GPT-3 couldn't remember what it said 30 minutes ago, and was basically incapable of planning, so unless you want a simple dungeon rougelike-esque adventure, it'll lose track of things and start hallucinating. It will also sometimes forget the rules. My initial impressions are…

> My initial impressions are that GPT-4 is nearly as competent as a human DM

I wonder what kind of campaigns we're talking about here. I mean, if it's just mindless modern encounter-based design, sure, I can believe that. Kicking down doors, rolling for initiative, GOTO 10.

But even mildly more moderate DM work like re-jiggering set up monsters to react to the actions of the players (in e.g. a Caves of Chaos type of setup)?

Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds

#33
post #31

I was happy to see that they included Watabou's Medieval Fantasy City Generator, but Oleg has much more to offer: on https://watabou.itch.io/ you can also find: * Cave/Glade Generator * Neighbourhood Generator * Perilous Shores: Fantasy region generator * One page dungeon generator * And my favourite: Village Generator

Came here to share the same One page dungeon generator, direct link https://watabou.itch.io/one-page-dungeon

These tools are invaluable. Combined with Azgar’s world making tools and DonJon’s demographics generator (see link) a dm/ref can generate an entire environment with fairly detailed religious, political and economic data in an hour.

https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/demographics/

https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/

Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds

#34

Okay, this is probably the right place to say this: You can't play D&D with GPT-3/3.5, but you absolutely can with GPT-4. GPT-4 is a solid DM. GPT-3 couldn't remember what it said 30 minutes ago, and was basically incapable of planning, so unless you want a simple dungeon rougelike-esque adventure, it'll lose track of things and start hallucinating. It will also sometimes forget the rules. My initial impressions are…

in my eyes the big problem is that these model are purely statistics and are unable to apply logic

Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds

#35
post #31

I was happy to see that they included Watabou's Medieval Fantasy City Generator, but Oleg has much more to offer: on https://watabou.itch.io/ you can also find: * Cave/Glade Generator * Neighbourhood Generator * Perilous Shores: Fantasy region generator * One page dungeon generator * And my favourite: Village Generator

Came here to share the same One page dungeon generator, direct link https://watabou.itch.io/one-page-dungeon

Just realised that glades in Against the Storm are basically this.

Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds

#36
post #30

I've recently started DMing, and my biggest surprise when I looked into this is just how poor the general tooling was when I looked for it. I found the user experience of Roll 20 horrible. I fumbled my way around the interface, eventually sort-of getting some maps going but the scene "transitions" were me just deleting the previous tiles because I couldn't work out how to set out proper scenes. A lot of the other too…

I think a lot of HN readers would find Foundry VTT to be a good choice - one-off fee, self-hostable, very, very extensible. I think it's worth pointing out that VTTs (Foundry, Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, etc) don't tend to be good at actual map-making, since the program design and the target users are pretty different, and you're better off with other tools for that. Some of them export into a format that's easily impor…

foundry is glorious. Dungeondraft is an excellent companion for quickly creating dungeons and exporting to foundry.

Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds

#37
post #24

Okay, this is probably the right place to say this: You can't play D&D with GPT-3/3.5, but you absolutely can with GPT-4. GPT-4 is a solid DM. GPT-3 couldn't remember what it said 30 minutes ago, and was basically incapable of planning, so unless you want a simple dungeon rougelike-esque adventure, it'll lose track of things and start hallucinating. It will also sometimes forget the rules. My initial impressions are…

> Also, unlike GPT-3, it will roll dice for you I'd question the fairness of those rolls. But yeah, DMing seems like an excellent fit for these models. But you probably need to track hitpoints and stats separately, GPT-4 can't do math either. Or I guess it not doing math might be a feature, that way it will tell you what reasonably happens with fuzzy logic, might be a more immersive experience.

It would be interesting to see the dsitribution of dice rolls when asking GPT-3 and 4 to roll a dice repeatedly.

Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds

#38

Okay, this is probably the right place to say this: You can't play D&D with GPT-3/3.5, but you absolutely can with GPT-4. GPT-4 is a solid DM. GPT-3 couldn't remember what it said 30 minutes ago, and was basically incapable of planning, so unless you want a simple dungeon rougelike-esque adventure, it'll lose track of things and start hallucinating. It will also sometimes forget the rules. My initial impressions are…

I am working on something like this, text-based with images. But I don't generate on the fly, I will have big lists (many thousands) of curated text outputs from GPT that get selected with randomization and nested if statements. For those interested, the game (work in progress) is Advinsula: https://advinsula.com/

Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds

#39

Okay, this is probably the right place to say this: You can't play D&D with GPT-3/3.5, but you absolutely can with GPT-4. GPT-4 is a solid DM. GPT-3 couldn't remember what it said 30 minutes ago, and was basically incapable of planning, so unless you want a simple dungeon rougelike-esque adventure, it'll lose track of things and start hallucinating. It will also sometimes forget the rules. My initial impressions are…

I spent some weeks trying to make a GPT-3 D&D GM, but indeed it just won't work. I haven't tried GPT-4 yet but this post makes me want to test it for sure.

The problem I had with GPT-3, most of all, was that it tries to "finish the story". E.g. if the players are on a grand campaign to defeat some big bad boss, then this might happen:

GM (GPT): You enter the tavern, and you see a halfling bartender and a few gnome patrons.

Player: I ask the bartender for information about

GM (GPT): The bartender tells you lives in a castle. You and your party storm the castle and manage to defeat .

Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds

#40

Okay, this is probably the right place to say this: You can't play D&D with GPT-3/3.5, but you absolutely can with GPT-4. GPT-4 is a solid DM. GPT-3 couldn't remember what it said 30 minutes ago, and was basically incapable of planning, so unless you want a simple dungeon rougelike-esque adventure, it'll lose track of things and start hallucinating. It will also sometimes forget the rules. My initial impressions are…

When you think of the content of the books in Baldur's Gate and the sheer amount of human hours poured into something just to give background to the game, this is going to save indeed a lot of time.

But on the other hand, just like open world was a terrible curse with hundred of games feeling empty, I'm afraid we will see a wave of games with a lot of generated but eventually uninteresting content because this is so easy to do.

After all, good content is coherent, and filtered. It's not just about producing a lot, it's what you don't put in the game, and what you do to glue things together.

I sure GPT will eventually be better at it than humans, but for now, having a human veto is necessary to have a good noise/signal ratio and because GPT is "good enough", being lazy is tempting.

But yeah, I can confirm GPT4 is already quite good at it and will only improve from this point.

This is going to be very interesting years.

Edit: I just made it write a full video game scenario, using BG as a competitor for basis. At first it was average, but with directions, it refined it and became quite good. Some kind of steam punk guild called the Navigators reading the wind, living in floating islands and a girl rediscovering the earth bellow the clouds and rebuilding old aliances with lost civilizations, plus a politician leader trying to prevent that and even a mentor to help her. Not bad.

I would play this, and even read it.

You can see the inspiration from "The Pillars of the Earth", "Gunnm", "Baldur's Gate" and "nausica" proving again it's mostly assembling known stuff.

But a cake is mostly assembling known stuff and it's still good. The "last of us" is just a good take on something that has been done a thousand times.

So why not?

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