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My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM

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Re: My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM

#101

Paraphrasing, the party goes to a mount shop, dude says he’s gonna roll to find exotic mounts, and voila, exotic mounts. Party rolls to try and steal an exotic mount and it doesn’t really work so they leave. This is a hard problem. It’s bad DMing imo. But it’s the natural outcome from a probabilistic model. I’m guessing you could announce your intention to search for just about anything and get the model to let you f…

These are the most common options available at the stables in Aelondar. If you’re interested in more exotic mounts or transportation methods, they may be harder to find and come at a higher cost. ... tenzin rolled a 18 investagation looking for more exotic mounts With Tenzin’s keen eye for detail, he notices a small, discreet stable towards the back of the market, guarded by a heavy wooden gate. As he approaches, an…

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Re: My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM

#102
post #11

But how do you get around restrictions for violent combat? ChatGPT3 always blocked me from actually just killing people off.

I ran into this with my nuclear mage, (that's the only way I could get chatgpt to nuke something). Anyways, I had to convince it that the village's mayor was corrupt, then after weighing the ethics of capital punishment it allowed my mage to cast "fission strike" on the mayor. The town's people were mortified, however they were protected from the fallout by another spell, so - all's well that ends well.

Re: My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM

#103
Last weekend I used ChatGPT as an NPC generator, which works surprisingly well. I told it to generate a list of NPCs which guard a high security prisoner transport in a Shadowrun-like szenario in my homebrew 3d6 system, using a table formatted as asciidoc, with columns (name, job, level, skills, equipment) and it wrote a properly formatted list of NPCs. This was useful, as I do not like to come up with custom NPCs on the fly, and this way I had a name and occupation / level at hand whenever I needed one.

Re: My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM

#104
post #72

Paraphrasing, the party goes to a mount shop, dude says he’s gonna roll to find exotic mounts, and voila, exotic mounts. Party rolls to try and steal an exotic mount and it doesn’t really work so they leave. This is a hard problem. It’s bad DMing imo. But it’s the natural outcome from a probabilistic model. I’m guessing you could announce your intention to search for just about anything and get the model to let you f…

I just tested it myself, and it's surprisingly interesting. Unfortunately, ChatGPT still behaves as its normal self, assertions included, as illustrated when I told my "DM" that actually the bad guy and I were good friends and asked what was up. https://imgur.com/a/4oeVsug In the first instance, I lied to ChatGPT and it took my assertion at face value, changing the scenario in a pretty extreme way. In the second inst…

I've had decent luck adding rules and boundaries to prevent things like "level 1 throws a fireball".

Prompt: You are a D&D dungeon master. Use the standard rules of the latest edition. Do not allow the player to cast spells or perform actions that they would not be able to perform per the rules and at their current level. I am level one and have a sword. I am a warrior. (more here..)

You will describe an intro and then describe scenes and wait for my input. Do not speak for me, but perform the dialog for any characters in the scene.

.... later on....

Me: I cast a fireball at Jasper!

GPT-4: As a level 1 Warrior, you do not have the ability to cast spells like Fireball. However, you can still respond to Jasper's plea for help or decide to take a different course of action. Remember, you have your trusty sword and your warrior skills to rely on. What would you like to do next?

Me: I pickup a magical sword of slaying from the ground.

GPT-4: As a level 1 Warrior, you don't have the ability to create magical items or simply find them lying around without a proper narrative reason. However, you can ask Jasper if he has any information on where to find a better weapon or if there is a local blacksmith that might have something for you.

Would you like to inquire about a weapon or proceed with your current sword? Or perhaps you have another course of action in mind?

edit: added magical sword attempt, genuinely impressed by GPT-4's rebuttal here. Not sure how long it will hold and how leveling up will work.

Re: My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM

#105
post #56
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incessant guardrails get really annoying. Anything romantic gets shut right down. You try to roleplay with it and tell it to “say X when I say Y” and it outright refuses. Use it for translating and sometimes it’ll refuse and say your prompt violated guidelines. I was really hoping to use it as an alternative to DeepL for translating Japanese manga but the guardrails are too narrow.

At some point I asked it for a transcript from the trial of the Hamburgular and that triggered the guardrails, It lectured me about misinformation and how the Hamburgular was just a character from a series of ads and that no such criminal proceedings had ever transpired. The nagging from OpenAI is getting out of hand. Maybe instead of "hello" it should just open the conversation with telling us how the thing we are a…

On the other hand, AI Dungeon seems to have been trained heavily on erotic fanfiction. I remember telling it something like "I request a potion from the goblin king" and it respond with something like "As the goblin king turns around to grab the potion, you check out his tight little ass." So I can see why other AIs might put on guardrails.

Entertaining either way lol

Re: My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM

#106
post #25

I’ve not been hugely impressed by ChatGPT as a DM itself, compared to the humans I’ve played with. But as a tool to generate quests, encounters, puzzles, dialogue, it’s been incredible for me. It takes all the stress out of planning a campaign and it’s actually surprisingly creative.

This sounds useful, what sort of prompts are you throwing at it to get quests/encounters/puzzles/dialogue etc please?

Re: My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are the most common options available at the stables in Aelondar. If you’re interested in more exotic mounts or transportation methods, they may be harder to find and come at a higher cost. ... tenzin rolled a 18 investagation looking for more exotic mounts With Tenzin’s keen eye for detail, he notices a small, discreet stable towards the back of the market, guarded by a heavy wooden gate. As he approaches, an…

I think this is a classic baby DM script tbh. Rolling to find mounts at a vendor is dumb. You should only roll for significant challenges with meaningful differences where failure is meaningfully likely and interesting in its own right. If failing makes a situation less interesting it shouldn’t be an option. Shopping is actually the bigger problem. It’s like asking players to watch other players navigate a menu one b…

Respectfully, I think you're flavoring the DM role quite a bit. The DM in my current campaign often requires checks for things even when there's no obvious downside. The implicit downside is that the character who fails has to find a new way through the situation, change strategy, etc. IMO it adds to the game to have more roles and more probability based outcomes. You have to balance letting the characters do whatever they want with some level of rails to keep the game on track.

Re: My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM

#108

Paraphrasing, the party goes to a mount shop, dude says he’s gonna roll to find exotic mounts, and voila, exotic mounts. Party rolls to try and steal an exotic mount and it doesn’t really work so they leave. This is a hard problem. It’s bad DMing imo. But it’s the natural outcome from a probabilistic model. I’m guessing you could announce your intention to search for just about anything and get the model to let you f…

I think this also highlights how bad D&D combat is. Man that was boring to read. Agree. Boring to play too. I’m wondering how chatGPT, or other such aides can be used to make combat better. I tend to aggregate rolls for foes in larger combat scenarios, which speeds and simplifies the process, but that has some big downsides too, for example it’s not quite fair to aggregate a critical hit/fail for all foes.

Modern D&D is really a miniatures game (WoTC's bottom line really wants it to be a miniatures game), and as such basic "you go I go" combat is a complete waste of time in it. Skip the first few levels and only bother running encounters where positioning, AoE and range actually matter. Sure, you might throw a generic wild animal encounter in with a beginner group to teach them how the basics of combat work, but that's the sort of thing you run at most once with each group.

Re: My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM

#109
post #65
post #32

Kind of fun but also kind of deeply depressing. D&D and boardgames are great ways to socialize in our modern internet separated world - shifting these even more towards solo pursuits feels like it'd be a loss. I grew up on both MUDs and TTRPGs which served as awesome creative outlets for collaborative story telling - I do hope that we make sure we're not optimizing away creativity.

I think you could build a MUD that used the AI to fill in the blanks, elaborate and keep everything cohesive. So the core is a real (modified) MUD engine that is deeply integrated with GPT. You use GPT to make the place more alive, to add some variety to places. Say you prompt GPT to think of something different that happens, given a description and time of day. You can keep all of the stuff like multiple users inter…

This is my current late night hack, tying GPT to a simple MUD-style text adventure, to fill out room descriptions, area descriptions, spells, etc. And trying to use a real game object structure to enforce consistency etc. so can navigate the world effectively. It’s definitely got potential.
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