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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

#111
post #95
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.

[flagged]

walks like a duck, quacks like a duck etc.

i've laughed out loud at lots of GPT output and find it more engaging than most wetware next token generators.

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

#112

Ha, I had the same idea a few hours ago. One thing I noticed is that the DM will let you do basically anything without fighting you on it. For example I was ambushed by some zombies and skeletons and I attempted to pitch them on a multilevel marketing scheme. Here is the result (my characters are Femribubs and Natnari): In a surprising turn of events, Femribubs and Natnari decide to change their approach. Instead of…

This is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever read. Well done.

I didn’t keep it but GPT-4 once pitched me a very convincing cross-over between Die Hard and Jurassic Park culminating in a tense face off between a machine gun armed John McLane and a T-Rex.

The heartbreaking World War 1 movie involving Pokémon was less good however.

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

#113

Ha, I had the same idea a few hours ago. One thing I noticed is that the DM will let you do basically anything without fighting you on it. For example I was ambushed by some zombies and skeletons and I attempted to pitch them on a multilevel marketing scheme. Here is the result (my characters are Femribubs and Natnari): In a surprising turn of events, Femribubs and Natnari decide to change their approach. Instead of…

I decided I wasn't done with the undead MLM scheme and instead of going to the temple I said: They're not ready to go to the temple yet. They want to make sure the zombies and skeletons succeed in their new "careers" so they decide to help them work on their sales pitches To which the DM replied: Femribubs and Natnari, feeling a sense of responsibility for the success of the undead in their new "careers," decide to p…

FWIW, the last few paragraphs of the response is something that I found was extremely common output for "DM AI". Whatever the situation, if it's kind of open ended, it'll say you did the thing really well, and you came to learn a bunch of new stuff, discovered who your friends really were along the way and everything was sunshine and rainbows.

You can get it to put out something a little more grimdark but you need to give it more context.

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

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. "

[flagged]

Personally, I think all creative endeavors are a regurgitation of rules ingested by the creator. Creativity is born from experiences.

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

#115

Ha, I had the same idea a few hours ago. One thing I noticed is that the DM will let you do basically anything without fighting you on it. For example I was ambushed by some zombies and skeletons and I attempted to pitch them on a multilevel marketing scheme. Here is the result (my characters are Femribubs and Natnari): In a surprising turn of events, Femribubs and Natnari decide to change their approach. Instead of…

It's not strictly wrong to let the story go wherever the players want as a DM, as long as you can keep up. In fact I'd say one of the traits of a good DM is knowing how much to let the story diverge from their plans, and to be able to think quickly and respond to the players on the spot. If the direction is entertaining, most parties are okay with exploring it. How tightly you keep the story on the rails is part of the game. In D&D sometimes you play the DM as much as you do their scenario.

What would be interesting is figuring out if you could configure ChatGPT's tolerance for divergence from the planned scenario. So that parties who prefer high walls can have them, while people who find your story thoroughly entertaining can experience it like you did.

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

#116

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.

I run a complete home brew system. I just keep max health low and combat potential low. Every time you receive an injury you suffer a noteworthy injury, die, or start dying. A random human with a knife should always be threatening… because it is. A guy with a knife is actually really scary. A guy with a gun even more so.

With such a system you tend not to have any meaningless fights, and when you do, you make it zany and high stakes and expect at least one person to suffer a severe injury or die.

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

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. "

[flagged]

It works very similar to what we call "creative" output from humans

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

#118

Ha, I had the same idea a few hours ago. One thing I noticed is that the DM will let you do basically anything without fighting you on it. For example I was ambushed by some zombies and skeletons and I attempted to pitch them on a multilevel marketing scheme. Here is the result (my characters are Femribubs and Natnari): In a surprising turn of events, Femribubs and Natnari decide to change their approach. Instead of…

That sort of struck me with the linked story. They saw some wolf footprints, and then essentially summoned the monsters to fight by setting up an ambush in their current location.

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

#119
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?

I started out with something as simple as “Give me an idea for a starter D&D campaign suitable for a beginner 11 year old” and was happy with the results. I followed up with “Give details of the monsters and their stats and abilities for each encounter” and a couple of follow ups to fill in gaps. It mentioned a puzzle as part of an encounter and I just asked it for more detail and it gave a great explanation. I also asked “Give some example dialogue for each NPC in the village.” just for some inspiration on one of the settings. I am by no means an expert prompter but these sorts of conversations have yielded great results every time. One of my players also has some very specific background that they’ve written and I’ve been able to supply that and ask for some future encounters and plot points to support their story. I really couldn’t be more impressed - if you don’t like the initial output you can always iterate but I feel like I’ve been very lucky so far.

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

#120

Out of curiosity, I asked GPT3 to write a Friends episode one time. On the one hand, I was kind of surprised how well it knew the show - it knew the characters and how they were related, it knew about the coffee shop and Rachel & Monica's apartment. It wasn't very _creative_ though, it just kind of seemed to talk in circles, and nothing ever actually happened (it also gave Chandler & Joey iphones). This actually seem…

I asked GPT4 for many Friends and Seinfeld episodes. It did both of them pretty well, but the Senifeld episodes were better written and funnier. In friends it tried too hard to mimic something from the show's episodes. Both shows it wrote well and was creative enough. It certainly writes much better than default ChatGPT. However the Friends episodes it wrote were not funny. The Seinfeld ones were good enough to make me wonder whether we will see a flood of TV shows even more than what we see now.
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