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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

#141

Post by thom »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #131
thom wrote: 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.

I'd like to hear an example of an actually good and novel puzzle that it's generated, everyone says that it's able to generate them but in my experience they're the equivalent of integrating a number slide puzzle in a video game, exceptionally mundane. This seems like a great tool to act as a copilot, but having read the medium article, that was an almost arid level of dry adventure with nothing standing out.

I’m making content for 11 year olds, perhaps I have more leeway than others. In my experience it tends towards riddles that map to certain interactions in a certain order, but obviously using it as a tool you can iterate however much you need to. Using ChatGPT directly as a DM has indeed felt lightweight to me (but still if I’m being honest, it’s absolutely astonishing that it’s coherent at all).

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

#142

Post by professoretc »

ekidd wrote: post #137
bentcorner wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, ChatGPT seems to strongly prefer happy endings. Ask it to write a scene where a Montague bumps into a Capulet, and accusations start flying. One of the characters will successfully de-escalate. Or the price of Verona will show up with guards and stop the brawl. He'll even throw in some foreshadowing about how this will all end in tragedy. I suspect that this relentless love of upbeat endings is a side effect of…

I've noticed a similar phenomenon when asking it to solve problems; if you point out a "flaw" in its proposed solution, even something that isn't wrong at all, it will cheerfully agree with you and "fix" its proposed solution, often making it worse or wrong in the process.

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

#143

Post by obiefernandez »

TomK32 wrote: post #84
fauxpause_ wrote: post #39

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…

Obie and Tenzin manage to each borrow 20 gold pieces from the other two who only have 5 left...

Yes this was a “bug”

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

#144

Post by windowshopping »

I'm really looking forward to when this technology starts getting incorporated into video games to give life to the NPCs.

I think in the future there will be as much a distinction between old dialogue tree NPCs and modern chatbot-powered NPCs as there was between color movies and black and white.

Instead of just having a few lines to choose from, you'll be able to just talk.

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

#146

Post by signatoremo »

tossoff wrote: post #124
gedy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wonderful! Can you please describe the algorithm?

Huh? Can you describe human’s creative algorithm? If not how can you say that ChatGPT is different?

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

#147

Post by fauxpause_ »

marcosdumay wrote: post #132
fauxpause_ wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flexibility is the problem. Good DMs build very tall walls.

I've read "flexibility" here compared to a computer RPG, not a people RPG.

I think that’s not much different. Players don’t want to hear the local shopkeeper’s thoughts and feelings imo. It’d be tedious. They canonically don’t have any useful information for you. It would just mean that they take a long time to talk to and worst case require you to respond with a level of sequitur and politeness.

I could see it for waifus I guess.

I’m prepared to be wrong on this.

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

#148

Post by Sharlin »

genewitch wrote: post #19

This was the second thing I tried. I used [...] as out of character delineation. I don't have a great imagination for that sort of stuff so giving it a setup and having it "flesh" it out was interesting.

Yeah, same here (even used the same notation for out-of-game remarks).

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

#149

Post by blatant303 »

germinalphrase wrote: post #47
blatant303 wrote: post #28

https://old.reddit.com/r/interactivefiction/comments/11z6p84... I shared some experiments on r/interactivefiction I made this past week with regards to writing interactive fictions using chatGPT. Interactive fictions are text based role-playing games you play on your computer. They were popular in the 80s and the scene is still alive to this day (although not commercially as big as it once was) with amateur hobbyist…

Is your current version playable?

No but I explored the idea of building a society of LLMs with ChatGPT4. It drew some diagrams too.

https://sharegpt.com/c/JTaoEJT

Diagrams: https://imgur.com/a/SKgDdmT

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

#150

Post by dragonwriter »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #135
gricardo99 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Older D&D editions specifically made combat much deadlier and incentivized players to avoid combat or use out-of-combat advantages as much as possible for this reason. Modern D&D caters to a crowd that enjoys metagaming and minmaxing combat more.

> Older D&D editions specifically made combat much deadlier

That’s not really true, IMO; older D&D made combat harder to calibrate to the desired level of deadliness because there were more irresistible forces and unmovable objects. Modern D&D is much easier to tune to the precise preferred deadliness. That’s pretty much a monotonic progression across the history of D&D. (Ignoring the boxed set series and considering just OD&D -> AD&D1 -> AD&D2 D&D/3/3.5/4/5, and leaving out the in-playtest One because I haven’t really checked any of the material out.)

> Modern D&D caters to a crowd that enjoys metagaming and minmaxing combat more.

IME and IMO, 4e was a local peak of that, but not more than either AD&D1 or AD&D2, especially the late era of the latter. Heck, in AD&D1 its was common for people who didn’t want the game to be dominated by the metagame to slice out big chunks that were oriented toward that (most notoriously, the weapon to-hit vs. armor class type system).

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