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LLM based agents as Dungeon Masters

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Re: LLM based agents as Dungeon Masters

#131

Post by mrtranscendence »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #91
giantrobot wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An LLM DM is exactly what could add that story, make overcoming challenges feel meaningful and allow for player decisions to actually impact the world deeply. No it's not. I don't think you're going to find an LLM with a large enough context window to have a meaningfully involving story spanning multiple sessions. An LLM isn't going to craft a story element tailored to a character, or more importantly, an individua…

> I don't think you're going to find an LLM with a large enough context window to have a meaningfully involving story spanning multiple sessions. Sure you will. > An LLM isn't going to craft a story element tailored to a character, or more importantly, an individual player. Sure it is. > An LLM also doesn't really understand the game rules and isn't going to be able to adjudicate house rules based on fun factor. Sure…

> Character stats, names, details about players - those are inputs, and structured ones at that.

Some details about players are structured and can be easily stored and referenced. Some aren't. Consider a character who, through emergent gameplay, develops a slight bias against kobolds; who's going to pick up on that and store it in a database (and at what point)? What if a player extemporaneously gives a monologue about their grief at losing a parent? Will the entire story be stored? Will it be processed into structured chunks to be referenced later? Will the LLM just shove "lost a father" into a database?

Given current limitations I don't see how you design a system that won't forget important details, particularly across many sessions.

Re: LLM based agents as Dungeon Masters

#132

Post by mrtranscendence »

jhbadger wrote: post #126
acomjean wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting. I grew up with “choose your own adventure” books which were like a solo adventure: (If you go on the north road turn to page 34 if you follow the river page 57) Many board games now have a solo mode with an automated player with tables and dice to help randomness. https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3238902/what-is-the-best-so... Obviously there are adventure video games. Some of the new ones often…

That style of book led to one type of solo adventure -- the "numbered paragraph" type that is basically a choose your own adventure book except that combat and other such situations are resolved using the RPG rules. Those still exist, but more recently, the goal is to make things more open ended and flexible, at the cost of having the player make decisions on what things mean -- like the player might roll on some tab…

Oh man, I played the shit out of the Lone Wolf books when I was a kid in the eighties and nineties. My brother had the first couple of them, and I still have his old books somewhere with his notes. I should find them for nostalgia's sake (my brother having long since passed).

Re: LLM based agents as Dungeon Masters

#134

Post by pmichaud »

JohnMakin wrote: post #30
pmichaud wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are a step on the road to fully responsive rpg worlds though, which don’t have to be text based.

It's been written at length here and elsewhere by game devs, but this isn't a thing that anyone would truly want. A purely AI generated or controlled world would have no constraints, and be fundamentally untestable - games aren't really games unless they have constraints. Even the 'purest' sandboxes have some kind of constraint buried within them, and I think you'd find an RPG of this type extremely boring, at least…

I don't really buy this. I don't think the tech is quite there, although at this point it might be a matter of clever prompting more than a fundamental limitation depending on the type of game you have in mind. A strong enough DM AI could take a prompt like "I want to play a game with a similar loop to Satisfactory, set in Mordor at the beginning of the second age." And the AI could figure out from there, including devising appropriate constraints.

Re: LLM based agents as Dungeon Masters

#135

Post by GuB-42 »

2099miles wrote: post #3

This is so interesting that people want this. This is beyond the guy saying “people don’t like making music so we made ai so it’s easier and faster to just prompt it to make music” . Like in my experience the best part of d&d is the dungeon master who knows their friends making a story and details specifically for fun and the fun of the group. And the interactions between players and the dm is where I derived the mos…

And yet, that's exactly what computer RPGs are all about, one of the most popular video game genre is essentially about automating dungeon masters. It includes early games like Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork, which are chatbots not unlike a very primitive version of ChatGPT.

If you have a good role playing group, with a DM you enjoy playing with, no computer game nor LLM will replace that. But if what you are looking for is the convenience of computer games with the freedom of tabletop RPGs more than the social aspect, then LLMs totally make sense. And even with a social group, it can work as substitute if you don't have a DM (DMing is hard work!).

Re: LLM based agents as Dungeon Masters

#136

Post by TeMPOraL »

mrtranscendence wrote: post #131
TeMPOraL wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think you're going to find an LLM with a large enough context window to have a meaningfully involving story spanning multiple sessions. Sure you will. > An LLM isn't going to craft a story element tailored to a character, or more importantly, an individual player. Sure it is. > An LLM also doesn't really understand the game rules and isn't going to be able to adjudicate house rules based on fun factor. Sure…

> Character stats, names, details about players - those are inputs, and structured ones at that. Some details about players are structured and can be easily stored and referenced. Some aren't. Consider a character who, through emergent gameplay, develops a slight bias against kobolds; who's going to pick up on that and store it in a database (and at what point)? What if a player extemporaneously gives a monologue abo…

> who's going to pick up on that and store it in a database (and at what point)

LLM might, if prompted to look at it, or if there was a defining moment that could invoke such change. It won't pick on a very subtle change, but then most people reading a story wouldn't either - this is more of the kind of stuff fans read into a story when trying to patch potential continuity issues.

> What if a player extemporaneously gives a monologue about their grief at losing a parent? Will the entire story be stored? Will it be processed into structured chunks to be referenced later? Will the LLM just shove "lost a father" into a database?

The scale depends on the design, but I'd say yes, shoving "lost a father" into a database so it pops up in context is a good first step, the next step would be to ensure the entry looks more like "mentioned they continue to grieve after loss of their father ", followed by a single-sentence summary of their monologue.

Personally, I had some degree of success with configuring LLM (Claude 3.5 Sonnet) for advising on some personal topics across multiple conversations - the system prompt contains notes in and tag-delimited blocks, and instructions to monitor the conversation for important information relevant to those notes, and, if found, to adjust those notes accordingly (achieved by having it emit updates in another magic tag, and me manually apply them to the system prompt).

> Given current limitations I don't see how you design a system that won't forget important details, particularly across many sessions.

It's not possible. Fortunately, it's not needed. Humans forget important details all the time, too - but this is fine, because in storytelling, the audience is only aware of the paths you took, not of the countless other possibilities you missed or decided not to take. Same with LLMs (and larger systems using LLMs as components) - as long as they keep track of some details, and don't miss the biggest, most important ones, they'll do the job just fine.

(And if they miss some trivia you actually care about, I can imagine a system in which you could ask about it, and it'll do what the writers and fans always do - retcon the story on the fly.)

Re: LLM based agents as Dungeon Masters

#137

Post by int_19h »

emptysongglass wrote: post #117
int_19h wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. But for stuff like this, ChatGPT is overkill. It's better to get a dedicated RP finetune of LLaMA, Qwen, or some other open weights model (you can still run it in the cloud if you don't have hardware to do so locally). There are enough finetunes around by now that you can "dial in" how dark you want it, but for some examples: https://huggingface.co/jukofyork/Dark-Miqu-70B https://huggingface.co/SicariusSicari…

Just curious, how do you keep up to date on these models? Is there a community out there that discusses them?

r/LocalLLaMA has the discussions, but on top of that, I just periodically browse new model lists on Hugging Face. There's a lot of stuff, but most low-effort finetunes tend to focus on small models (since that's much cheaper and faster), so if you only look at 70B+ ones, there's a lot less garbage there.

Re: LLM based agents as Dungeon Masters

#138

Post by popalchemist »

2099miles wrote: post #3

This is so interesting that people want this. This is beyond the guy saying “people don’t like making music so we made ai so it’s easier and faster to just prompt it to make music” . Like in my experience the best part of d&d is the dungeon master who knows their friends making a story and details specifically for fun and the fun of the group. And the interactions between players and the dm is where I derived the mos…

DMing takes a huge amount of effort and time.

Most likely use of this is that a DM runs it, and overrules/augments its output when necessary/as they see fit.

Re: LLM based agents as Dungeon Masters

#139

Post by meowfly »

cdiamand wrote: post #16

Last year, I built a DM for myself using the OpenAI api and an elevenLabs voice generator. I asked it set my character in Baldur's Gate, so it could pull upon the huge amount of DnD source material it had been trained on. A few takeaways: 1. An LLM based DM can give the player essentially infinite richness and description on anything they ask for. 2. There is difficulty in setting the rules for the LLM to follow that…

This was my experience too. The short context and the optimism bias make chatgpt the wrong solution.

It starts well and then NPCs become inconsistent and the DM basically lets you craft the story by constantly doing a "yes and".

It becomes boring because the stakes feel so low.

Re: LLM based agents as Dungeon Masters

#140

Post by trod1234 »

2099miles wrote: post #3

This is so interesting that people want this. This is beyond the guy saying “people don’t like making music so we made ai so it’s easier and faster to just prompt it to make music” . Like in my experience the best part of d&d is the dungeon master who knows their friends making a story and details specifically for fun and the fun of the group. And the interactions between players and the dm is where I derived the mos…

I guarantee you that anyone with knowledge of how these games are run would not want an LLM being a DM.

Its the type of problem which requires a good balance of storytelling, preparation, and tailoring the interactions towards the psychology of the people who are playing (in specific beneficial and entertaining ways).

Its a problem computers won't likely solve anytime soon.

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