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Model-Based Testing for Dungeons & Dragons

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Re: Model-Based Testing for Dungeons & Dragons

#41

Post by gglitch »

cammasmith wrote: post #19

One of my biggest issues with playing DND is that I never fully understood the rules. I'd play with people who had been playing for years, and they didn't explain things very well, and that made it hard to play. Hopefully, this will help with that.

There's a community and play-style called OSR or "old school renaissance," that recreates versions of the earliest editions of D&D, and encourage a style of play that's heavily oriented around few rules and the DM making quick decisions/rulings on the spot, rather than lots of rules and lots of time spent mining the rulebooks. In fact, the expression is "rulings over rules." This might appeal to you.

Re: Model-Based Testing for Dungeons & Dragons

#42

Post by chuckadams »

jghn wrote: post #28
cammasmith wrote: post #19

One of my biggest issues with playing DND is that I never fully understood the rules. I'd play with people who had been playing for years, and they didn't explain things very well, and that made it hard to play. Hopefully, this will help with that.

> I never fully understood the rules I played from the early 80s through early 90s. Mostly AD&D 1e but earlier on the red/blue boxes and later on 2e. Recently I've taken to reading r/adnd for nostalgia reasons. One thing become abundantly clear real fast, no one I ever played with ever truly understood the rules. Even the "rules lawyers" among us. And I played with a large variety of people from different friend grou…

House rules are part of the appeal of the game. RPGs are supposed to be something that you make your own, to whatever degree you want. D&D did have some really incoherent rules that accreted over time though... I grew up with AD&D (the gold book), and I don't think anyone ever used all the rules from that.

Re: Model-Based Testing for Dungeons & Dragons

#43

Post by nz »

data-ottawa wrote: post #12
jaen wrote: post #9

Maybe the content is great, but the AI writing style is really grating with its staccato sentences and faux-"profoundness". Can't bear it any more, stopped reading. "You’re not checking logic. You’re checking shape.". Ugh.

This and subheading like “the problem” “The feature space” bother me for reasons I can’t fully explain. It feels like the laziest possible section separator and generally would be better with an extra space divider or something. It’s so prevalent in AI writing.

The mental-model that I am using for online writing, is that it is analogous to the spectrum of `pretending acting`. The worst writing (AI or otherwise), looks, sounds, feels like pretense, like a kid that tucks a towel into his shirt, and runs around, pretending to be a super-hero. Meanwhile, acting, true acting, is invisible, it is a synonym for _being_[1].

That said, a lot of the AI writing feels "procedural", in the sense that most corporate writing (whitepapers, press releases, etc) feel procedural (i.e. the result of a constructed procedure). Before AI, the constructed procedure was basically that a piece of writing passes through a bunch of people (e.g. engineering -> management -> marketing -> website/email), and the output is a bland, forgettable pablum designed to (1) be SEO-friendly, (2) be spam-filter friendly, (3) be easy to ingest, (4) look superficially trustworthy and authoritative (e.g. inflated page count, extra jargon, numbers, plots), (5) look like it belongs to the "scene" or "industry" by imitating all the other corporate writings out there[2].

AI is interesting, in the same way that computers or the internet or an encyclopedia are interesting: how people choose to use it tells you a lot about them. All of those technologies can be used to compensate for a lack of skill (it helps one pretend), or they can be used to forge a skill (it helps one become).

One has to pretend, before they can act (I guess? Feels intuitively correct to me). So perhaps, AI (and web, and computer, and encyclopedia) is only harmful to the extend that it does not nudge a person towards becoming[3]? And if so, that's a _cultural_ limitation, not a technological one.

[1]: I am not an actor, and so I might be wrong, but that is the impression I get from just watching and analyzing the acting in various films.

[2]: this becomes frustrating when you get criticized for producing something that "reads like $famousSomething", and then you get criticized again for producing something that "does not read like $typeOfFamousSomething".

[3]: No clue how you (plural -- let's bring back "yous") will convince your boss that you did not take the shortcut, because you were trying to "become more".

Re: Model-Based Testing for Dungeons & Dragons

#44

Post by bob1029 »

This stuff can get as complicated as you want it to. I question the business value proposition though (i.e., how much fun it is to be this precise).

That said, I would pay good money to look at the source code of some of the production MTG rule systems.

https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Layer

https://media.wizards.com/2026/downloads/MagicCompRules%2020...

Re: Model-Based Testing for Dungeons & Dragons

#45

Post by elphinstone »

jghn wrote: post #28
cammasmith wrote: post #19

One of my biggest issues with playing DND is that I never fully understood the rules. I'd play with people who had been playing for years, and they didn't explain things very well, and that made it hard to play. Hopefully, this will help with that.

> I never fully understood the rules I played from the early 80s through early 90s. Mostly AD&D 1e but earlier on the red/blue boxes and later on 2e. Recently I've taken to reading r/adnd for nostalgia reasons. One thing become abundantly clear real fast, no one I ever played with ever truly understood the rules. Even the "rules lawyers" among us. And I played with a large variety of people from different friend grou…

Same experience mostly. I distinctly remember trying and then ignoring Unarmed combat and Psionics as cumbersome nonsense. Encumbrance was only enforced for a huge hoard, range penalties were usually irrelevant, and any sort of weapon factor was out. Most important was hp, AC, attacks/round, spells, magic items, STR, DEX, and saving throws.

Re: Model-Based Testing for Dungeons & Dragons

#46

Post by gmueckl »

cammasmith wrote: post #19

One of my biggest issues with playing DND is that I never fully understood the rules. I'd play with people who had been playing for years, and they didn't explain things very well, and that made it hard to play. Hopefully, this will help with that.

When you look at the DM's guide guide to the game, one of the very first rules it teaches is that the fun trumps being a stickler for the rules and the DM is free to bend and break rules for a better plot, and even encouraged to do so.

D&D has a strong narrative aspect when you look at the published adventure modules. There are usually plenty of characters to interact with in some way or another and some quests can be solved entirely by following the breadcrumbs offered up through them. But the DM needs to role-play all of these characters and do a lot of improv to make this work. This isn't so easy.

Also, combat in D&D is a slog. Whereas turn taking outside combat is rather fast and loose, the game turns into this enormous ceremony once the words "roll initiative" are spoken. The effect is that combat can take up a lot of playtime relative to the non-combat role playing, while often also leading to less overall quest progress per time.

Re: Model-Based Testing for Dungeons & Dragons

#47

Post by Firfi »

anentropic wrote: post #10
Firfi wrote: post #2

Dungeons & Dragons rules are a spec spanning thousands of pages, not formalized, but thoroughly tested by the community. Moving them to a formal specification language (Quint) was an obvious next step. It worked and proved to also be a great LLM self-checker.

Fantastic, I'd been daydreaming about doing similar for a while! Do I understand correctly that the Quint code is not needed 'at runtime', that it's there for model-based testing of the XState implementation?

Right. Quint is not used in runtime and is not supposed to be. It's a strong testing layer. But there's much more to it. My bigger idea is that I would generate whatever implementation from it, hopefully, with an agentic loop - the MBT test is a natural feedback harness to leave coding overnight. So dnd-rust at some point, maybe? If someone develops a game, they would be able to generate a core logic in rust for bevy, in c# for unity, in (whatever it's used there) for godot. That's in an ideal world.

Re: Model-Based Testing for Dungeons & Dragons

#48

Post by WorldMaker »

cammasmith wrote: post #19

One of my biggest issues with playing DND is that I never fully understood the rules. I'd play with people who had been playing for years, and they didn't explain things very well, and that made it hard to play. Hopefully, this will help with that.

D&D is a bit like Monopoly in that very few people play by the rules as written and instead most tables play by a semi-unique/regional subset of the rules and with a mixture of house rules and DM preferences. Especially people who have been playing for years, not only have they had more time to house rule and build DM opinions, but they also may have seen multiple versions of the rules over that time and interacted with a wider variety of other tables.

To some extent, this is weirdly a good thing: if you want strictly enforced rules, you may just want to play a videogame instead. D&D succeeds best as a social lubricant enabling a framework in which social gaming (roleplaying) can happen to be "fun". Rarely is strictly following rules "fun", especially socially with friends; the rules in D&D are meant to be guideposts and tools for enough structure that people that want structure find comfort and enough flexibility that "fun" isn't lost in the process.

Which is a long way to say that you probably aren't going to learn the right lessons from a well fuzzed computer spec of the rules, you probably are going to learn more lessons asking the people you play with what rules they find important, to explain things you feel you don't understand, and to suggest which chapters in which books to try to read to best improve your understanding for that group. At the end of the day, if the table seems too hard to play at you might also just be playing with the wrong group, especially if you aren't having fun.

Re: Model-Based Testing for Dungeons & Dragons

#49

Post by ramses0 »

gglitch wrote: post #41
cammasmith wrote: post #19

One of my biggest issues with playing DND is that I never fully understood the rules. I'd play with people who had been playing for years, and they didn't explain things very well, and that made it hard to play. Hopefully, this will help with that.

There's a community and play-style called OSR or "old school renaissance," that recreates versions of the earliest editions of D&D, and encourage a style of play that's heavily oriented around few rules and the DM making quick decisions/rulings on the spot, rather than lots of rules and lots of time spent mining the rulebooks. In fact, the expression is "rulings over rules." This might appeal to you.

My old thief in high school: "I use my 'Appraisal' skill on the situation..." :-D

DM: "Umm... not very good..." (became a running joke)

Re: Model-Based Testing for Dungeons & Dragons

#50

Post by Firfi »

jaen wrote: post #9

Maybe the content is great, but the AI writing style is really grating with its staccato sentences and faux-"profoundness". Can't bear it any more, stopped reading. "You’re not checking logic. You’re checking shape.". Ugh.

Sorry for that, everyone. I did use the AI to help me with structure and English. I thought I'd proofread and edited that enough to be readable, but apparently it still smells. I'll update the wording soon.
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