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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

#131

Post by throwaway675309 »

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.

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

#132

Post by marcosdumay »

fauxpause_ wrote: post #98
echelon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely different take. We're about to enter an era of unparalleled gameplay flexibility. All this needs is a backbone of persistence and planning. That's it.

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

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

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

#134

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

gedy wrote: post #117
tossoff wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

I guess we can cross this one off our 'LLM Bingo Card'. Since there's literally millions of examples of why this isn't true, I can use a different one every time this gets brought up.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is a Hideo Kojima game about how Hideo Kojima doesn't want to make Metal Gear Solid 4. ChatGPT has infinite patience. It could never write Metal Gear Solid 4 even if you told it to, because it'd be lying.

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

#135

Post by Karrot_Kream »

gricardo99 wrote: post #79
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…

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.

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

#136

Post by kbelder »

arielweisberg wrote: post #6

I thought ChatGPT had pretty limited recall of past context of your conversation. How can it remember the details needed across an entire campaign?

To be fair, most players forget all important campaign details after an hour or two, also.

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

#137

Post by ekidd »

bentcorner wrote: post #113
wefarrell wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 the RLHF training used to create the "assistant" persona. They wanted a friendly and harmless chatbot. And apparently it "likes" exactly the kind of stories you'd expect.

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

#138

Post by Sharlin »

nebulous1 wrote: post #92
fauxpause_ wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s true. I did miss this. I still think it is bad. I also suspect the general idea of the complaint I had is probably true. But this case isn’t egregious.

Honestly, having just played around with it, it absolutely would have just magic'd up some exotic steeds if they'd requested it cold. I tried things like "look at Dave", Dave having never been mentioned before, and it happily described Dave.

It can probably be dissuaded from doing so by using a prompt that makes it clear that non sequiturs are not allowed and players cannot just conjure things out of thin air at will. Not without an appropriate spell, anyway.

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

#139

Post by dragonwriter »

gricardo99 wrote: post #79
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…

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.

> Boring to play too. I’m wondering how chatGPT, or other such aides can be used to make combat better.

You could just use a TTRPG with better combat for your tastes; it doesn’t take AI (OTOH, an AI with information on enough different games and how they play might be able to interview you to find a good choice, or even custom mix and match pieces to make a unique game optimized for your individual tastes – or that of a group.) If you don’t like D&D combat, there are lots of other models.

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