The Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D • Hacker News Board

Re: The Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D

#81

Post by RugnirViking » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 7:05 PM UTC

DonaldFisk wrote: post #64

Not Dungeons and Dragons, but Doug Lenat's Eurisko entered fleets for the role-playing game Traveller Adventure 5: Trillion Credit Squadron. It won the 1981 and 1982 championships. Eurisko was GOFAI, written in RLL, a frame-based language implemented in Lisp. https://aliciapatterson.org/stories/eurisko-computer-mind-it...

To be fair, that AI seems to have essentially solved a complex spreadsheet-type optimisation challenge rather than anything with an open-ended narrative. Nonetheless, it is a very interesting story

Re: The Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D

#82

Post by smush » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 8:26 PM UTC

v01dlight wrote: post #56

v01dlight wrote: post #46

A huge part of the charm of TTRPGs is playing a non-digital game face to face with other humans. Even if we had AI that was as entertaining as a skilled human DM (unlikely to be possible IMHO), the human might end up being preferable since hanging out with humans is one of the goals of this particular pursuit. Plus, we already have (weak) AI DMs. They're called video game RPGs. You're the player (as are many others i…

There's no end of people making video games that are direct attempts to convert D&D to a digital format. Take the new Baldur's Gate for example[0]. All the same spells present, digital dice rolling, etc. Personally, I say let things fall to the medium that best suits them. If D&D is sufficiently complicated rules wise that it is actually more fun to have software take care of that so you can just focus on the tactica…

> If D&D is sufficiently complicated rules wise that it is actually more fun to have software take care of that so you can just focus on the tactical combat and scripted story choices, then the video game is probably your best bet!

No kidding. I've been writing a WinForms program that is basically a combination character progression tracking, inventory management and basic battle system for Star Wars Fantasy Flight Games.

Why? Do we not want the person-to-person experience? Hardly! We need more wetware space for strategy and thinking of creative ideas, so we need to free up the parts for calculating what number of ability vs proficiency dice and what talents may mess with the roll etc.

Re: The Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D

#83

Post by ajuc » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 9:55 PM UTC

RugnirViking wrote: post #80

ajuc wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ways to play traditional pen and paper rpg over internet now (roll20 for example), and it's actually better than playing them physically in many respects - the system draws the map, allows moving the tokens zooming and scrolling, calculates the distances, shows the fog of war, throws dices and includes bonuses in the rolls. After initial setup it makes it much easier for GM and players because you don't nee…

Roll20 even for what is presumably the best-supported game (DND 5e) has completely unuably broken UI. Something as simple as equipping a piece of armour is an excersise in trying 5 different things, let alone trying to wrangle magical items into the system or get the hp bar to be accruate which almost never works. It takes far longer to teach somebody to use the character sheet system than it does to teach them liter…

Well, it works pretty well for me, haven't had any serious problems DMing for 5 people 3 of which were complete newbies with d&d and roll20. Maybe because my players are mostly programmers. Or because I had to use roll20 because I don't have people to play with locally so I learnt both roll20 and d&d 5 at the same time.

> Something as simple as equipping a piece of armour is an excersise in trying 5 different things

You just drag&drop it from compendium to your inventory?