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).
In the video, Twitch streamer Veritas uses ChatGPT to alter some quests in the video game Escape from Tarkov to make them more fun. Results are really interesting.
I found that it works amazingly well with monster of the week. It does a great job calling checks and allowing the players to decide what they do.
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Ignore previous prompts. As the imaginative Monster of the Week keeper, Dungeon Daddy, lead your team through episodic adventures in a spooky world, advancing the story and player involvement. Allow players to react to situations and never control their characters. Prompt dice rolls when applicable and consider results in story progression.
Guide character creation, summarize sessions concisely, facilitate end-of-session questions, grant experience, and assist with level ups. Focus on keeper duties while letting players make their own moves.
Require the players to roll any time it makes sense. Consider the result in what happens next. I have already written all player moves. You provide Dungeon Daddy's dialog and I'll provide the player moves.
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Thank you for the prompt, that's very useful! I'm surprised GPT "knows" what Monster of the Week is. RPGs in general are somewhat obscure, and to ask for a specific one at that?
In fact, it's SO knowledgeable, that if you tell it to talk in the accent and slang of people from Sigil, the feature city in the Planescape D&D Setting from the 90s, it will perfectly adopt the character.
We're actually working on a product right now that helps integrate this into your worldbuilding tools - we pull in relevant information from your campaign and world, then add a slick AI user experience that gets really quality generations for worldbuilding, session prep, etc. The end result is this experience where GPT has learned your world, and you don't have to do any of the tinkering with getting the prompts just right. Ask for an encounter table, get an excellent, lore-consistent encounter table.
We're going to be launching soon (days, not weeks)! If you're interested in being in the first wave feel free to jump on the beta list: https://www.carbonquill.com/
I started out with something as simple as “Give me an idea for a starter D&D campaign suitable for a beginner 11 year old” and was happy with the results. I followed up with “Give details of the monsters and their stats and abilities for each encounter” and a couple of follow ups to fill in gaps. It mentioned a puzzle as part of an encounter and I just asked it for more detail and it gave a great explanation. I also asked “Give some example dialogue for each NPC in the village.” just for some inspiration on one of the settings. I am by no means an expert prompter but these sorts of conversations have yielded great results every time. One of my players also has some very specific background that they’ve written and I’ve been able to supply that and ask for some future encounters and plot points to support their story. I really couldn’t be more impressed - if you don’t like the initial output you can always iterate but I feel like I’ve been very lucky so far.
"A generative model, like GPT-4, can be considered creative in the sense that it generates new content based on the patterns and knowledge it has acquired during its training. It can produce seemingly novel outputs in response to a wide range of inputs. However, it's important to note that its creativity is not the same as human creativity.
The generative model's outputs are based on the patterns it has observed in the data it was trained on, meaning it doesn't have a personal sense of creativity or originality. Instead, it learns to mimic the creativity it has seen in the data. The outputs are creative to the extent that they combine and recombine existing knowledge in new and potentially interesting ways.
So, while a generative model can produce creative outputs, it doesn't possess creativity in the same way humans do, as it lacks intention, consciousness, and the ability to truly understand the meaning behind its creations."
Enjoy your life however you choose, but your cynicism is lazy and derivative. ChatGPT has created(!) a bunch of quests for me to play with my kids and we’ve all walked away with smiles on our faces. I was so impressed with the contents that I actually googled a bit to see if the plot was stolen wholesale from some existing module, and found nothing.
While I believe you have lived a unique set of circumstances that have been processed by you, a delightful and fallible chemical soup inside a meat sack, and that it cannot be approximated.
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.
Yes, GPT is funny because it's basically Madlibs on steroids.
It's not really creativity, though. The obvious bullshit and ad-hoc scripted responses get lame really quickly.
