Comment by 2099miles

> This is so interesting that people want this

I love being a DM but it is no mystery to me. Being a DM is a lot of work. And occasionally, a lot of annoyance. You not only have to facilitate (and sometimes create from scratch) an engaging story that keeps people coming back, you have to wrangle busy schedules and personalities that is often annoying. Lots of times you'll have a bunch of people willing to play, but no one willing to DM. So to me it's not surprising at all, and I experimented with AI in running a game, and quickly concluded it could never be good at it because it's so insanely suggestible and has poor memory.

Two reasons:

1) "LLM DM" isn't merely mean substituting for human DM in a D&D session. The same capability can be used as a component in a video game, to breathe life into the game world, have it interactively react and evolve along with the player.

EDIT: Take a game like Rimworld, that relies on a scripted RNG dubbed a "storyteller", to decide what random events to hit you with and how hard. It's fun early on, but if you're into role-playing, you'll quickly realize there's no evolving story behind it, just stateless RNG. 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.

2) There are people like me, who would love to participate in an RPG session, but for various reasons never got invited to those when at school, and now, due to demands of parenthood, can't exactly make time to coordinate with the few people around who are still playing.

There are more, but those are the two that are apparent to me.

DMing is, in my opinion, very time consuming. Prepping an adventure, familiarizing yourself with the rules, trying to incorporate character backstory in to the narrative, all takes time. As someone that can only play D&D if I am DMing, because none of my friends have the desire or inclination to do so, I would be very happy to pay money for an LLM dungeon master that lets me just play the game without all the prep time. I just don't have 4 extra hours a week like I did in college.

> 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.

Sure.

There are two reason why I can think of someone making a Dungeon Master LLm.

One is that when there is no cake we eat bread.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a DM, and I love playing d&d with my friends. I totally agree with the sentiment you are sharing. But people who are willing, and able to DM for others are not evenly distributed. There is a lot more people who would like to play TTRPGs than people who is willing to step into the DM role.

So in that sense think of this as a substitutions for those games which would not happen otherwise, because they don't have a DM. Or the only person who would DM them is an ass. Or their DM has burnt out.

Is some game better than no game? Sometimes. Depends on how good that game is. And we won't know how good the substitute can be without trying. Heck maybe more people will play, and they will realise how easy is to DM actually.

The other reason is the sheer challenge of it. Dnd has a lot of rules. There are the obvious ones you can read in the book. But there are also un-written rules. Like object-permanence. If a goblin steals a diamond ring from us, and we slay them within minutes they damn well have the diamond ring on their bodies somewhere. If three displacer beasts ambush us and we slay 2 there damn well be 1 more accounted for in some sense.

There are also "story-writing" rules. If we went through hell and high-water to obtain an arrow of dragon slaying after the blacksmith told us about the legend of it, he better not just pull one out of his ass the next time we see him. If the whole lore of goddess X is that they are kind and caring then they should better be at least not cruel when we meet them. These are all hard for an LLM. They are also easy for a human to evaluate. Because we just feel when they are not right. Therefore it is a good challenge to evaluate how good we are at this "making a bucket of sand smart" task.

Consider video game RPGs. They're largely based upon D&D, yet they remove the dungeon master entirely. They are enormously more popular than D&D itself.

Now imagine something in between, where you have a video game, but the NPCs and parts of the story are controlled by an LLM. You can give the players much more freedom, and the creators don't have to write thousands of lines of dialog to account for every possible choice a player can make. The game doesn't have to be "on rails" so much, the LLM can help speed the story along when the player gets confused, and you can have NPCs with much more depth than just several lines of static dialog.

How well this will work in practice remains to be seen. In my experience, ChatGPT itself is a painfully generic DM that relies upon repetitive fantasy tropes. You still need an actual human being to create an interesting story and add depth to the world.

One of the growing trends these days is solitaire RPGs -- where people play alone as both player and Game/Dungeon Master. Typically this isn't done by AI but by rolling on various tables (sometimes called "GM Emulators"). Not everbody has the time or even enjoys the extrovert pressure of a traditional social RPG. A related concept is the "cooperative RPG" which does have multiple players but no DM so everyone can play.

Here's a list of some of the ones available (about 10 years old but it gives you the idea)

https://rpggeek.com/geeklist/181957/list-of-solitaire-soloab...

The modern thing to do would be to automate the game, watch the bots play each other, and make a reaction video for TikTok.

Try doing this while you're driving with the gpt4o advanced audio mode. It's a nice way to kill 40 minutes or so without having to look at a screen. Just tell it you want to play an RPG with it, give it a setting, describe your character and go. It'll mostly be more of a choose your own adventure than a real RPG, but it can sometimes be quite entertaining.

Agreed on DM making the experience special. The cognitive load on a DM is very high though. They have to digest information on the game setting and the monsters, synthesize scenes and react to players' interactions all the while staying true to the narrative. I think LLM's can play a big part in assisting human DMs by either providing low-fidelity ideas for "inspiraton", commonsense based on their training on D&D texts and literature or high fidelity text in some cases to be directly presented to the players.

I think it's more about the challenge/curiosity of creating the implementation. I'm not sure these AI driven text-RPGs will find long term audiences.

I am an “everything is custom tailored to my players” DM and I use LLMs quite a lot as an assistant. Speeding up prep time is always welcome. Using an LLM directly as a DM? Oh hell no.

Also, I ran a session over Zoom and their AI summary was so useful!

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.

This is nothing new. Bringing ideas from DND into video games is as old as video games themselves. In interviews, John Carmack talks often about how he used to play DND with his friends and then try to take that experience into the games he made. And it goes back even further than that - Rogue, the primogenitor of all roguelike games, was inspired by DND as well. I could find a bunch more examples, but you get the idea.

I largely see it as the digital next step up from something like the Mythic Game Master Emulator, which is popular for solo play and things like trying out new systems.

And there's quite a lot of us that like to play but because of life commitments, getting together with a group on a regular schedule is difficult.

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.

Some people don't have friends they can play with :sadge:

I was watching a video on YT, heard a cool song, tried to soundhound it, turns out it was an AI generated song, I felt like I was "owned" damn.

Preparing a campaign is an awful lot of work, which at least in my case is why my friend group almost never plays.

>This is so interesting that people want this.

Go outside. There's people for everything.

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!).

they think they want it -- that doesn't mean they will actually like it if they get it

I can totally see the appeal of using LLMs to _help_ the DM. Not to replace it.

I DM a few games of The Expanse, and using LLMs to plan ahead was a godsend. No, I didn't utilise it to write the story for me - instead I used it to test my planned story and see which way my players might strafe off the road, so I can plan for those. Basically simulated a game using an LLM that acted in place of multiple characters, allowed those to run free (within certain limits, obviously you can't have the LLM players do a dozen actions without the DM having a say), and essentially mapped the potential "off branches", story pathways I didn't plan for initially. This has allowed me to be prepared for the usual dumbass things players might do, such as heading for a strip club in the middle of a total disaster where they (figuratively) have dozens of arrows pointing to the goal of the chapter.

Another interesting aspect of using AI for TTRPGs is to create atmospherics. For Expanse based games, I've bought a number of tile packs and such, to appreciate the artists who put work into it, but I simply don't have the funds to commission a few dozen acrylic matte style scenery images (which I usually put up on my projector, combined with some Hue lights to create the visual atmosphere). With AI, I can even generate them on the fly, should my little gremlins stray off the path. Same for music - AI can incredibly easily generate an atmospheric soundtrack that fits the current scenery, with just a few words, while I can still pay attention to the players.

But fully replacing the DM? That's silly.

Just that finding a good DM is hard