Comment by short_sells_poo

I find this idea fascinating, and I think a lot of very interesting emergent behavior can be added to video games by having something like an LLM act as a Dungeon Master. Rather than having to pre-program a bunch of choices that the player is allowed to pick between, have an AI model evolve the story and just move the pieces on the story board based on what the player actually does. Story driven games these days are still very much railroaded. They are like interactive movies. The player has very limited agency. They can't really pick any choice which the designers haven't thought to implement upfront.

At the same time, I'm personally not super enthusiastic about using LLMs for a pen and paper game. Let's assume for a moment that we have free will, then the most fun aspect of PnP dungeon mastering is the fact that the DM has agency. It adds an (IMO) very fun mini-game where the players try to get away with as much shenanigans as they can, and the DMs job is to try to thwart these shenanigans in the most entertaining ways possible. The keyword is on "try" - the GM has to put entertaining obstacles in front of the players to keep the game fun, but ultimately the players should have an avenue of success. Even if they don't always succeed, they need to succeed enough and when they fail they need to feel that it was fair.

I feel that with an AI DM, this goes out the window. At least with the current crop of AI, I would never feel that I'm facing an agent with it's own free will, rather just a machine. As such, it cannot replace a human DM for the PnP purposes.