I’ll start with a little bit of background. I moved to a different country just about two years ago and I have been slowly working on the language. I haven’t had many close friends who share similar interests with me. I also don’t care for the online games. Those reasons combined I haven’t played d&d in just about those two years.
Someone suggested ChatGPT to me for an unrelated reason. I was impressed and then I was suggested to try a text adventure with it. And to put it lightly I was a little bit blown away. I’ll admit, I even dropped a 20 to use the GPT-4. At this point, I think I have a mild addiction, as I’ve been spending a lot of my free time continuing our adventure.
But back to my original question. Have I just been this starved of role playing games that I think this is amazing? Or is it actually this good? What’s your opinion on these AI when it comes to RPGs?
You get to throw dice w/ a D&D ruleset, but it’s skyrim radiant quests forever. It’s just not the same IMO.
I will speak to my experiences with it.
I love solo roleplaying; I’ve been doing it for years. I was super excited with the advent of Dungeon AI, ChatGPT, NovelAI, and others. I have tried them all extensively. What I have found is that they are great sounding boards for generating ideas, descriptions, and even, sometimes, dialog.
However, AI is not quite ready to replace a DM. I’ve found that the stories it produces are very flat and repetitive. What’s more, they become very predictable once you realize that they act a bit like lucid dreams–it’s very easy to influence the story, even accidentally, by what you say.
Used in conjunction with a solo oracle, like Mythic GME, it can be a great asset.
I would never see it as a replacement, but if you are having a lot of fun with it, why does it matter? Do what brings you joy.
The social aspect for me is WAY too big a part of RPGs in general. LLMs don’t fulfill that at all for me. It is just a robot that knows what words goes in what order, there is no back an forth or creative creation between people with different life experiences or ideas of what “cool” or “interesting” is. Getting to chat with my friends and share in their creative space is so awesome. I am an online only player these days because it is the only way I can find time and connect with friends across borders - I don’t feel online detracts from the experience, sure it is different than in person, but once you have a good group it’s just a good time with friends.
Personally I have used LLMs as part of my GM prep. Mostly just to fill in things I don’t really care about (like a minor detail of colours of unimportant objects a module left out) or to bounce ideas off, and to do a BUNCH of text formatting for me. It is a great tool to kickstart the process but I find I always have to sit down and actually do the work myself in the end.
I can see how being alone in a new place where you don’t speak the language can very easily lead to an over reliance on good LLMs to take up some of that social space you might be used to. ChatGPT is an amazing thing, but we need to be aware for how and why we use it. Our monkey brains are easy to trick.
Totally agree with this. I think I’ve only tried ChatGTP 3.5, and perhaps 4.0 is better in this regard, but I noticed that it seemed pretty bad at coming up with original ideas. It could create usable scenarios, characters and dialogues for role playing, but everything felt very generic and stereotypical. IMO it was fun to play around with for a while, but I don’t think it could keep me entertained for a longer period.
I noticed that it seemed pretty bad at coming up with original ideas.
I mean yeah it is a language model that is trained on things other people write and learn what the next word should be from that (and some blackbox stuff). It’s fun to play around with for sure, but we as user need to be better at understand what the tech actually is rather than just pretend it is a Sci-fi AI… Because holy shit it is not, all that AI stuff is marketing and tech people trying to make us think it is just like in that movie we like or whatever… Why I try and be so hard about LLM as the term rather than AI.
It’s a bit scary how much some people trust the output from ChatGPT… I’ve seen people who have asked some technical Linux questions and copied the results to a terminal (or their GRUB config) without hesitation. I think they’re getting confused because it sounds so confident even if it’s just making stuff up.
As someone who loves homebrew stories with clever twists, “long term” hints for future plots and picking up ideas from the players to weave into the current story on the fly … it would not be the same for me. It might work well for generic solo play for a couple of evenings just to kill time, but I wouldn’t expect an AI to create something more elaborate than “go there, kill this, loot, XP, next quest”… and that’s a concept I usually find boring pretty fast.
That being said, if it brings you joy then there is no need to ask internet strangers for approval. Don’t let it sour your mood if others might or might not like the same things as you, and just enjoy what you enjoy ;) The world really doesn’t need any more gatekeeping.
There are plenty of solo resources available. All you need is an oracle and your imagination. You don’t need ChatGPT.
Try Cairn or white Box with OSR Solo.
You’ll thank me.
I’ve seen people successfully using ChatGPT in conjunction with solo resources as well. It seems like the main thing is you have to keep an eye on the details, as ChatGPT can play fast and loose with things it established before; similarly to how you have to factcheck any kind of summary you ask it for - it’s great at conversation and ideas, but internal consistency is still spotty.
