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Comment by dreen | Hacker News Reader

Of course the article is actually about writing a digital DM not a player. But isn't the main problem with this defining win conditions? Pretty easy to define win condition for chess or go.

Now, I haven't really played DnD (much to my sadness), but how do you win?

edit: I know the answer but I'm making a point with my question

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Every d&d game i've played tends to end either with the players becoming godlike and destroying the world, more often everybody dying, or everyone getting bored or busy in life and just stopping.

>but how do you win?

When you've provided a fun and engaging experience for your players?

I do mean this seriously. Being a DM is about making sure the players are having fun and always giving players something interesting to do. It shouldn't be too easy or too hard. The things should have some variety, you have to be able to adapt to what your players decide to do. Just because you have some cool stuff planned doesn't mean they'll find it, you can guide them a bit, but don't funnel them and accept they may not see your cool stuff, you can always save it for another time.

I guess my point is, keeping player fun and engagement high while allowing the game to run its natural course would be what I would think of as the win condition for a dm. Finding a way to measure this and provide this seems like a fairly difficult task though.

This is kind of the point I was making with my question. Playing DnD is not about winning. Being a DM is not about reaching some sort of conclusion. So it's essentially impossible to make an AI good at this without achieving true general AI (not within our lifetime for sure)

True, but I can imagine a world where AI DMs are in vogue, and are curated not for their one-size-fits-all perfection, but for their aesthetic or functional qualities. The hardest thing to capture will be truly surprising off-screen storytelling moments that role playing games enable. Otherwise, you can probably optimize for 'challenging combat,' 'fun puzzles,' 'social interaction' etc...

Have a hard-nosed, Old School Revival (OSR) group who enjoys hack and slash dungeon crawls? Great, all you need is an AI who picks hard but fair challenges, describes dire and interesting settings, and keeps rewarding moments (in this case, hard-fought victories) coming frequently.

Like to tell stories instead? Seed a plot with a laid-back AI who leaves lots of room to breathe, throws lots of skill checks at crafty players, and excels at creating complex personalities and interactions via a cast of interesting NPCs.

Rimworld is an simulation/tactics/base-building game that offers more traditionally game oriented "AI Directors," but the different kinds of directors offer different prioritization over moments of peace, intense challenge, battle, etc., based on just a few settings. Even blowing out that settings list a bit more could create interesting results.

interesting, i didnt know about that setting in rimworld. the game has been high on my list due to the fact ive had much FUN with DF, so im gonna bring rimworld up on that list!

Now is the perfect time! Rimworld just got a gigantic (free) 1.1 update and a smaller (paid) DLC to go with it.

Rimworld is like 2d dwarf fortress, but way more accessible. The controls make sense, and the game teaches you as you play. Also Rimworld has about 3 and a half metric tons of mods.

I first saw RimWorld while chilling in a hotel room watching YouTube a while back, and I bought it back while it was still in early access. Tynan has done a phenomenal job making the game go from good to fantastic.

IMHO one of the hardest parts of DMing is building tension and a sense that there is real danger, without just bringing out enemies that can completely roll over the players. Ideally the group should survive, but constantly feel threatened and like they "just barely" made it through a story's climax.

In other words those victories need to be earned, which is a fine balancing act since dice rolls are random and bad things happen.

It can also lead to awesome situations when the dice go extremely well, everything lines up, and the players feel like legit bad-asses. It is the DM's job to create situations where that can happen!

I still remember a friend of mine telling me that he had been genuinely scared at one point in an adventure. Like watching-a-horror-movie scared.

(A flying castle attacks the city; it's made to crash; someone has to go in there and find out what's up; cue our heros; they enter through a breach in the wall into a kind of internal moat; it's dark, you're up to your waist in water, and there's something in here with you! (Water Weirds. Damn near invisible snake-like water elementals...) Good times!)

My best horror dungeon so far was a 3-level abandoned dwarven mine. 2 first levels are infested with kobolds and pseudodragons, players kill some kobolds, block off some others with explosions, solve puzzles to get through blocked lift to the last level and see that it was blocked from inside on purpose, there are dwarven runes on the walls written with blood warning not to speak to each other and not to read anything or you'll get infected by HIM.

I borrowed it from SCP series - it's a "memetic hazard" - nonmagically infects brains when it's thought of or spoken of. Mechanically players roll a Wisdom save whenever there's infection opportunity, on a fail they start shouting the meme (then others have to roll :)), on a bad fail they become possesed and run somewhere. You of course don't explain it to the players, just ask them to roll when needed :)

As they explore searching for the artifact they were hired to recover they find the whole mine is full of dead bodies calmly sitting in circles, pools of dried blood, all the books are burned and there are bodies of dwarves who were fighting each other before they died. Then there's the last room with a huge portal that starts to activate when players who got possesed run into it.

The climax is a big pvp fight between the players that try to teleport to their new god and the rest of the party trying to knock them unconscious and drag them away before the portal activates :)

What is "SCP"?

A genre of web fiction with scary x-files like stories.

Great source of ideas for scary monsters/dungeons/villans/legends after reskinning from modern times to whatever setting you need.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation

That sounds great! The guys I was DM'ing for wouldn't have fallen for it though: they had a knack for confounding your best laid plans. E.g. they would have just read the warnings and bugged out. Or forced captured kobolds to go in first or something.

Later on in the wrecked flying castle there was a room with a clockwork horror in it that I was sure would give them a hard time. They trapped it in a chest right off and ran away before it broke out.

Another time I had a classic dungeon set up for them complete with a lich. They woke up the lich... and ran away. Like all the way out of the dungeon and then halfway across the freaking continent. They just left it for someone else to deal with.

Unrelated story time...

In another campaign one player had this dwarf fighter and he had rules-lawyered and finagled to get him specialized with two axes and multiple attacks per round. Three with the right and two with the left, five attacks per round. We nicknamed him "the Blender" because he could just chop the shit out of anything. He was stupid and reckless, a follower of the great god of war VTRE (Victory Through Reckless Endangerment!) and he was awesome.

This was a Spelljammer campaign (am I the only one who loved/loves Spelljammer!? It was so much fun) and one battle in particular they were fighting a ship of mindflayers. Scary right? The Blender jumps on a loaded ballista and tells the crew to launch him at the Illithid ship. He crashes into the deck, bounces up, grabs his axes from his belt, and proceeds to straight butcher the mindflayers. I forget the details but it was one of those times that the whole table is howling, the dice are hot, and it's just unbelievable but so fun no one cares.

I'll usually fudge at least a few dice rolls as a DM depending on how the game or encounter's going as the situation requires. If I roll a bunch of crits in a row for example, i'll maybe just call it one instead a bunch, maybe that wasn't a one hit kill when it should have been, stuff like that. If it's too random it usually stops being fun for everyone. It's a really hard balance though you don't want the players to be frustrated, but you don't want them to feel like their cheesing through the game.

For dungeons at least i try to go for that nethack or metroidvania vibe of slowly going deeper while your supplies and health dwindle, so each encounter needs to be considered more as they get deeper.

Above world adventures I try and let them be more free in their decisions but keep the consequences a bit higher for things.

I've yet to play any computer or console rpgs that really come close to the feeling of playing a good d&d game, even the ones that heavily use the rules. Nwn online came close, but those typically had human DMS the single player game was fun, but even on coop, still wasn't really like playing dnd without a DM player.

I remember one looking through the rule book for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG which had an interesting concept: players had a certain number of "plot points" (I forget exactly what they called them) which allowed them to overturn an unfortunate die roll. It was based on the idea that in the TV show, the main characters would often manage to get out of a tight spot through well-timed luck.

Tabletop RPGs are a broad range of activities stretching from the more traditionally game-like ones that are or are very close to tabletop wargaming, where stories may be involved but it's recognizably game-like with winners and losers (though "winner" and "loser" may still be a bit subjective or muddled, in much the same way it can be in, say, a battle in an actual war) to, at the other end, games that are lightly-structured collaborative storytelling activities.

So, what "winning" looks like depends on the group and the game. Having one's character die may feel a lot like losing at one table, but just another part of the story at another, meaningful, maybe, but not a "loss" any more than passing GO and collecting $200 is losing—roll up another character, the story goes on, and we've closed a meaningful chapter in it.

At most tables, I think, the rules basically exist just to give structure and fair-feeling challenge to an extended session of play-pretend.

I wouldn't call it a win condition but an attention metric would be a good start. You want your players to get engaged, aka. "have fun".

And come to think of it, it is not so different from ads and it is a bit scary. An AI able to provide an exciting game of DnD is going to use a lot of psychological manipulation, which is great when playing a game, much less so if you someone is pushing an agenda.

BTW, I know more about video games than tabletop RPGs but let me tell you that video games manipulate you constantly, for your pleasure. Illusion of choice, random numbers biased in your favor, the last bit of life that is worth a lot more than the rest, enemies you don't see that are slowed down, there are lots and lots of these. And these are just the tricks that make the game more enjoyable, not the dark patterns of games with in-app purchases.

It's even more nuanced than that, the DM <-> Players relationship is one where nobody really wants to "win". The ideal play is a session where the players are pushed to their limits, maybe one of the PCs dies (and maybe as the DM you send them on another quest then if they decide as a group they want to try and get that PC resurrected).

Building a AI DM that can follow a scripted pre-written dungeon would still be a challenge, building an AI that can understand how the players are experiencing the gaming session to know if they want things moving faster, or they want more elaboration, or more unexpected experiences... you're really getting to the point of Ava (Ex Machina) and even beyond Data (Star Trek).

What you do when one of your players' characters bites it is you roll a bunch of dice and look very busy for a few seconds leafing through rulebooks and thumbing through tables, then announce that the spirit of the dead character has ended up occupying the body of one of the enemies they're fighting (the more disgusting and embarassing, the better) through some kind of magical confluence, perhaps as the result of the actions of another character (preferrably of the caster/ invoker persuasion).

Even better, you _hide_ from your players the fact that the player's character has died (according to the dice) and instead present the possession event as the result of the other players' actions. "You cast the spell but it rebounds on the Dark Cauldron and pushes Janice's spirit through her body and into the body of the Goblin Scroll Carrier, narrowly missing the Goblin Shaman standing in front of him (or is it her?). Janice- you suddendly find yourself looking at your spasming body on the floor. You feel something sticking up your nose. You realise with horror that it's not your nose, it's the goblin caddy's nose and that thing sticking up it is his finger. Actually, it's now your finger. You're now a goblin."

Then you send the players on a quest alright- a quest to find a McGuffin that can reverse the situtation and put the PC's spirit back into her original body.

The point of course is that you don't have to kill off the character completely, so you avoid all the delay caused by the character's player having to roll a new one while the others are fighting and you avoid the awkward situation where the player ends up having to choose between the character that died and the new character (at the point where the old one can be resurrected).

I'm pretty sure that it should be perfectly possible to teach a neural net to do that.

(No, I'm taking the piss- there's no way you can teach a neural net that).

[Edit: all that goblin body swap stuff works a lot better if the PC was a paladin and if they were the character of a player who tends to play paladins and knights and whatnot. MWAHAHAHAHAH! Try teaching _that_ to a neural net.]

> how do you win?

By spending quality time with your friends and having a lot of fun imagining an epic quest?

I don't have a link or reference handy but your question reminded me of an old cybernetic device that improvised music along with human musicians. It could detect and respond to novelty in the human music, and it would get "bored" so to play along with it the humans had to figure out novel musical, uh, stuff... melodies and whatnot.

There seems like a vast difference between music and D&D stories/games, but just yesterday there was that RNN-sci-fi-editor experiment on here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22427958 ) so maybe it's not as far-fetched?

In any event, being a good DM is really really fun, I don't think I'd want to let a computer muscle in on it, eh?

You win when you have fun and get invited back.

If the goal of a DM is defined like this, then a genuine AGI would be more likely to cheat: instead of playing D&D at all, the AGI would use hypnosis to manipulate the players into a pure hedonistic pleasure-trance. Whether such an unintended result would be a good thing or a bad thing is a philosophical question, but it certainly wouldn't be an accurate imitation of a human D&D session.

Since some say, "No DnD is better than bad DnD," an AI might seriously consider a 'Wargames' scenario if players are hellacious enough...

I think one can argue that people have been playing role playing games GM'd by computers for going on 40 years now. Going back to the gold box games in the literal sense, but almost all video games are essentially dungeons and dragons under the hood -- hitpoints, encounters, npcs, etc.

> hitpoints, encounters, npcs, etc.

Those are the rules, not the game.

You don't need win condition. Tetris has no win condition yet it's easily trainable. You want some kind of feedback, and human players can just have a 2 buttons in the interface - "Good DM" and "Bad DM".

> writing a digital DM

Turing's DM as it were

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