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.
I will run Toon, Call of Cthulhu or Paranoia any day, the latter without a scenario as I can kill off their all their clones in my very dangerous Alpha Complex and have them rolling on the floor laughing the whole time with a help of a stack of prerolled character sheets and some random encounter tables. (I'd expect an LLM to be able to do the same)
Contrast that to the famous Bloodstone campaign which is the pinnacle of D&D scenarios but can't really be challenging to the players because players have to win over and over again if you're going to use most of the material.
There are numerous tactics that work to face the "not serious" problems you have in a game for "young adults".
For instance, serious players get resentful when somebody not serious comes in late, forgets their character sheet, etc. You could lose either or both of them, but with a little prep you don't have to. In Paranoia it's easy to shove a preroll into their hands, give them a 1-2 minute briefing from "The Computer" and build up tension around this character who mysteriously appears (and if the new player complains that they don't know the rules tell them they're not allowed to know the rules!)
Toon is the epitome of "not serious" and, like the other two games I've mentioned, is a game where you can buy one book and have everything you need, including your first scenario.
However I also agree with you that being a DM is a prohibitive amount of work for someone, say, with kids and a job. It would be awesome to have an LLM as an assistant, maybe feeding in parts of the story and querying it for ideas when you're in a bind. But having it run as a full DM, at least right now, will likely lead to a boring experience.
I would love to have an AI as an assistant Dungeon Master (or game master, or Keeper, or what have you). That is, one person in a group of players maintains the role of a master storyteller, but the AI is ready to fill in details or suggest ways to get the players back on track. This would probably be tedious if you're interacting with the LLM entirely through text, and having to manually keep it up to date with the story. But it could work well if you have a model that understands spoken language listening in on the game and generating cool images and making private suggestions to the game master.
As a player and very occasional DM myself, filling in details and trying to get players back on track is where is the fun and challenge. AI could definitely be useful to handle all the paperwork (fight resolution and so on) though
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.
No it's not. I don't think you're going to find an LLM with a large enough context window to have a meaningfully involving story spanning multiple sessions.
An LLM isn't going to craft a story element tailored to a character, or more importantly, an individual player. It's not going to understand Sam couldn't make last week's session. An LLM also doesn't really understand the game rules and isn't going to be able to adjudicate house rules based on fun factor.
LLMs can be great tools for gaming but I think their value as a game master is limited. They'll be no better a game master than a MadLibs book.
Rimworld is a great universe where we think about characters' stories, and there's really just like, a couple dozen attributes and straightforward ways they interact with the game.
An LLM context window could easily have 20 times as much interpersonal state, and make it interact in much more unexpected (but plausible) ways. That's going to be a surprising and rewarding gaming experience once someone figures it out.
I have a feeling people imagine LLMs as end-to-end DMs that should somehow remember everything and do everything in one inference round. That's not what they are. They're building blocks. They're to be chained and mixed with classical flow control, algorithms, and data storage (as well as the whole interactive game mechanics, in videogame context).
Sure you will.
> An LLM isn't going to craft a story element tailored to a character, or more importantly, an individual player.
Sure it is.
> An LLM also doesn't really understand the game rules and isn't going to be able to adjudicate house rules based on fun factor.
Sure it will.
You need to use the tools for their purpose, not for the opposite of it. LLMs have finite context, you need to manage it. LLMs don't have a built-in loop, you need to supply it.
Character stats, names, details about players - those are inputs, and structured ones at that. LLMs shouldn't store them - that's what storage media are for, whether in-memory or a database or a piece of paper. Nor should they manipulate them directly - that's what game systems are for, whether implemented in code or in a rulebook run on a human DM. LLMs are to make decisions - local, intuitive decisions, based on what is in their context. That could be deciding what a character says in a given situation. Or how to continue the story based on worldbuilding database. Or how to update the worldbuilding database based on what it just added to the story. Etc.
Some details about players are structured and can be easily stored and referenced. Some aren't. Consider a character who, through emergent gameplay, develops a slight bias against kobolds; who's going to pick up on that and store it in a database (and at what point)? What if a player extemporaneously gives a monologue about their grief at losing a parent? Will the entire story be stored? Will it be processed into structured chunks to be referenced later? Will the LLM just shove "lost a father" into a database?
Given current limitations I don't see how you design a system that won't forget important details, particularly across many sessions.
LLM might, if prompted to look at it, or if there was a defining moment that could invoke such change. It won't pick on a very subtle change, but then most people reading a story wouldn't either - this is more of the kind of stuff fans read into a story when trying to patch potential continuity issues.
> What if a player extemporaneously gives a monologue about their grief at losing a parent? Will the entire story be stored? Will it be processed into structured chunks to be referenced later? Will the LLM just shove "lost a father" into a database?
The scale depends on the design, but I'd say yes, shoving "lost a father" into a database so it pops up in context is a good first step, the next step would be to ensure the entry looks more like "mentioned they continue to grieve after loss of their father <time ago>", followed by a single-sentence summary of their monologue.
Personally, I had some degree of success with configuring LLM (Claude 3.5 Sonnet) for advising on some personal topics across multiple conversations - the system prompt contains notes in <user_background> and <user_goals> tag-delimited blocks, and instructions to monitor the conversation for important information relevant to those notes, and, if found, to adjust those notes accordingly (achieved by having it emit updates in another magic tag, and me manually apply them to the system prompt).
> Given current limitations I don't see how you design a system that won't forget important details, particularly across many sessions.
It's not possible. Fortunately, it's not needed. Humans forget important details all the time, too - but this is fine, because in storytelling, the audience is only aware of the paths you took, not of the countless other possibilities you missed or decided not to take. Same with LLMs (and larger systems using LLMs as components) - as long as they keep track of some details, and don't miss the biggest, most important ones, they'll do the job just fine.
(And if they miss some trivia you actually care about, I can imagine a system in which you could ask about it, and it'll do what the writers and fans always do - retcon the story on the fly.)
First, you don't need much of any context window because you can finetune the LLM. Don't mistake specific engineering choices and tradeoffs and deployment convenience for intrinsic limitations of the technology.
Second, LLMs like Gemini now have context windows of millions of tokens, corresponding to millions of words. Seems like enough for 'multiple sessions'.
> An LLM isn't going to craft a story element tailored to a character, or more importantly, an individual player. It's not going to understand Sam couldn't make last week's session. An LLM also doesn't really understand the game rules and isn't going to be able to adjudicate house rules based on fun factor.
An LLM can do all of that, and you definitely do not know that they can't.
> They'll be no better a game master than a MadLibs book.
They've been better than a Madlibs book since AI Dungeon 1 which was like 6 years ago.
You don't need to provide every single previous information to llm, use LLM to summarise previous ones and it gets really compact. It works quite well.
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.
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.
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...
I grew up with “choose your own adventure” books which were like a solo adventure: (If you go on the north road turn to page 34 if you follow the river page 57)
Many board games now have a solo mode with an automated player with tables and dice to help randomness.
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3238902/what-is-the-best-so...
Obviously there are adventure video games. Some of the new ones often have interesting back stories, really amazing world building and dnd like adventures. Horizon zero dawn, the Witcher, Star Wars outlaws among many others. “baldurs gate” really gave me dnd vibes (I played through that one multiplayer).
Citation needed.
> A purely AI generated or controlled world would have no constraints
That's a shitty AI then. Make a better one. I can play 2000 Vampire: The Masquerade games with 2000 different groups. They will each be different, but they will also be each distinctly Vampire: The Masquerade ttrpg games. If the AI you are thinking about can't do the same, then think of a better AI.
> at least with current technology.
Well. Who is the group who will make the "next technology"? Should we work on that, or just lay down on the ground and wait for it to fall from the sky? Testing what are the limits of the current technology (as done in the paper we are talking about here) is the way to get there. Or at least to systematically answer the question of where and what are we lacking.
Lol, a citation of what? This is my opinion statement and the rest of my post follows it.
> That's a shitty AI then. Make a better one. I can play 2000 Vampire: The Masquerade games with 2000 different groups. They will each be different, but they will also be each distinctly Vampire: The Masquerade ttrpg games. If the AI you are thinking about can't do the same, then think of a better AI.
Sure, I'll get right on that.
> Well. Who is the group who will make the "next technology"? Should we work on that, or just lay down on the ground and wait for it to fall from the sky? Testing what are the limits of the current technology (as done in the paper we are talking about here) is the way to get there. Or at least to systematically answer the question of where and what are we lacking.
I'm really unsure of what or who you are addressing here but it certainly isn't anything I've written in my post.
Citation that nobody wants what you described? The sentence which I was quoting.
> This is my opinion statement
Your opinon can be that "I don't want this." "nobody wants this" is refers to things outside of your head. Do you see the difference between the two?
> it certainly isn't anything I've written in my post.
Your post is suffused with defeatism. The 3 "no"s it contains are: "nobody wants this", "with current technology this cannot be fun" and an implicit "we can't make the next technology". I believe each of those are wrong, and I'm calling you out on the attitude.
Happily. I know you are wrong on the "nobody wants this" statement because I want it. With a sweeping generic statement like "nobody wants this" a single example is enough to disprove it. There you have it.
> what advances are being made in AI technology in this gaming that lends you such confidence?
There is a ton of experimenting going on. AI Dungeon and Deep Realms are the two obvious ones. I don't think anyone has found the golden solution yet, but that is also not evidence that no such thing exists.
Now it's true that, with the current crop of LLMs, a persistent enough player would always be able to break through them. But if it takes conscious and deliberate effort, I think it's reasonable to say that whatever experience the person gets as a result, they were asking for it.
Totally this, at least for me, in some circumstances.
TOU's be damned, I've written bots for some online games I've played, not because I want the XP or money or whatever that the bot could do without me working for it, but rather because I found writing the bots fun and engaging.
Before anyone gets in an uproar, I didn't sell them, nor any of the in-game resources gained from them. I was watching them basically all the time, because that's what I was there for - to see my creation work. And I purposely didn't interfere with other "real" players.
Also, I ran a session over Zoom and their AI summary was so useful!
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.
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.
Most likely use of this is that a DM runs it, and overrules/augments its output when necessary/as they see fit.
Go outside. There's people for everything.
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!).
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.