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Comment by sterlind | Hacker News Reader

it's not erotic role-play, but I have a use case of making an AI-powered NetHack clone. specifically, to generate dungeon layouts, dialog for NPCs and to fill in the boatloads of minutae and interactions which NetHack is famous for.

you kind of need soul for that, and a lot of background knowledge on mythology/fantasy lore, but also tool use to work the world systems.

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I've been experimenting with using various LLMs as a game master for a Lovecraft-inspired role-playing game (not baked into an application, just text-based by prompting). While the LLMs can generate scenarios that fit the theme, they tend to be very generic. I've also noticed that the models are extremely susceptible to suggestion. For example, in one scenario, my investigator was in a bar, and when I commented to another patron, 'Hey, doesn't the barkeeper look a little strange?', the LLM immediately seized on that and turned the barkeeper into an evil, otherworldly creature. This behavior was consistent across all the models I tested. Maybe by prompting the LLM to fully plan the scenario in advance and then adhere to that plan would mitigate the behavior but I haven't tried it. It was just an experiment and I actually had a lot of fun with the behavior. Also the reactions of the LLM if the player does something really unexpected (e.g. "the investigator pulls a sausage out of his pocket and forcefully sticks it into the angry sailors mouth") are sometimes hillarious.

Have you used any thinking models? I remember being surprised by QwQ-32B when I tried it. It would think about what I said and how it should respond, reiterate the behaviors I had assigned to it, and respond accordingly. That constant self-reinforcement in the thinking phase seemed to keep it on track.

I might have tried DeepSeek-r1-8B in the past but I'll certainly try again. Good idea.

> on, 'Hey, doesn't the barkeeper look a little strange?', the LLM immediately seized on that and turned the barkeeper into an evil, otherworldly creature.

Though making it an evil otherwordly creature is a bit extreme, it's at least similar to what a flexible GM can do. In my DMing days, I would often develop new paths that integrated into the whole inspired by things my players noticed/suspected.

In my GM days, I had a lot of trouble with players that tried really their best to completely leave the path I prepared for them.

You are right though and it's not that I completely dislike the LLMs "flexibilty" and openness to suggestions. However, it's also super easy to use it for "cheating". E.g. it generated a scenario with an evil entity about to attack me and some friendly NPC and I could "solve" that problem by telling the NPC "remember the device I gave you last week and told you to always keep on hand? pull the trigger now!" (that never happend, at least to the LLMs knowledge) and the LLM made up some device that shot a beam of magic light at the creature and stopped it.

Are you getting good results with this? Some time ago I build an "overworld simulator" by having a bunch if jsons that represented villages, characters, building, story hooks and plots. I just asked ChatGPT to "simulate the gameworld by a week".

Technically this worked great, but everything was somewhat bland and generic.

Noteable not-highlights: - there is a shimmer in the nearby forests that keep villagers up at night -> it's an orc camp - there is a mysterious figure in town -> it's a Aragon type ranger

Might be fixable with promoting and/or a much lower temperature?

I've had some success in letting it generate lists of things at high temperature and picking the last item in the list.

Ask some model to generate a number uniformly between 0 and 100; you get 47 a lot. Or 27. Something like that.

Ask it for a list of numbers, uniformly distributed, and it also often starts with the same number. However later elements in the sequence will converge (imperfectly) to a better approximation of uniformity.

The same for names of the dwarves and paladins in your party.

token entanglement is an interesting emergent behaviour https://owls.baulab.info/

I have been using one model to generate piles of random-adjective tables, then use real live randomness to select a bunch of traits to feed to the model doing character generation. It's instructed that it can take or leave individual traits.

I get brilliant, vibrant worlds withots of things happening and the consistent characters with Deepseek V3 (and R1 summaries every so often).

From time to time I get the event so great and character so compelling, I save the best in Author Note or Lorebook.

The overall atmosphere is effortlessly somewhat Skyrim/Game of Thrones/World of Darkness adjacent.

I'd look for these two models to build this simulator of yours, ie R1 to plan and V3 to fill in the blanks. Oh, or maybe Google Gemini 2.5 or 2.0 to plan the story and DeepSeek V3 to fill in.

Are you writing or sharing this work anywhere? I would love to read more about your approach.

Hey, I am sorry but no, I don't publish anything, but if you have any experience with Silly Tavern, I use Cherrybox preset (works fantastic with NSFW toggle off) and DeepSeek mostly. If you don't, this is where you start.

Other than that I don't do anything special compared to what other people share on aicg or reddit, etc. Just best practices :) (summaries, good OOC, temperature/top k/top p depending on the model).

Hmmm, maybe spending a lot of time on building interesting, deep, rich persona with deep links to the world (scenario card). 100-300 tokens. There are cards helping in building persona ("Persona Builder" from chub works great). Make it succinct.

I've found myself giggle for hours from the shenanigans of NPCs with my sidekick or just save in the journal best fragments of the gorgeous mental pictures it painted with words.

So at the end the name of the card that works best for me so far: it's called "Loraheim" (also on chub) but from my limited experience good model (DeepSeek V3/R1) + good preset + good persona + passable character will make a great adventure (I've just started a dramatic space opera from the fairly boring "you wake up in the alien dome/zoo").

It can be a great fun, try it :)

Where do you get started with something like this? Sounds like a fun project

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