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RPG Evolution: The AI DM in Action

How might WOTC launch an AI-powered DM assistant?

How might WOTC launch an AI-powered DM assistant?

technology-4256272_1280.jpg

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

We know Wizards of the Coast is tinkering with Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered tools for its multiple properties, including Dungeons & Dragons. But what might that look like in practice?

Interactive NPCs​

Large Language Model (LLM) AIs have been used extensively to create non-player characters of all stripes on Character.AI. It's not a stretch to imagine that Wizards might have official NPCs included as part of the digital purchase of an adventure, with the rough outline of the NPC acting as parameters for how it would interact. DMs might be able to create their own or modify existing NPCs so that the character drops hints or communicates in a certain way. Log outputs could then be available for DMs to use later.

There are several places today where you can create NPC bots powered by AI that are publicly available, although the DM might need to monitor the output in real time to record the conversation. Character.AI and Poe.com both provide the ability to create publicly available characters that players can interact with .

Random Generators​

There are already dozens of these in existence. What's particularly of note is that AI can go deep -- not just randomize what book is in a library, but provide snippets of text of what's in that book. Not just detail the name of a forgotten magic item, but provide stats for the item. For WOTC products, this could easily cover details that no print product can possibly encompass in detail, or with parameters (for example, only a library with books on necromancy).

AI RPG companion is a great example of this, but there are many more.

Tabletop Assistants​

Hasbro recently partnered with Xplored, with the goal of developing a "new tabletop platform that integrates digital and physical play." Of particular note is how Xplore's technology works: its system "intelligently resolves rules and character behaviors, and provides innovative gameplay, new scenarios and ever-changing storytelling events. The technology allows players to learn by playing with no rulebook needed, save games to resume later, enables remote gameplay, and offers features like immersive contextual sound and connected dice."

If that sounds like it could be used to enhance an in-person Dungeons & Dragons game, Xplored is already on that path with Teburu, a digital board game platform that uses "smart-sensing technology, AI, and dynamic multimedia." Xplored's AI platform could keep track of miniatures on a table, dice rolls, and even the status of your character sheet, all managed invisibly and remotely by an AI behind the scenes and communicating with the (human) DM.

Dungeon Master​

And then there's the most challenging aspect of play that WOTC struggles with to this day: having enough Dungeon Masters to support a group. Wizards could exclusively license these automated DMs, who would have all the materials necessary to run a game. Some adventures would be easier for an AI DM to run than others -- straightforward dungeon crawls necessarily limit player agency and ensure the AI can run it within parameters, while a social setting could easily confuse it.

Developers are already pushing this model with various levels of success. For an example, see AI Realm.

What's Next?​

If Hasbro's current CEO and former WOTC CEO Chris Cocks is serious about AI, this is just a hint at what's possible. If the past battles over virtual tabletops are any indication, WOTC will likely take a twofold approach: ensure it's AI is well-versed in how it engages with adventures, and defend its branded properties against rival AI platforms that do the same thing. As Cocks pointed out in a recent interview, WOTC's advantage isn't in the technology itself but in its licenses, and it will likely all have a home on D&D Beyond. Get ready!
 
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Michael Tresca
talien

Michael Tresca

Mike "Talien" Tresca is the managing editor of the EN World Columnists Program, author of The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games, releases daily game-related content on his Patreon, and has over 50 D&D 5E products for sale on DriveThruRPG. He is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to http://amazon.com. If you like what we do here at EN World please consider supporting our Patreon.
Distracted DM

Distracted DM

Distracted DM
Supporter
Thomas Shey said:
I've got to say if you think all current AI art looks "absolutely terrible", your standards are either exceedingly high, or you're going in with such an expectation it ll be you're projecting on it. Art AIs can produce too wide a variety of work for that to otherwise make sense. The most you can say is that versions that don't have style prompts have a tendency to look very similar, probably from having been trained on mostly the same material.
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It's definitely not absolutely terrible (IMO)! I have to sift through tons of AI art, even with search filters, and the problem is that at first glance it looks good. It's only after you look at it for a bit longer that you start to see the issues.

It does kill me every time players see 4 pieces of art, and pick the AI one as the best looking 😂
 

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MNblockhead

MNblockhead

A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
So I ran the InSPECTREs rules PDF through Adobe AI and asked it "how do I play this game. It responded:

To play the game, follow these steps:
  1. Come up with a name and basic personality for your character.
  2. Distribute nine skill dice among the four skills: Academics, Athletics, Technology, and Contact. No skill can have more than four dice or less than one die.
  3. Choose a Talent for your character, which gives them a bonus die in a specific area.
  4. Determine the number of franchise dice your team starts with, which depends on factors like the team's experience and financial situation.
  5. During gameplay, roll skill dice to determine the outcome of actions. The highest number rolled is used as the result.
  6. Roll stress dice when your character faces physical or mental stress. The lowest stress die rolled determines the result.
  7. Use Cool dice to ignore stress or to augment skill rolls.
  8. Collect franchise dice during missions by rolling high 5s or 6s. These dice can be used to finish the mission and improve the team's research, training, and equipment.
  9. Use teamwork to assist other players by sharing dice from your skill roll.
  10. Follow the play structure, which includes stages like getting the call, research/investigation, suiting up, fieldwork, and clean up.
  11. Use confessionals to temporarily suspend the game and have your character speak directly to the other players.
  12. Develop your character through Confessionals and in-game events, as well as relationships and rivalries with other characters.
  13. Have fun and enjoy the collaborative storytelling experience!
1712635285880.png

Not a bad summation. Covers the main beats. Gives you an idea of how the game plays.

I tried to trip it up by asking "how do I level up a character?" (There are no character levels in this game.). The answer was quite good. It is pulling from rules from all throughout the document, from page 11, to 72, back to 69. It is not simply cutting and pasting the text from the rules. It does a good job summing up, while giving links to the relevant portions of the rules.

In InSpectres, there is no traditional leveling up or character progression. Character development occurs through Confessionals, in-game events, stress penalties, successful jobs, and experiences during the game.[1] Characters can gain Cool dice during missions, which can be used to negate stress penalties and augment skill rolls.[2] They can also develop battle scars, phobias, and weaknesses, and their relationships and rivalries with other characters can evolve.[3] The focus is on the development of the character's story and relationships rather than numerical progression.

As you interact with the AI Assistant, it will suggest other prompts.

1712635867159.png


I find it pretty darn useful, except for the page limit. A 120-page limit isn't going to be useful for many games. And this would be much more useful for crunchy games with big page counts, like D&D, Pathfinder, Warhammer, etc. If there were no page limits, I would consider merging a number of my Warhammar Fantasy PDFs into one huge PDF and running it through this. That would be VERY helpful. That is something I could see D&D Beyond doing. Having an AI Assistant that can run against all content you have access to in DDB.
 


MNblockhead

MNblockhead

A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
MNblockhead said:
So have chatting and gossip. An ONLINE forum is just as much a social media as new one-line platforms for discussion.
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Further OED defines "social media" as "Websites and applications which enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking" and traces the term back to 1994

  1. 1994
    What attracted librarians to the Internet? For some cybernauts, USENET, IRC, and the other social media of the net are the hooks.
    Click to expand...
    Online January 94/1

  2. 2002
    America Online is focusing on developing what it calls ‘social media’, meaning the ability to interact about a topic online.
    Click to expand...
    Wall Street Journal 14 October a11/2

  3. 2004
    Chris Shipley..today announced BlogOn 2004: The Business of Social Media, a conference for technology executives, investors, and bloggers who wish to know more about the rapidly growing opportunities in blogging and social networking.
    Click to expand...
 

L

LesserThan

Explorer
MNblockhead said:
Further OED defines "social media" as "Websites and applications which enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking" and traces the term back to 1994

  1. 1994

    Online January 94/1

  2. 2002

    Wall Street Journal 14 October a11/2

  3. 2004
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Original Equipmemt Distributor? OED?

I had never heard "social media" as a term until about 5 years ago.

You do know you are quote replying yourself often, right?
 

S

Sulicius

Adventurer
LesserThan said:
I had never heard "social media" as a term until about 5 years ago.
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Everyone learns about things at different points in their lives, so that’s not on you.
I am afraid to push this thread into another argument about classifications, but ENWorld is most certainly social media.

I don’t think that matters much to the topic.

My expectation is that Hasbro will struggle to make something useful in time. This technology is moving so fast!

Talking about how good the AI art is, is a moot point to me. It doesn’t have to be as good as the art of the best artists to be worthwhile.

I will never buy a product that features AI generated content, but I have used MidJourney to make better art for my Curse of Strahd campaign.

EDIT: to give an example, I needed a piece of art for Lady Fiona Wachter. The art used in the book has an imp on her shoulder, making it unusable to show to my players. I decided to make something with AI. This took about 15 minutes to get "right". This is a very useful tool for DM's, in my opinion.

1712651114143.png
1712651218722.png
 
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Ruin Explorer

Ruin Explorer

Legend
Thomas Shey said:
Then you disagree, but I've got to say I've seen enough good look AI art that I really can't take seriously claims that its all bad. It simply doesn't fit my experience. I can see an argument with some of them about the same-y-ness, but not even all there.
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But my point is what are you seeing - are you seeing every image it generates based on a prompt, or are you seeing a human-created highlights reel of the very best it creates?

Because if you're looking literally anywhere on the internet that I'm aware of, you're seeing a human-curated highlights reel. You're seeing the "best of" - and even then, there's often extreme same-y-ness and the sort of anti-art weirdnesses of hyper-detail on images where it makes no sense (indeed often makes them worse and less striking), or multiple conflicting styles of shading (and that's ignoring frequent shading errors, because those at least are getting rarer). As such it's still relative easy to recognise and rather unaesthetic in most cases - in part because many of those providing the curated images have fairly limited judgement and taste re: aesthetics, which I think has been encouraging AI to kind of "stay bad".

But if you keep rolling the die, as it were, for long enough, sooner or later you often get something just about passable (there are some prompts which I've tried, which frankly seemed obvious and matched a lot of existing images, which never produced anything not drivel - specificity is a real problem for current AI art - the more general, average, generic you want the image, the easier of a time it'll have, and the less confused it'll get - I recently found two different AIs didn't know what a porkpie hat was, despite there being countless images of them on the internet, just instead putting a wide variety of other hats popular in the past on the character- particular fedoras - and, bizarrely, flat caps, which I suspect is an artefact of the TV series Peaky Blinders existing).

MNblockhead said:
That is something I could see D&D Beyond doing. Having an AI Assistant that can run against all content you have access to in DDB.
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Yeah this is the sort of thing AI has been genuinely useful for for quite a while - longer than it's been in the headlines - giving summaries and collecting information. It's not perfect at it and it sometimes loses its mind, but it is pretty good at it. If you don't want it to really try and be original, just to get stuff together, it's pretty efficient at it.
 
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cbwjm

cbwjm

Seb-wejem
@Sulicius this is the great thing about AI art generation, it allows you to take something that doesn't fit and then mess around with some prompts to make something yourself. A great tool for a DM, also a great tool for players to help create an image for their PC.
 

S

Sulicius

Adventurer
cbwjm said:
@Sulicius this is the great thing about AI art generation, it allows you to take something that doesn't fit and then mess around with some prompts to make something yourself. A great tool for a DM, also a great tool for players to help create an image for their PC.
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Exactly! I like it as a tool, I just don’t want to buy what is made using them.
 

N

Not a Decepticon

Explorer
Sulicius said:
EDIT: to give an example, I needed a piece of art for Lady Fiona Wachter. The art used in the book has an imp on her shoulder, making it unusable to show to my players. I decided to make something with AI. This took about 15 minutes to get "right". This is a very useful tool for DM's, in my opinion.
Click to expand...
When I was running Curse of Strahd I just googled her and got a better picture (I do not have qualms about using pictures of artists in a private game where only 3-4 people will see it). 5 minutes, thast's all it took. Once again, as Murphy said,
 

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