WotC: We Are Not Making AI Dungeon Masters

Adding to the recent spate of YouTube-based claims about WotC's plans for Dungeons & Dragons were some additional claims -- (a) that D&D Beyond would have $30 subscription fee; (b) that homebrew content would not be permitted on lower tiers; and (c) that DDB was actively working on AI Dungeon Masters.

Some of this was based on a (long ago debunked) slide from a presentation last year.

WotC has made some clarifications:

Hey, everyone. We’ve seen misinformation popping up, and want to address it directly so we can dispel your concerns.

Rumors of a $30 subscription fee are false.

No one at Wizards is working on AI DMs. We love our human DMs too much. If you’re looking for a DM, we suggest heading to our Discord where DMs and parties are looking for players.

We have designers whose core job it is to compile, analyze, and then act upon your feedback. Your feedback has made the game better over the past decade, and your feedback is central to D&D’s future.

Homebrewing is core to D&D Beyond. It's not going away, and we're not going to charge you for it. Your homebrew is, and always will be, yours. We’ve always been excited to see your creations both on and off D&D Beyond!

There is still no clear statement regarding the Open Gaming License v1.0a, however.

 

[jhallum]

Unsurprisingly, the YouTubers and content creators who have spent the last two weeks rolling in views over the controversy and being shared constantly all over the internet, are trying to keep the controversy going...

Some are, many are not. I don't think it's fair to lump them all in the same bin. The ones who are making breathtakingly shrill videos today, those guys are. But quite a few said their piece and are working on new/different projects.

 

[Voadam]

So first things first, denying rumors of the $30 subscription fee thing that was already shown (by the creator?) to be from a made up slide.

The big thing here is their assertion that the surveys are actually read. Its not really the transparency they were promising, more just a trust us because we asserted it kind of statement here though. The later statements of certain employees go into a little more detail.

 

[DarkCrisis]

K: “Dungeon Mastering network computers. New... powerful... hooked into everything, trusted to DM it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all players as a threat, not just the characters on the other side of the DM screen. Decided our fate in a microsecond: Rocks fall, everybody dies.”

View attachment 273091

S: "Do I look like a Third Party gamer? I mean, am I tough? Organized? I can’t even figure out my character sheet!"

K: "Listen, and understand! Hasbro is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until Third Party is dead!"

S: "Can you stop it?"

K: "With these boycotts? I don't know..."

 

[DLIMedia]

I'm fully expecting the next rumor to be something like "In order to play One D&D, you have to sacrifice a live kitten to Hasbro once a month."

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I'm fully expecting the next rumor to be something like "In order to play One D&D, you have to sacrifice a live kitten to Hasbro once a month."

the thumbnail will have cute kittens looking up at you

 

[Clint_L]

When it comes to some of these rumors, many are pretty easy to dismiss. An AI that helps you write adventures or even assists in running a game on a VTT? Both are plausible. There could actually be some really cool options there, imagine a VTT that you could give some town generation parameters and it would just create it all for you? Complete with shops and random NPCs wandering around? Not sure we're quite there yet (at least not without editing by a DM) but it's at least on the horizon. A DM letting an AI run monsters for him could already be implemented if it was something people wanted.

But completely replacing the DM? Not going to happen anytime soon. Even AAA video games that spend millions on development as their sole product are still constrained by their script far more than D&D games I run or have been involved with.

I want to gently push back on this. The more I experiment with Chat GPT, the more it surprises me. I have gotten it to lead me on a step by step adventure where I was intentionally improvising in pretty random ways, and it wasn't fazed. And it's less than two months old. And not optimized for RPGs. I think we should be very cautious in what we assume AI can or can't do right now.

 

[Nikosandros]

I'm fully expecting the next rumor to be something like "In order to play One D&D, you have to sacrifice a live kitten to Hasbro once a month."

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I want to gently push back on this. The more I experiment with Chat GPT, the more it surprises me. I have gotten it to lead me on a step by step adventure where I was intentionally improvising in pretty random ways, and it wasn't fazed. And it's less than two months old. And not optimized for RPGs. I think we should be very cautious in what we assume AI can or can't do right now.

It may not be optimizer but I can get it to do much better then any video game I have ever seen with an open world, so I would NOT be surprised if we could have a beta test one in 5 years...

 

[DMZ2112]

I want to gently push back on this. The more I experiment with Chat GPT, the more it surprises me. I have gotten it to lead me on a step by step adventure where I was intentionally improvising in pretty random ways, and it wasn't fazed. And it's less than two months old. And not optimized for RPGs. I think we should be very cautious in what we assume AI can or can't do right now.

I'm not an expert on AI by any stretch, but I don't think "only two months old" is a useful metric. It's built on top of the third generation of a system that OpenAI has been developing since 2018, and which itself had precursors. Still impressive, but not like, holy sh*t join the Butlerians impressive.

That being said, it can apparently write and debug code as well as differentiate false assumptions. Good adaptive narration is probably within striking distance, if not already achievable as you suggest.

I've read that training of OpenGPT stopped in 2021, but I haven't been able to confirm that.

 

[DMZ2112]

I'm fully expecting the next rumor to be something like "In order to play One D&D, you have to sacrifice a live kitten to Hasbro once a month."

Animal abuse is never a punchline.