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.

 

[Oofta]

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.

Massive difference between writing a static document and reacting to things in real time. I think AI could do a lot to help a DM, I just don't see it replacing a DM. If we ever get to the point of a true artificial intelligence (i.e. Data from Star Trek) instead of the expert systems that we have now, I will be the first to bow down to our new masters.

 

[mangamuscle]

I mean, it isn't like any of have any real decisions to make until they actually put out the new license anyway. We have no trust-based actions to take!

I could be wrong, but my bet is that they will not release it now in the hope people will completely forget about this (you can't stay angry all the time, it is too damn tiring) and in six months time (take or give a month) they will simply send the biggest or smallest TTRPG 3pp a C&D or better yet, they will go right to the courts.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

So ... what you're saying is that you could be an AI. Or maybe I'm an AI and don't even know it!

I lot of what I do involves in talking to people outside my company to get information that has not, to date, been written down. So I have a few more years, although I'm sure eventually AI can do that work. (This is among the reasons why I've been making a serious effort to acquire new skills in my field for about 12 years now. Gotta outrun that giant boulder rolling after all of us!)

 

[Dire Bare]

There's no money in making a new RPG. Not by Disney standards. The only way I see Disney getting into RPGs in a serious way would be them buying Hasbro to get D&D. Which would not surprise me in the least. It would be bad though - if you think Hasbro has a problem with open content, imagine what Disney would do. There'd be lawyers at your door the first time you home brewed a monster! (Exaggerating. A little. But they have threatened legal action to force pre-schools to stop using Disney murals).

Disney isn't likely to create a new Disney RPG in house . . . but they would totes license the idea to a good partner.

This coming summer, the new Disney TCG is launching, Disney Lorcana. It is very reminiscent of Magic: the Gathering and will be a direct competitor. And seeing how WotC is causing stress in the Magic community as well . . . . .

 

[mangamuscle]

So ... what you're saying is that you could be an AI. Or maybe I'm an AI and don't even know it!

Taken from Ghost in the Shell "Have you ever seen your own brain?"

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Disney isn't likely to create a new Disney RPG in house . . . but they would totes license the idea to a good partner.

This coming summer, the new Disney TCG is launching, Disney Lorcana. It is very reminiscent of Magic: the Gathering and will be a direct competitor. And seeing how WotC is causing stress in the Magic community as well . . . . .

Yeah, they've got outside partners producing their existing tabletop board games, most notably Ravensburger. It's easy to imagine them wanting to find a comparable RPG partner in the ttrpg space.

I think it would be very hard for any of the medium-sized RPG companies to say no to a giant bag of money fresh from Scrooge McDuck's vaults.

Given just how many Ravensburger games are out there now (it seems like a quarter of the board games in my local Target now), this feels more like a "when" and less like an "if."

 

[Scribe]

Taken from Ghost in the Shell "Have you ever seen your own brain?"

Is this the part of the conversation where I space off for a bit and consider if my life is a simulation, and if it is, does it matter?

 

[Oofta]

I lot of what I do involves in talking to people outside my company to get information that has not, to date, been written down. So I have a few more years, although I'm sure eventually AI can do that work. (This is among the reasons why I've been making a serious effort to acquire new skills in my field for about 12 years now. Gotta outrun that giant boulder rolling after all of us!)

Yeah, it may well be disruptive in ways we don't expect. Just like Excel was back in the day as an extremely basic example. We take it for granted now, just plug in numbers and out pops our calculations, but all that bookkeeping and tracking used to take monumental effort.

I don't know what impact AI will have, but AI can't think on it's own. It can crunch numbers, solve problems like predicting the shape of practically every protein. It's amazing. But it has to be directed, corrected and transformed into useful information. Our search engines are going to change and instead of pointing to articles, the AI may well give us the answer. But, and this is a big but, someone still has to write the article so that the AI can parse it out and regurgitate it. There's a lot of promise with AI, but there are also a lot of flaws.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Yeah, it may well be disruptive in ways we don't expect. Just like Excel was back in the day as an extremely basic example. We take it for granted now, just plug in numbers and out pops our calculations, but all that bookkeeping and tracking used to take monumental effort.

Travel agents also used to be a super-common job in the U.S. Now, they're all but gone and the ones that remain either offer very specific services that the websites cannot or cater to an old and tech-phobic audience.

I remember watching the conversation about Lotus-1-2-3 go from "this software could never replace traditional bookkeepers" to suddenly there being a lot fewer bookkeepers around. Lots of industries have been hollowed out this way, in ways we don't even recognize.

 

[Nikosandros]

So ... what you're saying is that you could be an AI. Or maybe I'm an AI and don't even know it!

Do ChatAIs dream of electric posts?