This bothers me a lot - "Written with ChatGPT" ? There are a LOT of games designers out there creating games without AI help and making them available free or for a charge within the OSR community.
I do realise that people who are not able writers can still have cool ideas and ChatGPT is a tool to enable them to get their idea out there but I would encourage people to look at the many, human-written OSR version that are out there.
So, I'm not saying what you have produced is not a worthy product, I am just wondering if you could have written it yourself?
Let me start by saying that the negative comments with little more argument then "But it's made by humans, thus better!" argument is going to drive more people into the arms of AI/LLM generated content.
AI/LLM are tools, tools used by humans. Those humans decide how to use the tools, and what rolls out depends on those humans. That does NOT mean that what rolls out is (any) good or well thought out. Something like this is probably more of a thought experiment then anything else, as many before you pointed out flaws in the system and things that were missing. This is more of a show of what an AI/LLM can throwup with little input, finessing and/or human editing.
I've been using Deepseek (r1 free) for generating room descriptions for the Undermountain adventure (5e Dungeon of the Mad Mage) from the little context that was given for each room. Just getting an acceptable output took a while to figure out, things from atmosphere, dungeon construction and general features for each level. And even then getting out exactly what I wanted wasn't happening, technical issues, memory issues, things I didn't like. Getting an AI/LLM to spit out exactly what you want in the style you want is like herding cats. You need to realize that good is good enough, and when it isn't, manual editing and/or rewriting entire sections is your friend! I've done the first five levels + Skullport, that's a few hundred descriptions. Could I have written those 100% myself? Absolutely, but how long would that have taken? Would it actually be better? Very long and probably not, unless I spent even more time on it. It still took a LOT of work. I then put it through an AI powered text-to-speech service, also a lot of work (and money to get a good quality output), but still less and better then if I did all the voice acting myself. My players really like this and didn't really notice (yet) that the text that's being read is AI generated.
Last week I started with Midjourney for image generation, getting that to function exactly to my wishes is even worse, it's like herding angry cats! Again, quite a bit of money, quite a bit of time. For the first session I settled on images that illustrated not exactly what was there, but gave an overall atmosphere. Sure, they figured out quickly that they were AI generated images, but they don't care, they like the atmosphere it creates. Midjourney gives you far more tools to edit and specify exactly what you want, but again you need knowledge and skills to make it work better for you, taking up even more time to learn new skills. But that's still less time then drawing/painting it yourself, even if you've been trained for that (like I have been), now imagine people that have not been trained for that. And again, will my human made illustrations be better then what the AI can generate? Probably not. And hiring someone else that does it in the exact style you want is going to be expensive, and will take WAY too much time to complete. My intention is to have atleast one illustration for every room/encounter, that's going to be hundreds of images.
AI/LLM is a tool for me to create more immersion/enjoyment for my players in a more realistic time/money budget. While leaving me time to create more bespoke adventure components for the adventure. In the same way that Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage saved me oodles of time/money as a DM. I see no one complaining about published adventures being the ruin of smalltime bespoke illustrators/writers DMs... Not everyone likes published adventures, to be honest the quality/writing is actually lacking a bit with most of the WotC stuff anyway, the Deepseek writing is an actual improvement over that...
And in the past I would have written my own adventures, have done many a time. But having a full time job that's brain intensive tends to mess that up, being older I also have more interests that distract me, as well as responsibilities. You don't have to use published adventures, you don't have to use AI/LLMs, you don't have to use D&D(5e).
That said, there are MANY, many RPGs I would use before ever considering using an RPG created by an AI/LLM. Even one page systems by writers I trust WAY more then ChatGPT. I would LOVE to spend $100-$200 to get a digital collection of 500 excellent illustrations made by human illustrators in style X about exactly subject Y, but not many others would, would they be able to sell a 1000+ of those bundles at that price? Probably not, because if they could, they would. In my case the artists that I want the style of are either dead or retired and at an advanced age (or have moved on from the style they did many decades ago). Also keep in mind that not everyone has a well paid job which results in a decent amount of disposable income, and in many different parts of the world, what's considered 'good' makes a magnitude of difference.
