Mistwell
Crusty Old Meatwad (he/him)
There’s been a lot of discussion of AI on the forum, and most of it stresses the fear that creators will see their creations used without their permission to benefit some megacorporation.
I am not here to argue against that issue. But I wanted to highlight some of the ways my D&D group has used AI to benefit our game, in ethical ways. This is the first in what may be several on this topic.
Our many-decades-long DM runs a TTRPG-related company called Mythforge Academy which provides assistance for people’s TTRPG games (from DMing to tools for your game, etc..). He’s a very good guy, very smart, and passionate about D&D. You should check him out. But this is not an ad for his company, I just wanted to give him a shout-out since he’s the big brain behind this application of these tools for D&D.
For about six months now he’s used a tool (or really a group of tools that produces a final product) that’s been a really fun and time-saving addition to our games. Here’s how he summarized it:
The process he uses, as far as I understand it, is as follows (and if you have any questions I am happy to relay those and get answers).
1. He asks the players permission to record their audio. Assuming we say yes, our DM uses a Discord recording bot called Craig. The bot records the audio of your D&D session- each participant has their own mic recorded separately. It allows you to do call-outs, where you say “Hey Craig, remind me…” and it will remind you at the end of the audio session of your call outs. This will often be things like “Hey Craig, remind me to research Sage Advice about whether Devil’s Sight gives any benefit in Dim Light” or “Hey Craig, remind me to fix the bug in Foundry for Green Flame Blade” or things like that.
Note: One of our players does not give permission to have his audio recorded. That audio is deleted before proceeding, and any mention of that PC’s actions thereafter is the result of other player’s mentioning that PC’s actions, the DM mentioning it, or implications from the circumstances.
2. Our DM next uses an AI tool called Whisperer (technically it's "Whisperer, which is a repo on Git that provides a UI for Whisper v2"), which transcribes the audio into text with special formatting, with PC names and NPC names included. He said, “Using Whisper v2 right now for its gui [Graphic User Interface], but am working on full automation that uses Whisper v3.” Apparently version 3 will be even more accurate. Noteworthy, if our DM calls out the spelling of an NPC name or something like that the first time it comes up, Whisper will get the spelling correct thereafter.
3. The next phase is using a Large Language Model AI (LLM for short). These include the popular GPT, Claude, and Gemini AI tools. Our DM wrote a script with an LLM's help to collate the scripts from Whisper into a unified master script. He then tosses four things into an LLM: that Whisper transcript for the session, a character summary page he created with a prompt, an exported XML file from the Virtual Table Top we use (Foundry, though I think Roll 20 would do it too), and a summary template into the LLM known as Gemini 1.5 (he uses that one for its huge context window.) He then does a follow-up prompt in an LLM so it gets a second look at things.
4. He then takes that final summary he’s generated using the LLM to format in a tool called GM Binder. The LLM Gemini can generate the summary in markdown script that GMBinder knows how to make look like the PHB (a sample of which is included in this post). It starts with the real world date and in-world date and time.
5. Each section of the summary is part of the template our DM has created for our particular game, but it doesn’t have to look like that.For example, we have a bard who sometimes likes to sing a ballad about our prior session, so he included a ballad in the template. But you could add all sorts of different sections to this template. We find in particular the To Long Didn’t Read summary itself, and the expended resources like spell slots, potions used, daily abilities used, and treasure found or passed to a particular PC to be the most useful parts. It also is a good reminder of any quests we got or achieved, or new goals we established in the prior session.
6. The next step our DM is working on are scripts to fully automate each step of what I just described. Mostly the Geminizing of it, as right now that's the biggest hassle to do manually. Over time this process has gotten easier as he refines each step.
7. Below is a sample summary produced from our games that I picked at random. It’s not a better or worse sample than anything else, it’s a fairly representative sample. We start each session referencing the prior sessions summary and it saves us so much time. We used to spend 10-20 minutes going over what happened the last session, and frequently forgot what treasure we found and resources we burned. And if someone was missing it’s particularly useful for them to catch up. This makes it so easy to keep track of all of that. Later we can even look back on an entire campaign’s summaries, and I believe our DM can create a campaign summary or even a section of a campaign as a summary. [We also start each session with a luck point for those who both arrive on time, and who answer a character background question, just for fun]
I am not here to argue against that issue. But I wanted to highlight some of the ways my D&D group has used AI to benefit our game, in ethical ways. This is the first in what may be several on this topic.
Our many-decades-long DM runs a TTRPG-related company called Mythforge Academy which provides assistance for people’s TTRPG games (from DMing to tools for your game, etc..). He’s a very good guy, very smart, and passionate about D&D. You should check him out. But this is not an ad for his company, I just wanted to give him a shout-out since he’s the big brain behind this application of these tools for D&D.
For about six months now he’s used a tool (or really a group of tools that produces a final product) that’s been a really fun and time-saving addition to our games. Here’s how he summarized it:
The process he uses, as far as I understand it, is as follows (and if you have any questions I am happy to relay those and get answers).
1. He asks the players permission to record their audio. Assuming we say yes, our DM uses a Discord recording bot called Craig. The bot records the audio of your D&D session- each participant has their own mic recorded separately. It allows you to do call-outs, where you say “Hey Craig, remind me…” and it will remind you at the end of the audio session of your call outs. This will often be things like “Hey Craig, remind me to research Sage Advice about whether Devil’s Sight gives any benefit in Dim Light” or “Hey Craig, remind me to fix the bug in Foundry for Green Flame Blade” or things like that.
Note: One of our players does not give permission to have his audio recorded. That audio is deleted before proceeding, and any mention of that PC’s actions thereafter is the result of other player’s mentioning that PC’s actions, the DM mentioning it, or implications from the circumstances.
2. Our DM next uses an AI tool called Whisperer (technically it's "Whisperer, which is a repo on Git that provides a UI for Whisper v2"), which transcribes the audio into text with special formatting, with PC names and NPC names included. He said, “Using Whisper v2 right now for its gui [Graphic User Interface], but am working on full automation that uses Whisper v3.” Apparently version 3 will be even more accurate. Noteworthy, if our DM calls out the spelling of an NPC name or something like that the first time it comes up, Whisper will get the spelling correct thereafter.
3. The next phase is using a Large Language Model AI (LLM for short). These include the popular GPT, Claude, and Gemini AI tools. Our DM wrote a script with an LLM's help to collate the scripts from Whisper into a unified master script. He then tosses four things into an LLM: that Whisper transcript for the session, a character summary page he created with a prompt, an exported XML file from the Virtual Table Top we use (Foundry, though I think Roll 20 would do it too), and a summary template into the LLM known as Gemini 1.5 (he uses that one for its huge context window.) He then does a follow-up prompt in an LLM so it gets a second look at things.
4. He then takes that final summary he’s generated using the LLM to format in a tool called GM Binder. The LLM Gemini can generate the summary in markdown script that GMBinder knows how to make look like the PHB (a sample of which is included in this post). It starts with the real world date and in-world date and time.
5. Each section of the summary is part of the template our DM has created for our particular game, but it doesn’t have to look like that.For example, we have a bard who sometimes likes to sing a ballad about our prior session, so he included a ballad in the template. But you could add all sorts of different sections to this template. We find in particular the To Long Didn’t Read summary itself, and the expended resources like spell slots, potions used, daily abilities used, and treasure found or passed to a particular PC to be the most useful parts. It also is a good reminder of any quests we got or achieved, or new goals we established in the prior session.
6. The next step our DM is working on are scripts to fully automate each step of what I just described. Mostly the Geminizing of it, as right now that's the biggest hassle to do manually. Over time this process has gotten easier as he refines each step.
7. Below is a sample summary produced from our games that I picked at random. It’s not a better or worse sample than anything else, it’s a fairly representative sample. We start each session referencing the prior sessions summary and it saves us so much time. We used to spend 10-20 minutes going over what happened the last session, and frequently forgot what treasure we found and resources we burned. And if someone was missing it’s particularly useful for them to catch up. This makes it so easy to keep track of all of that. Later we can even look back on an entire campaign’s summaries, and I believe our DM can create a campaign summary or even a section of a campaign as a summary. [We also start each session with a luck point for those who both arrive on time, and who answer a character background question, just for fun]