D&D General My experience with paid D&D tools after 3+ years as a DM/Player

[MNblockhead]

What do you mean by the bolded part? You believe the players won't find session summaries useful?

No, the summaries are useful. But Gemini also tries to determine "action items" or "next steps" based on the conversation. So if you say "I'll talk to greg to get the cost estimates for the new server", Gemini will add a "Get new-server estimate from Greg" (or something similar) to the "Next Steps" section.

I'm not sure how accurate or useful it would be in my typical game session. For example, over a several hour session there could be a number or planning discussions just for a specific encounter. If it pulls "next steps" out of those conversations, it won't be useful. I don't know if it is trained on gaming sessions enough to distinguish planned actions for an encounter from more useful action items like "I'll calculate XP between sessions" or "we'll divide the treasure next session."

I haven't had an opportunity to test, but I'm assuming that the LLM is trained mostly on business meetings. I could see there being a lot of "false" action items that it could pull from a long gaming session.

But I expect that the summaries of what occurred during the session would be quite useful.

 

[Algorithmancer]

What degree of tech and-or bandwidth does all this require?

The fog-of-war on Roll20, for example, chokes on either my machine or my bandwidth (probably machine, but my bandwidth isn't great either).

We use (free) Discord for audio and it has ranged from vaguely passable some nights to outright awful on others, depending on what seems like random chance. And that's across all of us, no matter what tech and bandwidth we have.

@Lanefan apologies I missed this one, its a good question!

Here's my personal thoughts on its tech/bandwidth requirements on all of the tools I mentioned. For context I run everything on my 2022 Macbook Air.

Obsidian
Tech: Low, though YMMV. I've had no performance issues ever even with many pages/links across pages, its very optimized. However this obviously might change significantly depending on the size of your project and how many plugins you use.
Bandwidth: Low, super fast since its just mostly text, sometimes some images.

Kanka
Tech: Low-Med, have had my browser lag a bit. Feels a bit clunkier than Obsidian, though this might be because its browser based instead of a proper app.
Bandwidth: Low, super fast since its just mostly text, sometimes some images.

Roll20
Tech: Med-High. I ran into the same issues as you mentioned, it sometimes does feel a bit laggy/clunky. This is probably expected since its a feature packed VTT running in the browser.
Bandwidth: High, loads alot of elements and also considering its voice/video chat.

Saga20
Tech: Low, haven't really had any issues with the app itself tech wise
Bandwidth: Med-High - the file uploads and processing takes quite a bit of time since the audio files i upload are usually 200+ mbs.

PrintableHeroes
N/A

Syrinscape
Tech: Low, haven't really had any issues with the app itself tech wise
Bandwidth: Low - haven't run into much issues since its just audio files