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

 

[DaedalusMW]

I thought I'd weigh in on the subject of battlemats and VTT's. In 2020 my group lost their in-person play space, we moved online and I have been running games in Foundry ever since. I've used battlemats almost exclusively but I'm thinking that I'll ditch them for theater of the mind after the current adventure is completed.

This came as a bit of a bolt of lightning inspiration to me, I was playing game of Call of Cthulhu at ChaosiumCon run by Brian Holland and he kept us on the edge of our seats, no maps, not tokens, no pictures. Just his descriptions and interactions with the NPCs. After the game I wondered if the tech was getting was getting in the way of my home game. What follows are my thoughts about it.

• Battlemaps and tokens add a whole lot of prep time. If it's a map of a specific place then I'm either looking for a public map, subscribing to a patreon or drawing it myself. Even If I find the perfect map I have to go through and mark the walls, windows, secrets and doors. If I choose not to do this I'm doing manual fog removal at the table. This doesn't even cover token creation or spell effects if you want to go that far. Is that time better spent fleshing out the descriptive details of the dungeon, or working on my rules mastery, or adding interesting details and NPC's to the plot.
• Players and the GM fixating on the details. How do I position this spell so I can get the most people? Is there true line of sight between these two tokens? Can I close the distance in one turn? There aren't hard questions but in my in-person table top days we'd hand wave this and move onto the fun stuff.
• Subconscious reduction in imaginative details while the map does the heavy lifting. I've noticed my descriptions aren't as good as they could be if I just subconsciously rely on the map to do the heavy lifting. I also don't want to deny the players the experience of imaging a place instead of picturing what they see on the map.
• Bugs. Ooops! Someone saw something they shouldn't because they clipped through a wall.

So once my current campaign is done I'm going to going map free for a spell to see if it makes a difference.

I used to spend 2-4 hours and have decent lore and images and whatnot, then AI accelerated me to spending roughly the same time but with far better assets for my players. I would use ChatGPT, MidJourney, Word and Powerpoint. I now prep in about 30 minutes and with even more and better lore and assets.

I've been running for 40 years, so my techiques have evolved a lot over time. But I finally made an website to help with my game prep, and my players talked me into publishing it and add a ton of VTT features, which I finally did recently. I hope this isn't disrespectful to this group, but it's ZapGM if you want to try it out, and even better help me with early access feedback, and I am both pleased with myself and scared that it will crash and burn. But you gotta take a leap sometime.

 

[DaedalusMW]

I thought I'd weigh in on the subject of battlemats and VTT's. In 2020 my group lost their in-person play space, we moved online and I have been running games in Foundry ever since. I've used battlemats almost exclusively but I'm thinking that I'll ditch them for theater of the mind after the current adventure is completed.

This came as a bit of a bolt of lightning inspiration to me, I was playing game of Call of Cthulhu at ChaosiumCon run by Brian Holland and he kept us on the edge of our seats, no maps, not tokens, no pictures. Just his descriptions and interactions with the NPCs. After the game I wondered if the tech was getting was getting in the way of my home game. What follows are my thoughts about it.

• Battlemaps and tokens add a whole lot of prep time. If it's a map of a specific place then I'm either looking for a public map, subscribing to a patreon or drawing it myself. Even If I find the perfect map I have to go through and mark the walls, windows, secrets and doors. If I choose not to do this I'm doing manual fog removal at the table. This doesn't even cover token creation or spell effects if you want to go that far. Is that time better spent fleshing out the descriptive details of the dungeon, or working on my rules mastery, or adding interesting details and NPC's to the plot.
• Players and the GM fixating on the details. How do I position this spell so I can get the most people? Is there true line of sight between these two tokens? Can I close the distance in one turn? There aren't hard questions but in my in-person table top days we'd hand wave this and move onto the fun stuff.
• Subconscious reduction in imaginative details while the map does the heavy lifting. I've noticed my descriptions aren't as good as they could be if I just subconsciously rely on the map to do the heavy lifting. I also don't want to deny the players the experience of imaging a place instead of picturing what they see on the map.
• Bugs. Ooops! Someone saw something they shouldn't because they clipped through a wall.

So once my current campaign is done I'm going to going map free for a spell to see if it makes a difference.

I used to spend 2-4 hours and have decent lore and images and whatnot, then AI accelerated me to spending roughly the same time but with far better assets for my players. I would use ChatGPT, MidJourney, Word and Powerpoint. I now prep in about 30 minutes and with even more and better lore and assets. I got sick of spending hours fiddling with the vectors in maps, especially in Foundry.

I've been running for 40 years, so my techiques have evolved a lot over time. But I finally made an website to help with my game prep, and my players talked me into publishing it and add a ton of VTT features, which I finally did recently. I hope this isn't disrespectful to this group, but it's ZapGM if you want to help me with early access feedback, and I am both pleased with myself and scared that it will crash and burn. But you gotta take a leap sometime.