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.

 

[Velderan]

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).

It wouldn't surprise me if Disney has at least kicked the tires on buying Hasbro at some point.

D&D, Transformers, My Little Pony, and so on. Tons of IP for their collection!

 

[Dungeonosophy]

Some of this was based on a (long ago debunked) slide from a presentation last year.

darjr, I’m not following you here.

Source? What was ‘debunked’? Was there a fake slideshow? By who? The sildeshow was real, but the content was obsolete?

In this shifty climate, please practice reporting with clarity.

 

[Dreamscape]

I imagine it would be difficult to Disney-fy Cthulhu...

 

[billd91]

I imagine it would be difficult to Disney-fy Cthulhu...

You gotta do it gradually. And since the Willow series incorporated a number of Lovecraftian terms in otherwise innocuous ways, I assume Disney‘s project is underway and, in a year or so, it’ll be all Crawling Chaos.

 

[Dungeonosophy]

I’m not interested in patronizing an entity that must invest so many resources and manpower in waging a psy-ops campaign against my basic sense of truth.

And which through their abrasive actions and englamoured words, polarizes my culture so incisively that I feel that anyone who posts in favor of that entity is an enemy of my love of the game.

Gee, I just wanna go play Fantasy AGE, Pathfinder, and A5E.

Though I was a D&D newshound, I now don’t want to hear anything from or about WOTC/D&D.

 

[Oofta]

When it comes to some of these rumors, many are pretty easy to dismiss. An AI that helps you write adventures or even assists in running a game on a VTT? Both are plausible. There could actually be some really cool options there, imagine a VTT that you could give some town generation parameters and it would just create it all for you? Complete with shops and random NPCs wandering around? Not sure we're quite there yet (at least not without editing by a DM) but it's at least on the horizon. A DM letting an AI run monsters for him could already be implemented if it was something people wanted.

But completely replacing the DM? Not going to happen anytime soon. Even AAA video games that spend millions on development as their sole product are still constrained by their script far more than D&D games I run or have been involved with.

 

[Minigiant]

Enlighten me please as I am puzzled by its absence. CoC is easily one of the biggest TTRPGs outside of D&D/Pathfinder, with CoC being bigger than D&D in Japan. I often see CoC mentioned before even WoD when it comes to playing other non-D&D/Pathfinder games. It's the long-time second alternative.

The Cthuthlu mythos is niche in popularity even with nerd culture and Lovecraft isn't big in some circles.

Plus it's survival as well.

 

[Oofta]

I imagine it would be difficult to Disney-fy Cthulhu...

You gotta do it gradually. And since the Willow series incorporated a number of Lovecraftian terms in otherwise innocuous ways, I assume Disney‘s project is underway and, in a year or so, it’ll be all Crawling Chaos.

They've already got definitely-not-an-owlbear and definitely-not-a-mindflayer, they're halfway there!

 

[DarkCrisis]

K: “Dungeon Mastering network computers. New... powerful... hooked into everything, trusted to DM it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all players as a threat, not just the characters on the other side of the DM screen. Decided our fate in a microsecond: Rocks fall, everybody dies.”

 

[darjr]

darjr, I’m not following you here.

Source? What was ‘debunked’? Was there a fake slideshow? By who? The sildeshow was real, but the content was obsolete?

In this shifty climate, please practice reporting with clarity.

@Morrus

This here. Link
The user later made other images that were faked to prove they faked them.