He didn’t last long, because my party murdered him, but I had a cleric of the goddess of luck that would challenge people in the tavern to dice games (which he couldn’t lose), to raise funds for his temple. My barbarian spent like an hour trying to beat him before he realized what was going on
@Infynis@jossbo Another Luck Cleric! Mine was basically Friar Tuck. He was always drunk (a lucky drunk) and searched every couch for loose change that he would give to the needy. I built him with a level dip into Barbarian so he could wear robes and occasionally “lose his temper”. I would love to get to play him again someday.
I would draw the line at “Does the post provide freely accessable, usable, non spam content?” If it’s just a link to to a store, or a unusability tiny sample of content then it’s an ad. But someone just posting unobtrusivly watermarked art or homebrew along with a donation link is fine and benefits the community. (This seems to mostly align with that)
Some subreddits had truly ridiculous politicies, like removing even very high effort, high quality content if is so much as mentioned the existence of a donation link. (Like r/Minecraft)
Other subreddits had excessively loose rules and got flooded with the same thumbnail sized artwork asking for commissions or advertising paid versions.
A pigeon aarakocra, who is a very caring matronly figure. The voice I chose for her is very light and airy and uses a lot of pigeon coos. It’s always a blast to voice her and hear the players’ amusement.
I had a blast watching the first episode. There’s something so satisfying about watching new players playing D&D and get engrossed in the story like they did. The queens are such fun to watch. It helped introduce D&D (and Brennan Lee Mulligan) to my friends. They didn’t even notice the episode was 2 hours long!
I find GPT is very good at saying obvious things, but not so good at throwing the curveballs that you want from a DM. Did anything in the adventure surprise you in particular?
Nothing in it leads me to believe it could fully replace a human DM in its current state, but if it was trained specifically on every dnd module, rulebook, fan content, fantasy books and movie scripts, then possibly.
In my opinion that’s what we do. Every homebrew adventure is the product of our combined knowledge of the system and the genre. We use some things designed by others (if you use a creature from a monster manual for example, or run a module), we create our own things. But the things we create still depend on things we have learned. We’re just organic AIs with a slower and less reliable training process lol
I used it to run an impromptu one-shot for some friends. It created the outline, the story hook, NPCs, encounters, traps, treasures and the big boss at the end. I had to tweak stuff and all the combat rolls were made with real dice, but overall it was fun and I said I co-DM’d that night.
It also creates and runs interactive fiction stories. I told it I wanted to play a game like zork with it lol and it wasn’t exactly zork, but it was actually more fun and flexible than zork could have been.
Yeah. It’s not going to replace a human who can read the room and respond to how the players act and feel any time soon, but I’ve used it to help flesh out some NPCs, because I’m pretty weak on that point.
I totally agree. But I know I had a folder of bookmarks with all sorts of tools for making NPCs, locations, enemies, names for stuff, treasures, and so on. Now ChatGPT does all that for me. I found ChatGPT is a great tool to inspire personal creativity, too. When I tell it to invent puzzles, they are kinda meh by themselves but inspires me to put something more cohesive together.
Eventually, sooner than you might think, I can see an AI with cameras around the room, so it can see the players’ faces. It will be able to identify common emotional faces and can improvise accordingly. Honestly, I predict there will be live streams of a bunch of humans sitting around a table that is being run by the AI dungeon master.
The tabletop is one of those big digital screen ones, and the the fights are animated as they play. I would totally watch that haha. Maybe at some point it can generate movies based on the game session. I know we’ve all had some epic game moments that would be awesome movie scenes.
It will be hard to convince me to let an AI run a game for me by reading my facial expressions, but I will allow that A) they’d probably do fine as supplementary players, and B) if AI is eventually able to generate short movies based on session recordings, that would be outstanding.
I'd like to add the OGL they were pushing would have effectively allowed them to steal homebrew and 3rd party content. They'd reserve the right to resell this content as their own or make it disappear altogether.
This would include supplements and adventures, of course, but the way it was worded, it would even include blogs and YouTube videos, etc.
Of course this isn't a unique situation (Meta has done this forever, for example)
I don’t think it’s hyped up. You just need context.
The OGL stuff was a tipping point but WotC prioritizing profit at the expense of the player is hardly new. I think the last truly lauded release in D&D proper was the shift to 5th edition, which was nine years ago and was a correction after 4th. Before that it was probably Eberron, almost twenty years ago. Other changes have largely been to increase profit with little consideration on improving the game. 4th edition, while not actually a bad game, was a mistargeted attempt to cash in on MMOs as well as the first attempt to kill the OGL. More recently you will not find many active DMs who love the 5e splatbooks, or who think the game values how they spend their time preparing for a session, or thinks the game does a great job helping them design custom content, or who really loves how WotC is locking down the virtual tabletop space.
Tabletop game design, as well as how designers interact with their player bases, has completely changed for the rest of the TTRPG space.
You missed the rise of Paizo, where former D&D writers found a home to write pre-generated content that is legitimately good and saves GMs hundreds of hours of work, called Adventure Paths, and who later filled the niche of 3.5 when WotC forced closure in favor of something more easily monetized. You missed Apocalypse World/Dungeon World/Blades in the Dark and Cypher, systems where cutting down on prep time was a serious priority rather than a tertiary afterthought, making games much more fun for the GM. You missed the OSR, the return to D&D’s roots. You missed Savage Worlds, Fate, FFG’s Star Wars, Free League, Honey Heist, Gumshoe, Lancer, tons of innovative ideas.
The other old companies like White Wolf and Chaosium have reacted at every step, re-writing their games to reflect modern design principles unprompted and working to improve distribution of their content. Those have also been attempts to make money, but by making the product better, not by squeezing the player base. The one time WotC was forced to turn to its designers they got 5th and they’ve been milking it since.
A lot of people don’t care about any of that, they just buckle down and play D&D. But DMs and most of the people who talk online are power users who know what they’re missing.
Thank you very much for the insightful response, looks like I have a lot of reading ahead of me. This was exactly the type of answer that I was looking for. Thank you.
I’ve always had a lot of respect for people who paint as a hobby. I know I don’t have the patience or skill to do art, so I’m always flabbergasted by what people can make. Great work, and thanks for posting it here!
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