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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

> This is so interesting that people want this

I love being a DM but it is no mystery to me. Being a DM is a lot of work. And occasionally, a lot of annoyance. You not only have to facilitate (and sometimes create from scratch) an engaging story that keeps people coming back, you have to wrangle busy schedules and personalities that is often annoying. Lots of times you'll have a bunch of people willing to play, but no one willing to DM. So to me it's not surprising at all, and I experimented with AI in running a game, and quickly concluded it could never be good at it because it's so insanely suggestible and has poor memory.

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I tend to agree. I used to run Call of Cthulhu in high school, and there was a lot of preparation involved in running a good scenario. Some people are good at winging it and making stuff up as they go along. I never was. The best experiences for me and my players was always when I'd meticulously designed my own scenario, or used a store-bought scenario and read it thoroughly. Either way, hours of prep.

I would love to have an AI as an assistant Dungeon Master (or game master, or Keeper, or what have you). That is, one person in a group of players maintains the role of a master storyteller, but the AI is ready to fill in details or suggest ways to get the players back on track. This would probably be tedious if you're interacting with the LLM entirely through text, and having to manually keep it up to date with the story. But it could work well if you have a model that understands spoken language listening in on the game and generating cool images and making private suggestions to the game master.

> one person in a group of players maintains the role of a master storyteller, but the AI is ready to fill in details or suggest ways to get the players back on track

As a player and very occasional DM myself, filling in details and trying to get players back on track is where is the fun and challenge. AI could definitely be useful to handle all the paperwork (fight resolution and so on) though

I think the previous posters point was that an LLM DM is boring due to it's generality and lacks the specific quirks of having a human DM with their own viewpoint and understanding of the players, which I agree with. I did some experiments with earlier ChatGPT models for world building and DMing and found it to be so boring, getting it to do anything interesting or giving any kind of push back was so hard. Since they are an averaging of all knowledge / previous creativity you end up with a smooth surface, but part of what makes stories interesting are the rough edges.

However I also agree with you that being a DM is a prohibitive amount of work for someone, say, with kids and a job. It would be awesome to have an LLM as an assistant, maybe feeding in parts of the story and querying it for ideas when you're in a bind. But having it run as a full DM, at least right now, will likely lead to a boring experience.

Yep, my experience using ChatGPT as a helper is very good. It can very quickly cook up a custom monster, give it relevant stats, and create some flavourful actions and attacks to make it unique. Lately I've been trying to hook this up to D&D Beyond, as it's just some fairly simple POST payloads. If I can get to the point where I can describe a vague encounter, and run it in the Beyond encounter tracker with zero effort, that would be amazing, and a lifesaver when the party goes off and does nutty stuff. Beyond that, its story ideas are fairly generic but fine if you really have no time, and it can do a decent job of the occasional flowery monologue if you need it.

If you make progress on the api part, would be awesome to see a write up on HN about it, I'd be really interested in how this develops!

Personally I can't stand to run a D&D game as players take it all too seriously.

I will run Toon, Call of Cthulhu or Paranoia any day, the latter without a scenario as I can kill off their all their clones in my very dangerous Alpha Complex and have them rolling on the floor laughing the whole time with a help of a stack of prerolled character sheets and some random encounter tables. (I'd expect an LLM to be able to do the same)

Contrast that to the famous Bloodstone campaign which is the pinnacle of D&D scenarios but can't really be challenging to the players because players have to win over and over again if you're going to use most of the material.

I DM for early teens and I would kill for a D&D party that took it all too seriously. :)

Try a simpler game. I think a lot of people think TTRPG = D&D and the world is worse off for it.

There are numerous tactics that work to face the "not serious" problems you have in a game for "young adults".

For instance, serious players get resentful when somebody not serious comes in late, forgets their character sheet, etc. You could lose either or both of them, but with a little prep you don't have to. In Paranoia it's easy to shove a preroll into their hands, give them a 1-2 minute briefing from "The Computer" and build up tension around this character who mysteriously appears (and if the new player complains that they don't know the rules tell them they're not allowed to know the rules!)

Toon is the epitome of "not serious" and, like the other two games I've mentioned, is a game where you can buy one book and have everything you need, including your first scenario.

I think whatever rules we tried to play, the nob jokes would persist.

Try Tales from the Loop -- https://freeleaguepublishing.com/games/tales-from-the-loop-r...

That would be my takeaway too. There is room for AI DMs, but they need to get a lot better before they're really fun to play with. I tried a few AI RP just to see how it works and it was pretty boring.

i mean this is on point regarding the effort needed to run a game, but also llms don't really solve any of the problems you listed, so while people want _something_ it doesn't seem like they're crying out for this. also, would love an example of the suggestible ai DM if you have one handy lol

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