ChatGPT has been a lifeline for me as a GM with little spare time to prep and far too grand ambitions for the scale and scope of (D&D) campaign I want to run. I’m curious how other GMs have found ChatGPT and similar AI tools useful or helpful in running their own games. I’ll share my own workflow below as a comment, and I hope others find it useful. I’m especially interested in any ChatGPT prompts you have found worthwhile, and you can see some of my own prompts in the examples I’ll share shortly.

  • RebelMage@ttrpg.networkEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    I don’t use ChatGPT and don’t plan to. For me, part of the fun of running games is being creative and doing the work of coming up with stuff myself. I don’t have as much of an issue with ChatGPT as with machine generated images, so that’s not why I avoid it. I just think the creative work is part of the experience, and us humans can also do that far better than a computer program. ChatGPT can’t easily draw on campaign-specific themes and symbolism, can’t foreshadow the greater mysteries going on. I mean, it likely can if specifically prompted to, but then you’re still doing most of the work myself.

    And if I want to randomly generate something… Well, we’re all into TTRPG’s; that’s what dice are for. (Or tarot decks. I have too many of those. They’re just so pretty and I keep hoarding them.)

    • dwgill@ttrpg.networkOPEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      I think this is an entirely valid perspective. Some people are just overflowing with ideas and the use of ChatGPT (or any kind of aid in inspiration, such as random tables) seems redundant. Just for a point of comparison, my own experience is a combination of (a) I simply enjoy creating some kinds of content more than others, and (b) I don’t have enough spare time to personally author all of the content I want for my campaign. With my limited time, I want to focus on authoring the stuff that I enjoy creating and/or the stuff that’s going to have the biggest impact. As an example, I’m happy to delegate descriptions of rooms to books of tables or ChatGPT if it means I can focus instead on the lore of the dungeon as a whole or the background & motivations for its overarching villain.

    • sirblastalot@ttrpg.networkMEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Same. My problem has never been generating content, it’s been in parring down alllll the content I produce to actually fit in a game, and organizing it in a way that produces a cohesive narrative.

      EDIT: Was thinking about this more and was going to add that I don’t normally use random tables/generators, for the same reason. But there is one exception: I will absolutely generate NPC names. And it occurs to me that ChatGPT would be as good as or better than existing generators.

  • dwgill@ttrpg.networkOPEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    So, far and away the greatest utility I have found for ChatGPT is in two areas:

    • Brainstorming ideas like a random generator or book of tables. ChatGPT can be especially helpful with brainstorming ideas if your campaign doesn’t fit neatly into traditional genres or stories typically featured in role-playing games.
    • Brainstorming how to tie up loose plot threads. This is beyond the ability of most traditional tools or aids to help with, and it’s a godsend if (like me) you often lay down clues long before you’ve fully worked out all the details of the mystery.

    General Brainstorming

    ChatGPT is pretty good at just coming up with ideas for your campaign in general. I’m talking about stuff like adventure ideas, encounter ideas, descriptive details of rooms, etc. It’s not great, though, and its output can feel pretty generic compared to material like Raging Swan Press which has entire books full of wonderfully evocative tables great for filling environments and dungeons with detail. There’s also stuff like this Random Adventure Generator by @slyfourish@ttrpg.network or this other Random Adventure Generator by donjon which are both probably just as good or better than ChatGPT in general at brainstorming adventure ideas.

    Where ChatGPT shines however is that you can give it basically arbitrary thematic or fictional constraints and tell it to generate ideas within that context. ChatGPT is mediocre at generic D&D or traditional fantasy, but my campaign isn’t a typical D&D campaign world, and as a result ChatGPT is basically the only random generator that can reliably generate ideas that are actually useful for my campaign. In essence, ChatGPT is a random generator I can tailor to my campaign world.

    Here’s an example below of how I might use ChatGPT for this. In practice, I often like to “prime” it with details of the major characters of my campaign as well. It’s not brilliant, and you can see in many places it’s effectively repeating back themes or ideas that I gave it in the first place, but it’s nonetheless incredibly useful compared to the kind of stuff I tend to get back from other random generators that focus on generic fantasy content.

    My biggest challenge with this kind of usage of ChatGPT is that it tends towards sounding like a back-of-the-book summary of a plot, often generalizing or otherwise glossing over the specific details that I’m precisely interested in. The first response to my prompt in the example is a great demonstration of this, which is why you’ll see I have to follow up by prompting it for specifics about the McGuffins and the cast of characters. If anyone has ideas for prompts that can avoid this tendency to summarize without making it write novels of text, I’m all ears.

    Tying Up Plot Threads

    ChatGPT can be really helpful with brainstorming not just general ideas but specific plot points for your adventures and campaigns. I don’t know how to explain this well outside of sharing another example but the gist is that you give ChatGPT a lot of detail about your campaign and its themes, characters, world, and setting, and then explain how there’s a “gap” in the story somewhere and ask it to brainstorm how to fill it. In my example here, the “gap” is that I’m missing a clue to deliver some critical information, but I’ve also used it successfully for other things like:

    • “Why or how would character ABC be connected to mysterious phenomena XYZ?”

    • “Which of these characters could have summoned the monster, and why?”

    • “What is the nefarious scheme this character is planning (which I hinted at in a prior session)?”

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 🏆@yiffit.netEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I’ve used it to run a campaign in single player.

    Using Janitor AI, I setup a multi-personality AI using its D&D and games training presets and then fed it the SRD for 3.5 as well as all the stuff I wrote for my campaign and was able to play a game as a player all by myself because the AI handled being a DM and 3 other players.

    It worked out pretty good. It didn’t always understand the rules which lead to arguments… Just like it would with real people! 😃

    • MrKaplan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      unfortunately i don’t think mastodon reports can make their way to lemmy yet, but i’ve been cleaning up a lot of the stuff that federated to lemmy.world today. i’m also reporting all those comments so the respective instance admins and also community mods and community instance admins will see the reports.

  • Trumble@sopuli.xyz
    1·
    2 months ago

    I moved to using DeepSeek which should have a much better energy efficiency compared to ChatGPT with same maybe even better results.

    Pretty much the only things I use LLMs with ttrpgs is when I want to customize something I have an example of.

    For example when I find a some kind of random table that has great format or style I like but doesn’t fit the area I would yo use it on I give it to LLM to produce similar but something that is more fitted to my need.

    Edit: the other way I use LLMs is to translate texts as we don’t play in English.

  • elize@endlesstalk.org
    11·
    2 months ago

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  • elize@endlesstalk.org
    11·
    2 months ago

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