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.
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.)
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.