I’ll start with a little bit of background. I moved to a different country just about two years ago and I have been slowly working on the language. I haven’t had many close friends who share similar interests with me. I also don’t care for the online games. Those reasons combined I haven’t played d&d in just about those two years.
Someone suggested ChatGPT to me for an unrelated reason. I was impressed and then I was suggested to try a text adventure with it. And to put it lightly I was a little bit blown away. I’ll admit, I even dropped a 20 to use the GPT-4. At this point, I think I have a mild addiction, as I’ve been spending a lot of my free time continuing our adventure.
But back to my original question. Have I just been this starved of role playing games that I think this is amazing? Or is it actually this good? What’s your opinion on these AI when it comes to RPGs?
As someone who loves homebrew stories with clever twists, “long term” hints for future plots and picking up ideas from the players to weave into the current story on the fly … it would not be the same for me. It might work well for generic solo play for a couple of evenings just to kill time, but I wouldn’t expect an AI to create something more elaborate than “go there, kill this, loot, XP, next quest”… and that’s a concept I usually find boring pretty fast.
That being said, if it brings you joy then there is no need to ask internet strangers for approval. Don’t let it sour your mood if others might or might not like the same things as you, and just enjoy what you enjoy ;) The world really doesn’t need any more gatekeeping.
I’ve never used chatgpt like that, but it’s probably okay to do so. One benefit is that you don’t have to keep track of the details yourself or juggle a game system because the LLM does it for you. Here is a hackathon full of gpt prompts that might raise your game: https://flowgpt.com/bounty/PEeCw9RxAzmqEC7xt4KM4?promptId=FMEKZxl7wKLFlEwguqDY9
Keep in mind though that there is an entire cottage industry of very fun solo tabletop rpgs that you can play yourself. Here is a blog describing some different categories to help you search for one. There are also many top ten lists to point you in a good direction.
Itch.io has tons of them. Here is a tag cloud that will make you feel like a kid in a candy store: https://itch.io/physical-games/tag-solo-rpg/tag-ttrpg
I will speak to my experiences with it.
I love solo roleplaying; I’ve been doing it for years. I was super excited with the advent of Dungeon AI, ChatGPT, NovelAI, and others. I have tried them all extensively. What I have found is that they are great sounding boards for generating ideas, descriptions, and even, sometimes, dialog.
However, AI is not quite ready to replace a DM. I’ve found that the stories it produces are very flat and repetitive. What’s more, they become very predictable once you realize that they act a bit like lucid dreams–it’s very easy to influence the story, even accidentally, by what you say.
Used in conjunction with a solo oracle, like Mythic GME, it can be a great asset.
