Greetings, 3WD-verse! DM Chris here. Over the past several years, the spectre of AI has loomed over much of our daily lives. The implications for writers, artists, and application developers, as well as for consumers of these industries, are a serious concern. Both the copyright infringement issues and the inevitable reduction in force that these folks face require thoughtful consideration when adopting AI in the professional world.
But what about at the game table?
The responsible, non-commercial use of Artificial Intelligence to enhance your games is a wonderful new set of tools in your DM toolbox. I certainly don’t condone selling something created by AI, but its ability to act as another set of hands and ideas for you at the table is both powerful and time-saving. I’d like to highlight four examples where we used AI to enhance our campaigns with the hope that it may help demystify the highly-contentious technology and provide tips that you can bring to your own table.
First off, let’s define what Artificial Intelligence is in simple terms. AI is like a person who has read, seen, and absorbed an enormous amount of knowledge. They use this knowledge to create content that they believe will satisfy your question, or prompt as it is called. Machine learning was designed to operate and process like the human brain, where we take bits of stories or ideas and make new things out of them. But just like a person, AI only knows as much as it knows. And also like a person, sometimes they may answer incorrectly or randomly add unrelated material and ideas, called hallucinations, to the answer.
So without further ado, let’s dig into a few examples…
1. Using AI to Create Art For Your Session
This idea is DM Tony’s. Tony, as I do, likes to have art and images prepared for a session to help with his descriptions and to provide immersion. While Google searches and the like can provide much of this, unfortunately we often can’t find the image we were looking for. During our recent Journey to Ragnarok campaign, Tony turned to Meta AI to generate some of the images and the results were great.
By simply prompting the AI with a short description of the scene or person, and then tweaking through additional prompts where necessary (just like a person, it may not get it right at first), you can create unique and campaign-focused images that will help your players immerse themselves in your fantasy world.
For those of us who aren’t talented artists, like our dear friend Johnny Ott of For Monster Kids, who helped us design the new 3 Wise DMs logo, this can be an enormous help. A picture is worth a thousand words, and the right picture is priceless. Let AI help you visualize the parts of your adventure that you can’t find elsewhere.
2. Using AI to Enhance Narrative Side-Quests
We’ve talked often on the podcast about DM Dave’s inclusion of narrative side-quests during our recent Dragonlance campaign. They allow players to flesh out their characters and their place in your fantasy world, without taking valuable time away from when you’re all gathered around the table. It can add a lot to the player experience, but writing can also take time away from other important prep activities ahead of the next session.
In our current Lord of the Rings Roleplaying campaign, the inclusion of the Fellowship Phase – an extended time of rest, recovery, and reflection between adventures – provided the perfect opportunity for narrative side-quests. But with six players in the Company and an ever-shrinking amount of free time, I needed a hand. So I wrote a couple of short paragraphs, briefly touching on the previous adventure and then leaning into their backstory. I focused on the content I wanted to avoid having the AI start pulling in other non-related stuff about Middle-Earth, etc. Just like your Tolkien-obsessed friend, it will try to show you how smart it is, which can lead to a flowery, but overall insubstantial and confusing, written passage.
Once I had these ready, I opened ChatGPT and asked it to “Enhance the following passage…”. To my surprise, it turned the paragraphs into a short, well-written passage that added the right amount of shine to my original. As with everything generated through AI, they all needed to be checked to ensure that other wrong or unrelated bits didn’t make it in. However, it added enough drama and detail that I genuinely enjoyed reading them back. And the players enjoyed them, too—a quick and relatively easy way to help your players dig into their character.
3. Using AI to DM a Solo Adventure
Through the years, I’ve used several systems for solo gaming, with the Mythic system being one of the best. So, when it came time to write my article, I wondered: Could AI do as well or better than the earlier systems in running a solo campaign? Well, it turns out it actually does it quite well.
Before I started, I did a little research on the web to see what had been done and what people were saying about it. Along the way, I found a great article from Mind the Dungeon that really helped me dig in. Highly recommended, as well as his follow up article to it.
Opening up ChatGPT, I entered the prompt that Mind had initially used and let AI guide my pugilist fighter, Tristan Grey, through the village of Brighthollow and into an encounter with some kind of possessed hound. It asks for rolls, provides descriptions and NPCs, and seems to have a good working knowledge of the 5e ruleset. The only limitation so far is the amount of information it will save persistently, so after a while, hallucinations and incongruent events can eventually appear.
4. Using AI to Turn Your Session Notes into a Story About Your Campaign
This one I found by accident. One Saturday morning, I wondered aloud (ask my wife) about whether AI could help me turn my session notes into an ongoing story to help immortalize the Lord of the Rings Roleplaying campaign. I knew that given enough time I would have tried anyway, so this was another spot to see whether Artificial Intelligence could help me shorten the distance between.
I made sure that my first prompt let the AI know what and how I was feeding it information (wait for me to finish describing this character, etc. can help with loading info from additional sources). Then as the first step, I fed the character backstories into ChatGPT, then prompted it to ask me any additional questions about the specific characters to get it set up. Second, I fed my session notes from our inaugural session to give it a timeline.
It spit out a full narrative, but it was missing some of the flavor of the in-person session, So finally, I fed the player’s recollections of the adventure in – it’s a great idea to ask your players to give you a sentence or three about what they experienced or what they’d like to experience.
ChatGPT took that, along with everything I’d fed in previously, and crafted a compelling story that captured the players’ personalities in unexpected ways. Maybe I’ll share it when the campaign’s over.
Final Thoughts
Artificial Intelligence is a polarizing topic these days. From Skynet-style flights of fancy to the very real implications for content creators, it’s an evolving technology that isn’t going away anytime soon. But free from worrying about profiting off of others’ work, using AI at the game table can help provide you with a set of tools and a pair of hands that can help lift the sometimes heavy and time-consuming duties of a DM. Don’t be afraid to give it a shot, and likewise, don’t be afraid to keep doing it your own way if that’s what makes you happy.
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