As some one who started in the Three little book days.
Original 70's DnD started as players vs a killer dungeon built by the DM Aka Gary Gygax
Ironically it was those of us who crossed over from traditional wargames who where more into the role playing your character.
You can see more recent players in pathfinder and dnd 5th wanting to win "the game", the full on RP style of the Mighty Nine of The Glass Cannon is quite different are actors or semi pro ones AND THEY ARE SO WELL BEHAVED""
To be a dungeon master is effectively to achieve AGI. It’s... not realistic. Current NLP systems have mapped out what language means, and can use that to generate text. But they have no idea what the text means. It requires incredible knowledge about how the world works and an ability to explain its reasoning in plain terms.
Of course the article is actually about writing a digital DM not a player. But isn't the main problem with this defining win conditions? Pretty easy to define win condition for chess or go.
Now, I haven't really played DnD (much to my sadness), but how do you win?
edit: I know the answer but I'm making a point with my question
Every d&d game i've played tends to end either with the players becoming godlike and destroying the world, more often everybody dying, or everyone getting bored or busy in life and just stopping.
>but how do you win?
When you've provided a fun and engaging experience for your players?
I do mean this seriously. Being a DM is about making sure the players are having fun and always giving players something interesting to do. It shouldn't be too easy or too hard. The things should have some variety, you have to be able to adapt to what your players decide to do. Just because you have some cool stuff planned doesn't mean they'll find it, you can guide them a bit, but don't funnel them and accept they may not see your cool stuff, you can always save it for another time.
I guess my point is, keeping player fun and engagement high while allowing the game to run its natural course would be what I would think of as the win condition for a dm. Finding a way to measure this and provide this seems like a fairly difficult task though.
This is kind of the point I was making with my question. Playing DnD is not about winning. Being a DM is not about reaching some sort of conclusion. So it's essentially impossible to make an AI good at this without achieving true general AI (not within our lifetime for sure)
True, but I can imagine a world where AI DMs are in vogue, and are curated not for their one-size-fits-all perfection, but for their aesthetic or functional qualities. The hardest thing to capture will be truly surprising off-screen storytelling moments that role playing games enable. Otherwise, you can probably optimize for 'challenging combat,' 'fun puzzles,' 'social interaction' etc...
Have a hard-nosed, Old School Revival (OSR) group who enjoys hack and slash dungeon crawls? Great, all you need is an AI who picks hard but fair challenges, describes dire and interesting settings, and keeps rewarding moments (in this case, hard-fought victories) coming frequently.
Like to tell stories instead? Seed a plot with a laid-back AI who leaves lots of room to breathe, throws lots of skill checks at crafty players, and excels at creating complex personalities and interactions via a cast of interesting NPCs.
Rimworld is an simulation/tactics/base-building game that offers more traditionally game oriented "AI Directors," but the different kinds of directors offer different prioritization over moments of peace, intense challenge, battle, etc., based on just a few settings. Even blowing out that settings list a bit more could create interesting results.
interesting, i didnt know about that setting in rimworld. the game has been high on my list due to the fact ive had much FUN with DF, so im gonna bring rimworld up on that list!
Now is the perfect time! Rimworld just got a gigantic (free) 1.1 update and a smaller (paid) DLC to go with it.
Rimworld is like 2d dwarf fortress, but way more accessible. The controls make sense, and the game teaches you as you play. Also Rimworld has about 3 and a half metric tons of mods.
I first saw RimWorld while chilling in a hotel room watching YouTube a while back, and I bought it back while it was still in early access. Tynan has done a phenomenal job making the game go from good to fantastic.
IMHO one of the hardest parts of DMing is building tension and a sense that there is real danger, without just bringing out enemies that can completely roll over the players. Ideally the group should survive, but constantly feel threatened and like they "just barely" made it through a story's climax.
In other words those victories need to be earned, which is a fine balancing act since dice rolls are random and bad things happen.
It can also lead to awesome situations when the dice go extremely well, everything lines up, and the players feel like legit bad-asses. It is the DM's job to create situations where that can happen!
I still remember a friend of mine telling me that he had been genuinely scared at one point in an adventure. Like watching-a-horror-movie scared.
(A flying castle attacks the city; it's made to crash; someone has to go in there and find out what's up; cue our heros; they enter through a breach in the wall into a kind of internal moat; it's dark, you're up to your waist in water, and there's something in here with you! (Water Weirds. Damn near invisible snake-like water elementals...) Good times!)
My best horror dungeon so far was a 3-level abandoned dwarven mine. 2 first levels are infested with kobolds and pseudodragons, players kill some kobolds, block off some others with explosions, solve puzzles to get through blocked lift to the last level and see that it was blocked from inside on purpose, there are dwarven runes on the walls written with blood warning not to speak to each other and not to read anything or you'll get infected by HIM.
I borrowed it from SCP series - it's a "memetic hazard" - nonmagically infects brains when it's thought of or spoken of. Mechanically players roll a Wisdom save whenever there's infection opportunity, on a fail they start shouting the meme (then others have to roll :)), on a bad fail they become possesed and run somewhere. You of course don't explain it to the players, just ask them to roll when needed :)
As they explore searching for the artifact they were hired to recover they find the whole mine is full of dead bodies calmly sitting in circles, pools of dried blood, all the books are burned and there are bodies of dwarves who were fighting each other before they died. Then there's the last room with a huge portal that starts to activate when players who got possesed run into it.
The climax is a big pvp fight between the players that try to teleport to their new god and the rest of the party trying to knock them unconscious and drag them away before the portal activates :)
That sounds great! The guys I was DM'ing for wouldn't have fallen for it though: they had a knack for confounding your best laid plans. E.g. they would have just read the warnings and bugged out. Or forced captured kobolds to go in first or something.
Later on in the wrecked flying castle there was a room with a clockwork horror in it that I was sure would give them a hard time. They trapped it in a chest right off and ran away before it broke out.
Another time I had a classic dungeon set up for them complete with a lich. They woke up the lich... and ran away. Like all the way out of the dungeon and then halfway across the freaking continent. They just left it for someone else to deal with.
Unrelated story time...
In another campaign one player had this dwarf fighter and he had rules-lawyered and finagled to get him specialized with two axes and multiple attacks per round. Three with the right and two with the left, five attacks per round. We nicknamed him "the Blender" because he could just chop the shit out of anything. He was stupid and reckless, a follower of the great god of war VTRE (Victory Through Reckless Endangerment!) and he was awesome.
This was a Spelljammer campaign (am I the only one who loved/loves Spelljammer!? It was so much fun) and one battle in particular they were fighting a ship of mindflayers. Scary right? The Blender jumps on a loaded ballista and tells the crew to launch him at the Illithid ship. He crashes into the deck, bounces up, grabs his axes from his belt, and proceeds to straight butcher the mindflayers. I forget the details but it was one of those times that the whole table is howling, the dice are hot, and it's just unbelievable but so fun no one cares.
I'll usually fudge at least a few dice rolls as a DM depending on how the game or encounter's going as the situation requires. If I roll a bunch of crits in a row for example, i'll maybe just call it one instead a bunch, maybe that wasn't a one hit kill when it should have been, stuff like that. If it's too random it usually stops being fun for everyone. It's a really hard balance though you don't want the players to be frustrated, but you don't want them to feel like their cheesing through the game.
For dungeons at least i try to go for that nethack or metroidvania vibe of slowly going deeper while your supplies and health dwindle, so each encounter needs to be considered more as they get deeper.
Above world adventures I try and let them be more free in their decisions but keep the consequences a bit higher for things.
I've yet to play any computer or console rpgs that really come close to the feeling of playing a good d&d game, even the ones that heavily use the rules. Nwn online came close, but those typically had human DMS the single player game was fun, but even on coop, still wasn't really like playing dnd without a DM player.
I remember one looking through the rule book for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG which had an interesting concept: players had a certain number of "plot points" (I forget exactly what they called them) which allowed them to overturn an unfortunate die roll. It was based on the idea that in the TV show, the main characters would often manage to get out of a tight spot through well-timed luck.
It's even more nuanced than that, the DM <-> Players relationship is one where nobody really wants to "win". The ideal play is a session where the players are pushed to their limits, maybe one of the PCs dies (and maybe as the DM you send them on another quest then if they decide as a group they want to try and get that PC resurrected).
Building a AI DM that can follow a scripted pre-written dungeon would still be a challenge, building an AI that can understand how the players are experiencing the gaming session to know if they want things moving faster, or they want more elaboration, or more unexpected experiences... you're really getting to the point of Ava (Ex Machina) and even beyond Data (Star Trek).
What you do when one of your players' characters bites it is you roll a bunch of dice and look very busy for a few seconds leafing through rulebooks and thumbing through tables, then announce that the spirit of the dead character has ended up occupying the body of one of the enemies they're fighting (the more disgusting and embarassing, the better) through some kind of magical confluence, perhaps as the result of the actions of another character (preferrably of the caster/ invoker persuasion).
Even better, you _hide_ from your players the fact that the player's character has died (according to the dice) and instead present the possession event as the result of the other players' actions. "You cast the spell but it rebounds on the Dark Cauldron and pushes Janice's spirit through her body and into the body of the Goblin Scroll Carrier, narrowly missing the Goblin Shaman standing in front of him (or is it her?). Janice- you suddendly find yourself looking at your spasming body on the floor. You feel something sticking up your nose. You realise with horror that it's not your nose, it's the goblin caddy's nose and that thing sticking up it is his finger. Actually, it's now your finger. You're now a goblin."
Then you send the players on a quest alright- a quest to find a McGuffin that can reverse the situtation and put the PC's spirit back into her original body.
The point of course is that you don't have to kill off the character completely, so you avoid all the delay caused by the character's player having to roll a new one while the others are fighting and you avoid the awkward situation where the player ends up having to choose between the character that died and the new character (at the point where the old one can be resurrected).
I'm pretty sure that it should be perfectly possible to teach a neural net to do that.
(No, I'm taking the piss- there's no way you can teach a neural net that).
[Edit: all that goblin body swap stuff works a lot better if the PC was a paladin and if they were the character of a player who tends to play paladins and knights and whatnot. MWAHAHAHAHAH! Try teaching _that_ to a neural net.]
If the goal of a DM is defined like this, then a genuine AGI would be more likely to cheat: instead of playing D&D at all, the AGI would use hypnosis to manipulate the players into a pure hedonistic pleasure-trance. Whether such an unintended result would be a good thing or a bad thing is a philosophical question, but it certainly wouldn't be an accurate imitation of a human D&D session.
Tabletop RPGs are a broad range of activities stretching from the more traditionally game-like ones that are or are very close to tabletop wargaming, where stories may be involved but it's recognizably game-like with winners and losers (though "winner" and "loser" may still be a bit subjective or muddled, in much the same way it can be in, say, a battle in an actual war) to, at the other end, games that are lightly-structured collaborative storytelling activities.
So, what "winning" looks like depends on the group and the game. Having one's character die may feel a lot like losing at one table, but just another part of the story at another, meaningful, maybe, but not a "loss" any more than passing GO and collecting $200 is losing—roll up another character, the story goes on, and we've closed a meaningful chapter in it.
At most tables, I think, the rules basically exist just to give structure and fair-feeling challenge to an extended session of play-pretend.
I don't have a link or reference handy but your question reminded me of an old cybernetic device that improvised music along with human musicians. It could detect and respond to novelty in the human music, and it would get "bored" so to play along with it the humans had to figure out novel musical, uh, stuff... melodies and whatnot.
There seems like a vast difference between music and D&D stories/games, but just yesterday there was that RNN-sci-fi-editor experiment on here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22427958 ) so maybe it's not as far-fetched?
In any event, being a good DM is really really fun, I don't think I'd want to let a computer muscle in on it, eh?
I wouldn't call it a win condition but an attention metric would be a good start. You want your players to get engaged, aka. "have fun".
And come to think of it, it is not so different from ads and it is a bit scary. An AI able to provide an exciting game of DnD is going to use a lot of psychological manipulation, which is great when playing a game, much less so if you someone is pushing an agenda.
BTW, I know more about video games than tabletop RPGs but let me tell you that video games manipulate you constantly, for your pleasure. Illusion of choice, random numbers biased in your favor, the last bit of life that is worth a lot more than the rest, enemies you don't see that are slowed down, there are lots and lots of these. And these are just the tricks that make the game more enjoyable, not the dark patterns of games with in-app purchases.
I think one can argue that people have been playing role playing games GM'd by computers for going on 40 years now. Going back to the gold box games in the literal sense, but almost all video games are essentially dungeons and dragons under the hood -- hitpoints, encounters, npcs, etc.
You don't need win condition. Tetris has no win condition yet it's easily trainable. You want some kind of feedback, and human players can just have a 2 buttons in the interface - "Good DM" and "Bad DM".
Why is it not full AGI? Seems to me that the ability to perform 'spontaneous yet coherent storytelling' perforce makes one a universal explainer (i.e. a person).
I think creating an AI dungeon master has a wide range of difficulty depending on how open ended the game is intended to be.
The more structured and rules based the game is, the easier it is to create a dungeon master - the more free form and "on the fly" the game is the harder the task. So while creating a dungeon master may be "easy" if the rules and story are heavily enumerated, it likely won't be very fun as it doesn't capture the free-formedness that makes D&D so fun.
D&D isn't even the most free form RPG out there, there are plenty of systems that run the gamut from "highly tactical and rules based" to "almost freeform collaborative story telling."
D&D at least has well defined combat rules. I've ran games that use cinematic combat rules, where the books have suggestions and some math, but a lot of things are left up in the air with the general guidance of "whatever is awesome."
So there aren't rules for shooting grenades out of mid air, but it made for an awesome climax to the story as the team raced onto the escape ship and the hanger bay door was slamming down, so of course I allowed it.
I was playing one game where we the players objected to how the military was prepping for an AI invasion so we rebelled, next session the DM brought in a giant map and it turned into a base building tower defense session.
D&D can go off the rails, other systems can go off the rails then continue until things are off planet!
The main issue with AI Dungeon right now is that it is too free form. The AI is incapable of remembering plot points, and just writes very convincing prose based on the last few paragraphs. This has the result that one can be playing a medieval game and then quickly end up getting on a motorcycle and driving away.
That seems easy to fix by setting a few ground rules on the scenario like a human DM does. The world is possible_worlds[6] then you only search in that space or replace the nouns or whatever.
You forget the step where when we get comfortable enough with something we stop calling X AI at all because obviously it' just Z.
NB: I'm not convinced this is the wrong thing to do, many of the things we've historically labeled "AI" are very obviously not, at least in retrospect.
Perhaps the cycle ends only when an AI can explain to us how we are getting it wrong.
We just don't have a very good definition of what "intelligence" actually is. Hence we're trying to set the bar somewhere. "Surely a machine that can play chess is intelligent". Nope, that's not it. "But surely a machine that recognizes objects in images is intelligent". Nah, it's just good at recognizing patterns of pixels. And so on and so forth. It's a noisy process, but we're slowly moving in the right direction.
Right, we've been doing this for coming on 60 years now, and we have a much better idea of what isn't intelligence than what is. But that's still useful.
This is sort of like asking: If you had Star Trek replicators, what would be the optimal configuration to use those replicators as paperweights?
D&D is not a game with rigorously defined rules and winning conditions, instead it's a means to an end, the end being: have fun with friends through a mutual fantasy. If you had a genuine post-singularity superhuman AGI, it would be silly to use it for D&D, because you could just directly instruct it, "Make my friends and I have fun through a mutual fantasy". This might be inherently dangerous because a truly superhuman AGI would probably be so effective that you and your friends would end up unable to distinguish said mutual fantasy from reality and you'd all end up blissfully running around in the resulting fantasy for the rest of your lives.
Depends on your definition of dangerous. Dangerous in the same sense that a button you could press to directly stimulate your brain's pleasure centers would be dangerous, because you'd probably end up pressing it to the exclusion of everything else (personal hygiene, family, eating...)
>It was solved (for AI) by Stuart Russell in his new book Human Compatible
Correction: it was downplayed by Stuart Russell. Stuart took simplistic strawman examples and made them look silly by assuming perfectly calibrated common sense in the hypothetical AGI. (Based on skimming the link you posted; I haven't read Stuart's book.)
You should read instead of skim. Stuart Russell specifically rejects the idea of “perfectly calibrated common sense” in AI. He says AI should not interpret any command literally, but instead take a Bayesian approach. This is much closer to how humans respond to one another’s demands.
Except we don’t have that. AI research is mostly about taking a problem that’s just a little to difficult to actually do and working on it. A great DM AI May not need to understand what’s going on any more than a jeopardy AI, it just needs to be good enough to work.
A great many things like image classification initially look like they need AGI, but you can make something useful without it.
Hang on a minute. We alread have AI DMs, without being anywhere near AGI. It's just -they are very limited as DMs and they're not even recognised for being DMs, we just think of them as whatever impossibly complicated logic that runs inside a C-RPG and is responsible for managing encounters, handing out rewards, and yes, even advancing the story (such as it is in most C-RPGs), largely through pre-scripted events, of course.
Like I say, this kind of software, pretty common in C-RPGs, is very limited when compared to a human GM, in particular because it cannot present the player with genuinely novel situations and cannot respond to the player's actions with genuinely novel reactions. In other words, the kind of "AI" (ad-hoc game logic) that runs on C-RPGs, is extremely primitive and very unsatisfying, hence the reliance of most C-RPGs on action rather than _inter_action with the players.
Since these kinds of ad-hoc "DMs" are so very limited, even a very small improvement in their ability to interact with the player(s) in surprising and imaginative manners would be a _huge_ improvement.
In the same sense, the ability to reliably generate an interesting story _procedurally_ would be a _huge_ improvement on the current situation, where the majority of procedurally generated game content is just environments with enemies, rewards etc. There are very few games that go a little bit beyond that, e.g. Dwarf Fortress that generates an entire world's mythology and so on.
So there's no need to go as far as AGI. We likely don't even have to go as far as machine learning. The kind of improvement that most gamers would really enjoy is probably within our technological capabilities right now- but there's very little in terms of efforts to make it happen. Why, I'm not sure.
If you're willing to stretch things that far, a chess playing robot could be considered a DM who administers an extremely hyperspecific campaign which is isomorphic to chess. Or, tic-tac-toe for that matter.
A C-RPG captures D&D in the same sense that a WWII-themed video game captures the true World War II. In other words: not at all. A WWII-themed game applies WWII costumes, sound effects, etc. to an underlying game logic. Switching the WWII costumes to D&D costumes and marketing the result as D&D doesn't really make it D&D.
A lower bar might be a Paranoia[0] GM. For those that haven't played, Paranoia is a tabletop RPG that takes place in a dystopian future ruled by an insane/evil AI. It is hilarious fun. I could see it being easier for an AI to RP an insane AI than a D&D DM. :D
A huge part of the charm of TTRPGs is playing a non-digital game face to face with other humans. Even if we had AI that was as entertaining as a skilled human DM (unlikely to be possible IMHO), the human might end up being preferable since hanging out with humans is one of the goals of this particular pursuit.
Plus, we already have (weak) AI DMs. They're called video game RPGs. You're the player (as are many others in the case of an MMO), the game itself is the GM. They do many things better than a human could (handle lots of background math, present gorgeously rendered environments, have professionally voice acted NPCs, have skill based real time combat), but the audiences don't entirely overlap because TTRPG players are seeking the freedom of choice and limitless outcome that video games cannot really match.
There's no end of people making video games that are direct attempts to convert D&D to a digital format. Take the new Baldur's Gate for example[0]. All the same spells present, digital dice rolling, etc.
Personally, I say let things fall to the medium that best suits them. If D&D is sufficiently complicated rules wise that it is actually more fun to have software take care of that so you can just focus on the tactical combat and scripted story choices, then the video game is probably your best bet! There are many other TTRPGs where this is not the case, and where any digitization would take away much more than it would add. Such RPGs are elegant enough rules wise that they do not slow down play at the table, and you can spend 99% of your time just relishing each other's madcap plans and imaginative descriptions of things.
CRPGs are no competition, there's no comparison, really. When you do anything outside the box CRPGs just break, while a good game master will run with it and that's how the best stories happen. We found a boss we didn't wanted to fight. Our spellcasters decided sending a construct with 2 bags of holding to put one into another near the boss will destroy it. It worked, but it also created portal to another dimension, and when we tried to recover the hostages 2 player characters got thrown into that dimension. The rest of the party had to pay a powerful mage to recover them with our best magical weapon. Half a session (several hours) was spent arguing over who owns the magical weapon and if it's good idea to give it away :) They almost fought in game :) Meanwhile my character stranded in another dimension decided to become a priest (I was a barbarian before).
These kind of stuff never happens in CRPGs - it couldn't because there's infinite number of possible open-ended solutions to any problem. If AI can improvise them I'd argue it's as good as a Turing Test.
BTW complicated rules aren't that big of a problem - there is a compromise between CRPGs and TTRPGs - and it's computer-assisted TTRPGs played over internet. The most important advantage is that you can play with people from other continent, so it's much easier to find players. But the computer-assisted part is also making the rules much less of a problem. You set up your character (all the items, feats, skills, abilities) before the game, and when DM wants he asks you to roll the attack, you click and the system rolls the dices for everybody to see, adds the needed modifiers, calculates the damage (including critical hit if needed etc. ) and shows how much hitpoints you lost.
It's faster than doing all this stuff physically and beyond the initial setup and occasional level-up it makes complicated rules more bearable.
> If D&D is sufficiently complicated rules wise that it is actually more fun to have software take care of that so you can just focus on the tactical combat and scripted story choices, then the video game is probably your best bet!
No kidding. I've been writing a WinForms program that is basically a combination character progression tracking, inventory management and basic battle system for Star Wars Fantasy Flight Games.
Why? Do we not want the person-to-person experience? Hardly! We need more wetware space for strategy and thinking of creative ideas, so we need to free up the parts for calculating what number of ability vs proficiency dice and what talents may mess with the roll etc.
There are ways to play traditional pen and paper rpg over internet now (roll20 for example), and it's actually better than playing them physically in many respects - the system draws the map, allows moving the tokens zooming and scrolling, calculates the distances, shows the fog of war, throws dices and includes bonuses in the rolls. After initial setup it makes it much easier for GM and players because you don't need to remember to include all the bonuses every time you attack with your sword.
You still use voice (usually over discord) and DM decides what happens on the fly.
But most importantly you don't have to play with people that live close to you, makes it much easier to find someone to play with, it's why I started playing p&p rpg again after over a decade.
I could see sites like roll20 recording the sessions with metadata (at this point they said this and GM told "roll perception" and they rolled d20 + 3) as a way to train a virtual DM. Of course it would need crazy amount of games.
Roll20 requires a lot of upfront work to create those integrated character sheets. Many games on roll20 are only partially implemented, and many more are not implemented at all. An untold number could not be implemented on roll20 because they have requirements which were not considered early in the development phase for the system, and therefore are impossible to implement.
It also requires a lot of GM research and development, even for those games that are at least partially supported.
Roll20 also has a marginal audio chat solution. It was so bad that we chose to replace that part with Discord in my current campaign.
There is a background music solution available in roll20, but I was never impressed by it.
In my current game, we found it was better in the long run to convert everything to Discord, because it was better on the collaboration and audio chat functions, which helped the humans communicate with each other better and resulted in an overall better game. We lost the interactive mapping functions and the mostly kinda semi sorta integrated character sheets of roll20, but in the end, those were less important to us than the other collaboration functions of Discord.
Yes the voice chat in roll20 sucks and everybody use discord instead, also for background music as it allows players to set relative volume of each player and music. You can easily keep discord in the background and do everything else on roll20. The system for rolling is pretty good for the games I played (D&D 5th edition and Pathfinder 1st edition).
There's some tips for 5e:
- set "always roll with advantage" in campaign settings to true, it removes the fiddling with the system by the player each time they want to roll, now it's just a click on a weapon or a skill, and it lets DM decide after the roll if it was advantage and change the interpretation without rerolling. You simply ignore the second roll if it was a straight test, take worse or better out of the 2 rolls if player had disadvantage/advantage
- install free chrome extension "vtt enhancement suite" - it allows for executing macros on all selected tokens at once - especially useful for starting combat with lots of enemies - you select for example 10 tokens and click on a macro that rolls initiative for each of them and adds them to the initiative tracker, you ask players to select their tokens and click the same macro - 5 seconds and combat with 16 participants is ready to go - normally I would have to roll physically 10 times, ask players and sort it manually and it would take a minute or 2
- use DM layer for hidden enemies/traps/secret doors/notes/etc - you can then easily move them to map/token layer when players roll perception
- reinforcements in a combat are easy when you put some tokens in DM layer - you can add them all to the combat tracker and the tokens on DM layer will be hidden from the players until you move them to token layer
- make players drag and drop their most used spells and items to a quick-use bar on the bottom left of the screen - it's 15 minutes to set this up on the session 0, but later it eliminates the problem "I closed my character sheet, wait 20 seconds for me to find the button to roll the attack"
- set up tokens to have hitpoints and AC bars on them (keep them hidden from players)
- when you click on hitpoints bar on a token and write "-17" it will automatically decrease the hitpoints by 17 points, don't need to substract in your head every time
All of this allows me to run combat several times faster than I could possibly do physically, it adds up quickly.
Roll20 even for what is presumably the best-supported game (DND 5e) has completely unuably broken UI. Something as simple as equipping a piece of armour is an excersise in trying 5 different things, let alone trying to wrangle magical items into the system or get the hp bar to be accruate which almost never works. It takes far longer to teach somebody to use the character sheet system than it does to teach them literally all of the rules of DND, and even then it consistently finds new ways to unexpectedly fuck up stats and bonuses at a rate of about 6 or 7 times per session. Overall, If I must run an online game, I just use pdf character sheets and just have players /roll d20s in chat and ignore all the roll20 functionality as its such a nightmare.
Overall, in trying to reduce the complexity of the game, they gave you a finnicky spreadsheet nightmare of half-baked solutions to problems no-one had.
Well, it works pretty well for me, haven't had any serious problems DMing for 5 people 3 of which were complete newbies with d&d and roll20. Maybe because my players are mostly programmers. Or because I had to use roll20 because I don't have people to play with locally so I learnt both roll20 and d&d 5 at the same time.
> Something as simple as equipping a piece of armour is an excersise in trying 5 different things
You just drag&drop it from compendium to your inventory?
Not Dungeons and Dragons, but Doug Lenat's Eurisko entered fleets for the role-playing game Traveller Adventure 5: Trillion Credit Squadron. It won the 1981 and 1982 championships.
Eurisko was GOFAI, written in RLL, a frame-based language implemented in Lisp.
To be fair, that AI seems to have essentially solved a complex spreadsheet-type optimisation challenge rather than anything with an open-ended narrative. Nonetheless, it is a very interesting story
82 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadOn the flip side, this is what people said. Forget Chess - Go is the one. Forget Go - D&D is the one.
the thing about 70s style D&D is the liberal arts involvement as role playing is really thespianism
the costumes and the soapboxing as people play out thier characters was really something
Original 70's DnD started as players vs a killer dungeon built by the DM Aka Gary Gygax
Ironically it was those of us who crossed over from traditional wargames who where more into the role playing your character.
You can see more recent players in pathfinder and dnd 5th wanting to win "the game", the full on RP style of the Mighty Nine of The Glass Cannon is quite different are actors or semi pro ones AND THEY ARE SO WELL BEHAVED""
Being a DM - or a player - can be very challenging indeed.
If someone can make even a decent AI DM, I'd say turn that one loose on NP-complete for a followup softball question.
Now, I haven't really played DnD (much to my sadness), but how do you win?
edit: I know the answer but I'm making a point with my question
By spending quality time with your friends and having a lot of fun imagining an epic quest?
>but how do you win?
When you've provided a fun and engaging experience for your players?
I do mean this seriously. Being a DM is about making sure the players are having fun and always giving players something interesting to do. It shouldn't be too easy or too hard. The things should have some variety, you have to be able to adapt to what your players decide to do. Just because you have some cool stuff planned doesn't mean they'll find it, you can guide them a bit, but don't funnel them and accept they may not see your cool stuff, you can always save it for another time.
I guess my point is, keeping player fun and engagement high while allowing the game to run its natural course would be what I would think of as the win condition for a dm. Finding a way to measure this and provide this seems like a fairly difficult task though.
Have a hard-nosed, Old School Revival (OSR) group who enjoys hack and slash dungeon crawls? Great, all you need is an AI who picks hard but fair challenges, describes dire and interesting settings, and keeps rewarding moments (in this case, hard-fought victories) coming frequently.
Like to tell stories instead? Seed a plot with a laid-back AI who leaves lots of room to breathe, throws lots of skill checks at crafty players, and excels at creating complex personalities and interactions via a cast of interesting NPCs.
Rimworld is an simulation/tactics/base-building game that offers more traditionally game oriented "AI Directors," but the different kinds of directors offer different prioritization over moments of peace, intense challenge, battle, etc., based on just a few settings. Even blowing out that settings list a bit more could create interesting results.
Rimworld is like 2d dwarf fortress, but way more accessible. The controls make sense, and the game teaches you as you play. Also Rimworld has about 3 and a half metric tons of mods.
I first saw RimWorld while chilling in a hotel room watching YouTube a while back, and I bought it back while it was still in early access. Tynan has done a phenomenal job making the game go from good to fantastic.
In other words those victories need to be earned, which is a fine balancing act since dice rolls are random and bad things happen.
It can also lead to awesome situations when the dice go extremely well, everything lines up, and the players feel like legit bad-asses. It is the DM's job to create situations where that can happen!
(A flying castle attacks the city; it's made to crash; someone has to go in there and find out what's up; cue our heros; they enter through a breach in the wall into a kind of internal moat; it's dark, you're up to your waist in water, and there's something in here with you! (Water Weirds. Damn near invisible snake-like water elementals...) Good times!)
I borrowed it from SCP series - it's a "memetic hazard" - nonmagically infects brains when it's thought of or spoken of. Mechanically players roll a Wisdom save whenever there's infection opportunity, on a fail they start shouting the meme (then others have to roll :)), on a bad fail they become possesed and run somewhere. You of course don't explain it to the players, just ask them to roll when needed :)
As they explore searching for the artifact they were hired to recover they find the whole mine is full of dead bodies calmly sitting in circles, pools of dried blood, all the books are burned and there are bodies of dwarves who were fighting each other before they died. Then there's the last room with a huge portal that starts to activate when players who got possesed run into it.
The climax is a big pvp fight between the players that try to teleport to their new god and the rest of the party trying to knock them unconscious and drag them away before the portal activates :)
Great source of ideas for scary monsters/dungeons/villans/legends after reskinning from modern times to whatever setting you need.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation
Later on in the wrecked flying castle there was a room with a clockwork horror in it that I was sure would give them a hard time. They trapped it in a chest right off and ran away before it broke out.
Another time I had a classic dungeon set up for them complete with a lich. They woke up the lich... and ran away. Like all the way out of the dungeon and then halfway across the freaking continent. They just left it for someone else to deal with.
Unrelated story time...
In another campaign one player had this dwarf fighter and he had rules-lawyered and finagled to get him specialized with two axes and multiple attacks per round. Three with the right and two with the left, five attacks per round. We nicknamed him "the Blender" because he could just chop the shit out of anything. He was stupid and reckless, a follower of the great god of war VTRE (Victory Through Reckless Endangerment!) and he was awesome.
This was a Spelljammer campaign (am I the only one who loved/loves Spelljammer!? It was so much fun) and one battle in particular they were fighting a ship of mindflayers. Scary right? The Blender jumps on a loaded ballista and tells the crew to launch him at the Illithid ship. He crashes into the deck, bounces up, grabs his axes from his belt, and proceeds to straight butcher the mindflayers. I forget the details but it was one of those times that the whole table is howling, the dice are hot, and it's just unbelievable but so fun no one cares.
For dungeons at least i try to go for that nethack or metroidvania vibe of slowly going deeper while your supplies and health dwindle, so each encounter needs to be considered more as they get deeper.
Above world adventures I try and let them be more free in their decisions but keep the consequences a bit higher for things.
I've yet to play any computer or console rpgs that really come close to the feeling of playing a good d&d game, even the ones that heavily use the rules. Nwn online came close, but those typically had human DMS the single player game was fun, but even on coop, still wasn't really like playing dnd without a DM player.
Building a AI DM that can follow a scripted pre-written dungeon would still be a challenge, building an AI that can understand how the players are experiencing the gaming session to know if they want things moving faster, or they want more elaboration, or more unexpected experiences... you're really getting to the point of Ava (Ex Machina) and even beyond Data (Star Trek).
Even better, you _hide_ from your players the fact that the player's character has died (according to the dice) and instead present the possession event as the result of the other players' actions. "You cast the spell but it rebounds on the Dark Cauldron and pushes Janice's spirit through her body and into the body of the Goblin Scroll Carrier, narrowly missing the Goblin Shaman standing in front of him (or is it her?). Janice- you suddendly find yourself looking at your spasming body on the floor. You feel something sticking up your nose. You realise with horror that it's not your nose, it's the goblin caddy's nose and that thing sticking up it is his finger. Actually, it's now your finger. You're now a goblin."
Then you send the players on a quest alright- a quest to find a McGuffin that can reverse the situtation and put the PC's spirit back into her original body.
The point of course is that you don't have to kill off the character completely, so you avoid all the delay caused by the character's player having to roll a new one while the others are fighting and you avoid the awkward situation where the player ends up having to choose between the character that died and the new character (at the point where the old one can be resurrected).
I'm pretty sure that it should be perfectly possible to teach a neural net to do that.
(No, I'm taking the piss- there's no way you can teach a neural net that).
[Edit: all that goblin body swap stuff works a lot better if the PC was a paladin and if they were the character of a player who tends to play paladins and knights and whatnot. MWAHAHAHAHAH! Try teaching _that_ to a neural net.]
So, what "winning" looks like depends on the group and the game. Having one's character die may feel a lot like losing at one table, but just another part of the story at another, meaningful, maybe, but not a "loss" any more than passing GO and collecting $200 is losing—roll up another character, the story goes on, and we've closed a meaningful chapter in it.
At most tables, I think, the rules basically exist just to give structure and fair-feeling challenge to an extended session of play-pretend.
There seems like a vast difference between music and D&D stories/games, but just yesterday there was that RNN-sci-fi-editor experiment on here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22427958 ) so maybe it's not as far-fetched?
In any event, being a good DM is really really fun, I don't think I'd want to let a computer muscle in on it, eh?
And come to think of it, it is not so different from ads and it is a bit scary. An AI able to provide an exciting game of DnD is going to use a lot of psychological manipulation, which is great when playing a game, much less so if you someone is pushing an agenda.
BTW, I know more about video games than tabletop RPGs but let me tell you that video games manipulate you constantly, for your pleasure. Illusion of choice, random numbers biased in your favor, the last bit of life that is worth a lot more than the rest, enemies you don't see that are slowed down, there are lots and lots of these. And these are just the tricks that make the game more enjoyable, not the dark patterns of games with in-app purchases.
Turing's DM as it were
Those are the rules, not the game.
The more structured and rules based the game is, the easier it is to create a dungeon master - the more free form and "on the fly" the game is the harder the task. So while creating a dungeon master may be "easy" if the rules and story are heavily enumerated, it likely won't be very fun as it doesn't capture the free-formedness that makes D&D so fun.
D&D at least has well defined combat rules. I've ran games that use cinematic combat rules, where the books have suggestions and some math, but a lot of things are left up in the air with the general guidance of "whatever is awesome."
So there aren't rules for shooting grenades out of mid air, but it made for an awesome climax to the story as the team raced onto the escape ship and the hanger bay door was slamming down, so of course I allowed it.
I was playing one game where we the players objected to how the military was prepping for an AI invasion so we rebelled, next session the DM brought in a giant map and it turned into a base building tower defense session.
D&D can go off the rails, other systems can go off the rails then continue until things are off planet!
As soon as Ys become Xs over time, and we come up with new Ys: we’re making progress.
NB: I'm not convinced this is the wrong thing to do, many of the things we've historically labeled "AI" are very obviously not, at least in retrospect.
Perhaps the cycle ends only when an AI can explain to us how we are getting it wrong.
D&D is not a game with rigorously defined rules and winning conditions, instead it's a means to an end, the end being: have fun with friends through a mutual fantasy. If you had a genuine post-singularity superhuman AGI, it would be silly to use it for D&D, because you could just directly instruct it, "Make my friends and I have fun through a mutual fantasy". This might be inherently dangerous because a truly superhuman AGI would probably be so effective that you and your friends would end up unable to distinguish said mutual fantasy from reality and you'd all end up blissfully running around in the resulting fantasy for the rest of your lives.
Edit: I personally know a good amount of people for that is a life goal.
[1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Wireheading
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/30/book-review-human-comp...
Correction: it was downplayed by Stuart Russell. Stuart took simplistic strawman examples and made them look silly by assuming perfectly calibrated common sense in the hypothetical AGI. (Based on skimming the link you posted; I haven't read Stuart's book.)
Except we don’t have that. AI research is mostly about taking a problem that’s just a little to difficult to actually do and working on it. A great DM AI May not need to understand what’s going on any more than a jeopardy AI, it just needs to be good enough to work.
A great many things like image classification initially look like they need AGI, but you can make something useful without it.
Like I say, this kind of software, pretty common in C-RPGs, is very limited when compared to a human GM, in particular because it cannot present the player with genuinely novel situations and cannot respond to the player's actions with genuinely novel reactions. In other words, the kind of "AI" (ad-hoc game logic) that runs on C-RPGs, is extremely primitive and very unsatisfying, hence the reliance of most C-RPGs on action rather than _inter_action with the players.
Since these kinds of ad-hoc "DMs" are so very limited, even a very small improvement in their ability to interact with the player(s) in surprising and imaginative manners would be a _huge_ improvement.
In the same sense, the ability to reliably generate an interesting story _procedurally_ would be a _huge_ improvement on the current situation, where the majority of procedurally generated game content is just environments with enemies, rewards etc. There are very few games that go a little bit beyond that, e.g. Dwarf Fortress that generates an entire world's mythology and so on.
So there's no need to go as far as AGI. We likely don't even have to go as far as machine learning. The kind of improvement that most gamers would really enjoy is probably within our technological capabilities right now- but there's very little in terms of efforts to make it happen. Why, I'm not sure.
A C-RPG captures D&D in the same sense that a WWII-themed video game captures the true World War II. In other words: not at all. A WWII-themed game applies WWII costumes, sound effects, etc. to an underlying game logic. Switching the WWII costumes to D&D costumes and marketing the result as D&D doesn't really make it D&D.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)
There an AP of paranoia with Felica Day as a play that woman is scary good.
Plus, we already have (weak) AI DMs. They're called video game RPGs. You're the player (as are many others in the case of an MMO), the game itself is the GM. They do many things better than a human could (handle lots of background math, present gorgeously rendered environments, have professionally voice acted NPCs, have skill based real time combat), but the audiences don't entirely overlap because TTRPG players are seeking the freedom of choice and limitless outcome that video games cannot really match.
Personally, I say let things fall to the medium that best suits them. If D&D is sufficiently complicated rules wise that it is actually more fun to have software take care of that so you can just focus on the tactical combat and scripted story choices, then the video game is probably your best bet! There are many other TTRPGs where this is not the case, and where any digitization would take away much more than it would add. Such RPGs are elegant enough rules wise that they do not slow down play at the table, and you can spend 99% of your time just relishing each other's madcap plans and imaginative descriptions of things.
[0] https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/27/21156082/baldurs-gate-3-di...
These kind of stuff never happens in CRPGs - it couldn't because there's infinite number of possible open-ended solutions to any problem. If AI can improvise them I'd argue it's as good as a Turing Test.
BTW complicated rules aren't that big of a problem - there is a compromise between CRPGs and TTRPGs - and it's computer-assisted TTRPGs played over internet. The most important advantage is that you can play with people from other continent, so it's much easier to find players. But the computer-assisted part is also making the rules much less of a problem. You set up your character (all the items, feats, skills, abilities) before the game, and when DM wants he asks you to roll the attack, you click and the system rolls the dices for everybody to see, adds the needed modifiers, calculates the damage (including critical hit if needed etc. ) and shows how much hitpoints you lost.
It's faster than doing all this stuff physically and beyond the initial setup and occasional level-up it makes complicated rules more bearable.
No kidding. I've been writing a WinForms program that is basically a combination character progression tracking, inventory management and basic battle system for Star Wars Fantasy Flight Games.
Why? Do we not want the person-to-person experience? Hardly! We need more wetware space for strategy and thinking of creative ideas, so we need to free up the parts for calculating what number of ability vs proficiency dice and what talents may mess with the roll etc.
You still use voice (usually over discord) and DM decides what happens on the fly.
But most importantly you don't have to play with people that live close to you, makes it much easier to find someone to play with, it's why I started playing p&p rpg again after over a decade.
I could see sites like roll20 recording the sessions with metadata (at this point they said this and GM told "roll perception" and they rolled d20 + 3) as a way to train a virtual DM. Of course it would need crazy amount of games.
It also requires a lot of GM research and development, even for those games that are at least partially supported.
Roll20 also has a marginal audio chat solution. It was so bad that we chose to replace that part with Discord in my current campaign.
There is a background music solution available in roll20, but I was never impressed by it.
In my current game, we found it was better in the long run to convert everything to Discord, because it was better on the collaboration and audio chat functions, which helped the humans communicate with each other better and resulted in an overall better game. We lost the interactive mapping functions and the mostly kinda semi sorta integrated character sheets of roll20, but in the end, those were less important to us than the other collaboration functions of Discord.
There's some tips for 5e:
- set "always roll with advantage" in campaign settings to true, it removes the fiddling with the system by the player each time they want to roll, now it's just a click on a weapon or a skill, and it lets DM decide after the roll if it was advantage and change the interpretation without rerolling. You simply ignore the second roll if it was a straight test, take worse or better out of the 2 rolls if player had disadvantage/advantage
- install free chrome extension "vtt enhancement suite" - it allows for executing macros on all selected tokens at once - especially useful for starting combat with lots of enemies - you select for example 10 tokens and click on a macro that rolls initiative for each of them and adds them to the initiative tracker, you ask players to select their tokens and click the same macro - 5 seconds and combat with 16 participants is ready to go - normally I would have to roll physically 10 times, ask players and sort it manually and it would take a minute or 2
- use DM layer for hidden enemies/traps/secret doors/notes/etc - you can then easily move them to map/token layer when players roll perception
- reinforcements in a combat are easy when you put some tokens in DM layer - you can add them all to the combat tracker and the tokens on DM layer will be hidden from the players until you move them to token layer
- make players drag and drop their most used spells and items to a quick-use bar on the bottom left of the screen - it's 15 minutes to set this up on the session 0, but later it eliminates the problem "I closed my character sheet, wait 20 seconds for me to find the button to roll the attack"
- set up tokens to have hitpoints and AC bars on them (keep them hidden from players) - when you click on hitpoints bar on a token and write "-17" it will automatically decrease the hitpoints by 17 points, don't need to substract in your head every time
All of this allows me to run combat several times faster than I could possibly do physically, it adds up quickly.
Overall, in trying to reduce the complexity of the game, they gave you a finnicky spreadsheet nightmare of half-baked solutions to problems no-one had.
> Something as simple as equipping a piece of armour is an excersise in trying 5 different things
You just drag&drop it from compendium to your inventory?
Eurisko was GOFAI, written in RLL, a frame-based language implemented in Lisp.
https://aliciapatterson.org/stories/eurisko-computer-mind-it...