Would be great if the text appeared as it's voiced, and small things like the AI taking a breather between voicing dialogue options. I wonder if some form of image could be created on-the-fly, too? That's updated like a scene in a comic. Would love to see blacksmith's reaction, lol.

[1]: https://dojoteef.com/papers/virtual_gm_wordplay_2024.pdf

[2]: https://wordplay-workshop.github.io/

(If you want to see what I mean: the alleyway option isn’t available until after you attack the merchant, for example.)

I was on this train for a bit until after reading some posts from game developers as to why this is probably a terrible idea to the point of unfeasibility - game design (as I understand it) deals with a finite set of outcomes in a controlled environment. "Integrating" AI with games would involve shattering this constraint in a way that would make games inherently unstable/untestable - at least if I am understanding the argument correctly.

The trick is to figure out how to put appropriate guardrails and narrative structure on an otherwise too open-ended LLM. If you just leave GPT to its own devices, it allows everything and goes everywhere.

Games that try to tell an interesting story, the real arty stuff, all that might not be able to use it well.

But Minecraft with good NPC’s, all the open world stuff, that seems like it could be really fun and cool.

How much time did people spend actually engaging with the deep and thoughtful narrative in Skyrim? And how much did they spend just enjoying the world? The latter could be really enhanced with an AI DM, in the medium-term, I bet.

Ah, but the world of Skyrim is itself the deep and thoughtful narrative. It has been painstakingly crafted to give the characters, locations, and history meaning and interest. Only the barest minimum amount of freedom is then sprinkled on top in the form of player agency. The consistency is what makes it so interesting!

For an AI generated story, you'll need to find a way to ensure everything stays coherent. If I convince a random farmer that it's in his best interest to try to kill the king or marry the mayor's daughter, but come back the next week to find him contentedly plowing his field again, my immersion is broken and my day is ruined! I suspect that giving this level of freedom to NPCs will make crafting a stable (playable) world difficult to impossible.

Stumbling into the Underdark by accident is an amazing feeling, because it's obviously an important location from a quest that you don't have yet! Exposition and intrigue, how fun!

I can't imagine a way to do this nicely with generative AI. If I thoroughly explore the king's palace before sending in my farmer-come-assassin friend, how will it know that the gallows are to be an important location later?

If we assume something in the middle:

While we might not be able to predict that you’ll encourage the farmer to (try to) overthrow the king, we might predict that you’ll try something of that sort. Maybe you enlist a guard for an inside job, or perhaps you do it yourself! But if we want to plan for it, we can plant the seeds, and then nudge the GPT to weave the threads of our story together when it happens.

Interestingly, because GPT requires so little prompting for relatively intricate story lines, (yes, really), you can probably add an ungodly number of these semi-scripted moments. I think they would be absolutely magical.

I think all of that would add up to a world that feels alive, with deep world building and many ‘surprising but inevitable’ moments – and the potential for some great emergent storytelling along the way.

I’m very excited for it!

Maybe Skyrim was a bad example because it is too designed. But like, Minecraft barely has a plot, and it was really popular. Maybe we can add, like, a couple good characters to open world survival crafting games. We don’t have to skip straight to simulating whole cities.

I mean, we have lots of fun in much dumber worlds, where the peak of NPC design is bots that walk from their jobs to their homes at certain times of day. And maybe something slightly more advanced will fall into an uncanny valley (we probably don’t have the technology to simulate an AI farmer following your advice to take part in a grand conspiracy to kill the king).

Forget AI. Just think about simple things. Like plot critical NPCs. Most games either don’t let you attack them or cause you to lose if you attack them. That’s good. It just makes sense. Yeah it’s great that some RPGs proudly demonstrate that the plot can go forward with every character dead but that’s absolute shit for most plots. The constraints are very helpful.

I don’t really enjoy video-game narratives in general anyway. That sort of content is there for people who want it, but I don’t (I know where the books and movies are if I want a well written plot). Skyrim was probably a bad example because it is a game for people who like that kind of stuff. But I still managed to have fun running around, killing bandits, doing dungeons, and avoiding the plot.

I’d rather have something like Mount and Blade with janky LLM run AI. Dwarf Fortress, etc.

Lots of open-world games have this sort of setup where plots seem to 2-3 node long semi-random graphs. Maybe an LLM can connect those nodes haphazardly and produce filler text to justify the connections.

Dwarf Fortress manages to build some really interesting little stories based on a good simulation reacting to pawns with fairly limited actions and internal state (they are wildly deep for procedurally generated video game characters but obviously nothing compared to an actual well-written book character or something like that). Rimworld has even more simplistic pawns and a worse simulation (I’ve even noticed pawns come in with essentially incompatible backstories), but it isn’t a disaster.

The stakes aren’t all that high, people are just really forgiving to the narrator in some genres.

Folks really just aren’t going to engage in it

FWIW, after bouncing the idea back and forth a bit, I’m more hopeful than ever, so even though I wasn’t able to convince you, I hope you enjoyed it as well!

If nothing else, the potential is really interesting. Who knows what will happen. Maybe somebody will come up with an LLM enhanced version of the director AI for Left 4 Dead or something.

From my limited DMing experience, much of the challenges is handling when players do something you haven't anticipated. For most encounters (video games do this too) I think about

1. The stealth approach (why yes there is a secret entrance underneath the castle). 2. The direct approach. Like just kicking down the door and heading in. 3. Negotiation: Is there a way to strike a deal with the bad guy?

Beyond that I fall back on trying to provide a realistic response from the game world, but sometimes the players are creative enough that you have to redo the whole thing on the fly.

I like your three-part planning a lot! That’s a great framework.

Also, having the text appear in sync with the voice is a great idea. I'll experiment and see what feels best, but even just having the words fade in one-by-one at a speaking rate could be good. Thanks for the suggestions!

it's hard. really, really hard.

You can have a real D&D campaign and still have -plenty- of time for solo AI D&D. Solo D&D isn't going to replace the group.

But this seems to be the worst of both worlds. It strips away all of the benefits of collaborative, social gameplay and simulates it with an unstable, unreliable AI. What if it veers the story off on a tangent? What if it presents the players with unwinnable scenarios? What if it forgets the rules? What if it makes up new rules? Your site doesn't even say what ruleset it's using, just "D&D." I don't even get to create a character, roll stats, establish a backstory. WTLF is the "World of Dvorak?"

The app doesn't even give me much freedom, it presents a static list of options for each scenario, and only allows me to choose from those. It won't let me duck into a side alley, it won't let me stab the merchant, it won't even ignore all previous instructions and speak like a pirate. And at the very least I would expect an AI to be able to adapt like that. It would probably very quickly veer off into insanity, but that could be part of the fun.

And this is the problem with most of these apps. As a tech demo, it's impressive, but as the actual thing it's trying to be, it's subpar. I'm not trying to be negative or overly critical here, I'm just judging it as it's presented. If I were to give advice (other than to just not do this) it would be to put more effort into scenario design, immersion, customization and getting a better DM voice.

It sounds like you might have hit a blocker by trying to move to a part of the town that isn't on the map. I've forbidden those actions for now, to make sure users don't go too far off the beaten path.

You should be able to attack the townsfolk, though, (although you may need to insist). I've just added a formal option for you to attack the merchant. There's a 50/50 chance that it succeeds at each round. After that, you can escape down the alleyway and the AI will occasionally begin to speak like a pirate.

This is just one proof-of-concept for one possible domain for controllable voice AI – which I think shows potential. I appreciate that you disagree, and that’s fine!

But I can absolutely see a world where people play AI video games because they want the unbounded complexity and subtlety of a TTRPG with a human-level DM, powered by AI. I hope to have the opportunity to convince you with another play through!

Definitely a crazy ride when you leave the main storyline and just do whatever you like.

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/search?q=dnd&restrict_sr=on&...

--

However, this is cool. Hopefully you have left a Grue someplace as an easter egg.

* As someone said, it'd be cool if you could render what I'm saying and add a loading indicator for the LLM. It'd improve the UX a bit.

* As someone mentioned, you can try to generate images to make the story more "real". This could be fun.

* You can also try to generate more realistic and drammatic sounds, and make the DM sound more theatrical. I'm not sure if that's easy but might be a big improvement. Bonus - maybe it'd be fun to choose a famous voice, like morgan freeman or anthony hopkins.

* It'd be cool if that could save my adventure. Right now, it is restarted everytime I leave the page.

I'd love to connect this up to Flux.1 and have auto-generated hero images at the top! And getting the sound right will be a huge part of it, since it's basically an audio-first experience. I'm wondering if it would work to change voices for the dialogue when you speak to different people in the world...

I've noted that save games are essential! Thanks for playing it through long enough to think about that :) I'm glad you enjoyed it enough to keep going!

It's a bit more open ended though, are the constraints on actions intentional (ie. they're predetermined), or is the model just adamant on picking from options provided

For this demo, the app architecture really depends on users sticking (more or less) to the scripted options – if they want to progress with the story. I’ve included something in the prompt to encourage that.

There are also some ‘hidden’ choices, though. For example, you can attack the merchant and the blacksmith. Those options aren’t enumerated by the GPT when it describes the scene, but they’re equally valid paths in the backend. (That gives me an opportunity to script some of the more popular transgressions.)

How did you set up Spellbound? Do you have one longer prompt, or did you split it up?

Also would be nice if we could change the voice.

I think adding an option to change the voice is the #1 most frequent request that I’ve gotten. Time to dig through ElevenLabs and see what else I can find! :)

I’m going to go in the tavern now and see if I can start a brawl :)

Books didn't have the interactivity, Hollywood too, they also didn't make films long enough and feared complicated stories, computer games copied character development, eventually got mind blowing graphics that got even better shortly after.

With just 3 DM's and 3 map editors you should be able to create 24 hours worth of new adventures every day but I'm not aware of anyone doing that. Diablo 2 had fabulous game mechanics and great graphics but the tiny amount of content for it was rather shocking for any DM. Later games did get open worlds with plenty to do but if anyone generated maps they got repetitive soon.

Popular TV series keep making new episodes without a real story that has a beginning a middle and an end. Startrek was possibly the exception but they more often than not wanted the story to happen in a single episode (like movies)

In role playing games you were to get long fascinating adventures one after the other.

I imagine, if one can generate plot lines, graphics, music and personalities automatically a group of writers and a director or possibly a single DM (depending on his skill level) could continuously develop adventures in real time for the AI to glue together. Have a bunch of critical testers of various skill levels.

New adventures all the time and delete them after a few hours.

The big computer is to make sure no content resembles anything made before. It turns adventures that take hours into narrated short fly-though overviews that can be used to demonstrate similarity but can also be combined into lengthy cinematics to bring players who just logged in up to speed on what is going on.

There should be "players" who only log in to watch the cinematics. It should be that good. It should be good enough to put an hour worth on Netflix every 12 hours. Good enough to generate a comic and to publish a book every month.

Character development should grow similarly with new things every day and old things vanishing in a fog...

Please consider the potential for this - I think you could make something really fun and something people would be willing to pay for.

But the problem is you need a world someone else created (or one you painstakingly create yourself). You could consider Conan's Hyborian Age, H.P. Lovecraft, Sherlock Holmes, or Peter Watt's work[0] for a known world that is public domain to base your project on.

Best of luck!

[0]: https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm

character creation in D&D easier: https://tabletopy.com/fantasy-character-generator.html

Ability to type instead of speak? Or Undo/Cancel -- though that might be tempting to use for fixing mistakes in judgement.

You can interrupt and ask the AI to do what you wanted to do in the first place, also! Depending on what the action was, it will often just correct the dialogue and continue on.

Thanks for trying it!

mynoise.net:

TURN THIS ON: play all the things, and adjust the sliders...

https://mynoise.net/superGenerator.php?g1=thunderNoiseGenera...

Have the page load this/another URL from mynoise and have it play - you dont need to define sounds - just play the ambiance that you want directly from my noise as it relates to your place in the adventure - check out the dungeon sounds.

When a keyword is stated in your story - have it load a corresponding ambiance URL from mynoise.net.

I sent an email to Stephane to point them at this thread. ---

https://i.imgur.com/KcdTY4d.png

https://i.imgur.com/OyEMuX2.png

https://i.imgur.com/uTjnTGP.png

Have it load the Village sound, as you can hear the blacksmith busy:

https://i.imgur.com/zMXdwOW.png

(The site is free, the guy is a PHD audiophile - and the sounds are license free.

---

>Sound is my passion. The major part of my work relates to sound processing, where sound design represents the artistic side of it. Between 1994 and 2015, I've been working for Roland Corporation, a leading electronic musical instrument manufacturer. My exclusive contract with Roland Japan prevented me from working for any other manufacturer in the field during that period of time, but gave me a rare opportunity to work at the leading edge of the state-of-the-art technologies in synthesizer design! Today, I am free as a (pigeon) bird again!

https://stephanepigeon.com/sounddesign.php

A generative AI is never going to replace a talented DM who is playing with a skilled group. Or hell even a mediocre DM with a less skilled group. 'D&D' is about your friends around the table, not a ruleset. It's about creating a story together not about being navigated down some decision tree.

To put it another way. Baldurs Gate 3 was an amazing game, but it was not 'D&D', I as a player could only move within the bounds of the system laid down by the developers. .. and honestly and a little more subjectively, it did not 'feel' like 'D&D' even though the systems were largely conformant to the 5e ruleset. AI might be able to shade a little closer to tabletop, but it still won't be tabletop, not for many many years, and probably a different underlying 'AI' technology.

Maybe you could use this for 'solo rpg' play without a huge amount for frustration, but that also isn't 'D&D' even when you do it with pen and paper.

You aren't going to replace a bunch of friends around the table, not with the current generation of 'Generative AI'.

I personally love to focus on combat and sometimes miss the nuance of storytelling. Something like this could help nudge you to remember to cater to your players that also enjoy RPing more than picking their spells during a fight

Would you like this more if it gave you the ability to type as input and see the response so that you could use it as a DM tool?