Having had the Christmas break to unwind, destress, and generally have space to think about other stuff than work, I found myself pondering D&D one afternoon.
I've never actually played proper D&D, although I have played other roleplaying systems (Cyberpunk RED notably which was great fun). I did once go through the set up of a character for D&D, which seemed to take quite a while and at the time did make me worry that the game might require more time rolling dice or consulting rulebooks than having fun, but I've never actually tried it. Of course, D&D - and any other similar roleplaying game, requires a number of elements, including people to play with, and a dungeonmaster to run an adventure for the players.
I was curious to see whether AI could be used to simulate D&D, and particularly to make an enjoyable experience.
Before I go further, I'll nail down this point to anyone reading this who has played D&D properly - it's not D&D, I know it's not D&D, AI could never replace the organic interaction between humans and a human dungeonmaster (I don't actually believe this, I think in time it might be able to, but I don't want this post to turn into a place where awesome people that I like rant about the purity of human D&D), I just want to talk about my experience trying it.
So, I fired up ChatGPT - free version - and typed...
hi chatgpt - can you play d&d with me?
ChatGPT replied "Absolutely, I can! Do you have a character ready, or would you like me to help you create one? Also, are you imagining a classic D&D setup (like swords, spells, and dungeons), or do you want to try something unique? Let’s dive in! 🐉✨"
I gave it a very brief summary - ie "my character is a human male bard called thog, equipped with a short sword, a lute, a backpack, and 100 gold. quite happy to play a classic D&D setup with you can be the dungeonmaster. Happy for you to be creative and don't feel like you need to stick too closely to the rules of D&D, just make it fun :)"
And promptly lost the next 24 hours.
It dropped my character into a bustling town called Evermere, and sent me a chap in a leather apron - who I assumed was a butcher, although I don't think it was ever actually said - in need of an adventurer to find his daughter. It happily handled my responses, allowed me to build up a party over time, and handled my sometimes unusual responses - when confronted with a snarling and possibly magical wolf, I told ChatGPT that I would "play a tune on my lute softly while kneeling down and singing "doggy woo, who's a good doggy woo". I offer it a few of my rations and try not to look the wolf in the eyes as it can cause aggression in canines" - ChatGPT happily went with it, and continued to describe what happened.
Through experimentation, I found that I could ask it to make the adventure more challenging and to incorporate more dice rolls - without them it felt a little bit on the easy side - but fundamentally it made it a really enjoyable experience. Over time my character got the ability to read minds, and on asking it to read the minds of my party it was interesting to see that not all of my party was wholly on board with the actions my character was making, although it seemed that as long as I was being successful, they were happy to come along for the ride.
Was it perfect?
No. Absolutely not. I found that it had a tendency to forget details - one of my party members, Elira, I didn't interact with as much as the others and it seemed as a result that it wasn't always clear whether she was actually still there or not. My inventory also didn't always align, with items that I hadn't used recently strangely vanishing.
I also found that I ended up upgrading to the paid version of ChatGPT to get a sufficient amount of what it called "advanced data analysis" - aka dice rolls - to make it interesting, along with more access to the GPT-4o model (although I would say that the GPT-4o mini model did a good job too). Also ChatGPT learns things about you to customise its responses, and pretty soon this memory was filled with ephemera as "Thog decided to go east", and once full the game fell over.
Another annoying issue is that as the ChatGPT log gets longer, it takes longer and longer for responses to come through on the web browser. I found that this was the case on any web browser, or on the Microsoft app, however when using the Android ChatGPT app on my phone, it didn't suffer with this delay. And of course, there's no way (that I could find) of running the Android app on my PC.
And currently you can add to the list that the current chat of ChatGPT which has my adventure in has lost the ability to do dice rolls - it is specifically that chat, if I open up another instance of ChatGPT it happily does dice rolls as needed, but the chat where I want the dice rolls to happen it just reports bugs.
But putting all this to one side, it was definitely sufficiently fun and entertaining to keep me gripped for a day, and I'm happily continuing to play as and when I see fit. Figuring out workarounds for issues was a lot of fun - I resolved ChatGPT's memory issue and slowdown on the web browser by having it export a data file (a JSON file apparently!) all about my party, including their equipment, class, level, relationships with each other, personality and background, which I could tweak as I saw fit and then import into another ChatGPT instance to start again. I do like this as part of the thrill for me is being able to take a character and play them through multiple adventures
For completeness, I did also try other AIs, in particular Google Gemini (Gemini 1.5 Flash) and Microsoft Copilot. Gemini outright told me "I can't play D&D with you in the traditional sense" but then when I clarified what I wanted it to do, it did respond well and while I'm not sure it was quite as good as ChatGPT, did a reasonable attempt of being my dungeonmaster and again rolled with me making unusual choices and roleplayed them adequately. Copilot I found made it more like a "choose your own adventure" book, where your choices were clearly set - again though, it wasn't unpleasant to play, and when I did want to reject its options and propose something else to do it handled it well.
So I would say if you're needing a D&D fix but you don't for whatever reason have people handy, you could do a lot worse than giving your friendly AI a shot.
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| Thog the Bard according to ChatGPT |
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