The only way to get good at something is to suck at it first.
Don’t be afraid to suck at something new!
I’m going to argue that how you use the lying machine determines if it’s slop, not if you use it.
“Generate a character profile for Alexander the blacksmith.” Slop.
“Ask me questions about Alexander the blacksmith so I can further develop his character.” Not slop.
“Summarize everything I explained about Alexander the blacksmith in the format of a wiki article.” Could be slop, might not be, depends on how diligent you were about not letting the lying machine have creative control. Needs to be reviewed for accuracy of course.
And for the record, I was a DM for years before generative ai was a thing. Running a campaign is ton of work, even with shortcuts. Don’t insult your DM like this.
Holy shit some nuance and experience really work wonders towards a good comment
I was literary complaining in another thread a couple days ago that almost nobody with an opinion on ai was capable of nuance. I’m very happy to have been immediately proven wrong.
Sounds like this meme was made by someone who has never DMed a session in their life.
Not everyone has the luxury of having enough time to prepare entire campaigns from scratch, but still would like to play. And if they want to take shortcuts, who are we to gatekeep? (And no, premade-campaigns take up even more time)
When you tell them to prepare their own campaign then, they stay remarkably quiet.
~ DM who has been DMing long before LLMs became a thing.
What’s this “prepare” you speak of?
Ive been a DM for 30+ years and do practically zero prep. If the Rules Cyclopedia doesnt have what I need I just make it the fuck up, which is, yknow, half the DM’s job - improvising answers that make sense.
You dont need AI. Period.
As a dm for me theres no game if im not inventing the world. For exampe one game was that of the players being chased by a lich rampaging across the world because they had the piece his immortality spell needed to be complete. This idea came about cause i decided to see what combo of spells one could use to become immortal. Another idea got torpedoed in session zero when i tried to do a genetation ship situation and a player guessed it, so i had to come up with a whole different idea that i think turned out much better.
As a dm where is the fun of the game if i leave all that to a computer?
Exactly!
Good on you that you have enough experience to run things with an encyclopedia in your head. The rest of us don’t have that luxury. We need prep in order to not have a boring session. Can’t you remember your first couple of times?
You don’t need anything. You can play D&D on a napkin in a McDonalds.
Doesn’t mean we should avoid every tool, including LLMs.
Who says the cyclopedia is in their head?
I’ve used AI to generate the tabletop token that I would have otherwise stolen from Google image search. Only now I have 12 different random soldiers instead of 1 soldier copied 12 times.
I would never leave the session prep to AI, because that’s the fun part. Why would I outsource my fun?
I’m conflicted on this one, and I think blanket statements like this aren’t useful. I’m not going to judge folks for what they do in the privacy of their own homes with consenting adults.
If you’re DMing and your idea flops, try again. If you cant be arsed to try, find a new hobby.
I’m by no means advocating AI, but if someone wants to DM, I’m going to be supportive rather than saying “get a new hobby”. The TTRPG scene has a shortage of DMs, hence the ‘forever DM’ trope.
TTRPGs are fun and don’t have to be a lot of work. But trying is the barrier to entry.
If someone wants to DM and says “I’m worried I’m not smart enough or creative enough” I would also be supportive. Follow a prewritten adventure, or rip off media you like, or don’t be afraid to do something dumb. Don’t be afraid to fail.
But if someone wants to DM and says “Eh, I can’t be fucked to read the rules, and I think AI can write a better plot than me, so I’ll just do that” I would say, find a new hobby. What are you trying to do?
To be clear: human made rules tools: great! Ripping off human made stories you’ve experienced: great! Having a computer guess for you because you can’t be bothered to try: bad.
Lastly, if you can’t be arsed but want to play, there are plenty of TTRPG systems that don’t have a DM or share the duty collectively
Exactly!
Hopefully people will slowly become more conscientious of the reasons we find things valuable. A beautiful sad song is touching in large part because we empathize with the sad person who wrote it. They put words to something our soul was feeling too. The exact same intonations feel kind of empty if we know it was a computer that generated them.
There are decades of campaigns and adventures waiting to be played. I have five campaigns on my shelf, all of them good quality and fit to my tastes. And yet, I still write new campaign material because I actually like making campaigns.
Why would I give the fun part to a machine?
Because it can keep track of inventory items, NPCs, environmental assets and flock hit points if fighting a million insects and you can’t.
There are three kinds of response to this. First, yes I bloody can, don’t insult me. Second, if it’s too complex to keep track of, it needs to be simplified. Third, none of that has anything to do with creating a campaign, you’re just trying to redirect the conversation from AI taking the fun part away.
Bro there’s literally no way you can keep track of the hit points of a million insects.
Also the point is that it takes care of the non fun parts.
Once again, several kinds of response.
Reasoned: Obviously, you’d abstract the swarm to something manageable, as per my second point.
Informed: A swarm of insects is defined in the SRD as having 22 hit points.
Cautious: I wouldn’t trust an LLM to track hit points better than me.
Pedantic: Tracking hit points is not part of campaign creation.
Aggrieved: You listed NPCs as one of the non-fun parts?!
Defiant: There ARE no non-fun parts!
Suspicious: There’s a lot of basic DM knowledge and experience you seem to lack for someone offering DM advice.
Accusatory: You are STILL deflecting.
I’ve tried using AI three times as a GM. Two were complete failures. The third worked well enough for my purposes in the end, but I certainly wouldn’t say it was good.
The first was trying to generate a picture of a very specific scene I had in mind. I wanted to show the players the landscape they were seeing. The AI was unable to generate a picture to my satisfaction, so I gave up. This was 3 years ago now so maybe image generation has gotten better, but it certainly wasn’t good enough at the time, and I haven’t bothered trying again.
The second was an attempt to generate some box text–style description of something. More out of curiosity than anything. It made some very basic factual errors. The description was of a statue of an archer, and it described her doing something with both her hands (hands on hips I think? I forget) as well as having her bow drawn. Humans don’t have 3 hands… I tried and tried repeatedly to get ChatGPT to fix its errors, but by the time I ran out of free credits it still couldn’t produce something that was even cogent, let alone artistically good.
The third is one that I think has the greatest potential. I had a great map that I wanted to use. I can’t remember if this particular one is one I paid for or if it was purely hobbyist put up for free. But it wasn’t printer friendly. I asked the AI to take the map and convert it into a printer-friendly format. So mostly blank white with black outlines of things, and a black grid. It really, really struggled with this task. After several back-and-forths I eventually got something that was…usable. But I was far from happy with it, and the AI regularly completely ignored the specific things I was asking of it to address the failure in the previous attempt. This was maybe 1 year ago or so. I think it has potential to get better because it’s not replacing a creative process, but a mechanical one. But even here it didn’t seem good enough yet.
I think youve pretty much nailed the ai experience in a nutshell - spend some time trying to coax a result out of the system over several iterations, finally giving up and reluctantly submitting half assed slop to a recipient that doesnt know any better.
For your pictures you could maybe try drawing it in paint and then get AI to IMG to IMG from that to add detail but generally following the hard edges fairly well.
Not done much with it beyond playing around to see what it can do a while ago. Civitait got blocked in the UK now and I can’t be bothered to open a VPN for something I didn’t really have that much use with beyond poke and see what happens.
I read this in Benny and Evelyn’s voices.
Is this claiming that you can’t be an effective DM if you don’t do your own art? Nice gatekeeping if so.
Once again AI hate bleeds into other things.
well articulated
It says “you [aren’t] an effective DM” in response to the statement "Not everyone has the time, knowledge, imagination or resources to create D&D … art
Please, seriously, tell me how I’ve misinterpreted that?
I think y’all are mentally adding stuff to the conversation because you want it to only be about making content with AI, even though that’s not what it says. And you’re annoyed with me because my hatred of AI is not enough to overlook the actual words and actual meaning.
It didn’t say skill. Anyone can create art, always has been. Literally just a crayon drawing or the description you would have entered as a prompt is enough.
Respectfully, I believe you’re the one mentally adding stuff.
… I also didn’t say skill? So I think we’re back to people other than me adding stuff :/
Damn, I really thought that’s what you were getting at.
OK actually, here’s another angle: a buddy of mine loves generating ai images and videos and showing them off. I tell him I’m not interested in the images because I can’t tell what parts come from him. I would rather see a crude sketch or hear a rough description from his mouth than something that looks like it comes out of the MCU.
When I tell him this he says “so you’d rather I not make anything, because if I didn’t use ai it wouldn’t exist” which makes 0 sense to me, so I say “it wouldn’t exist like that but it would exist” and we both walk away with the wheels turning in our heads trying to name sense of eachother’s wacky worldview.
Does that kind of by proxy get at it? Like, I want the rough draft, but you’re saying (?) you want the polished looking (?) output that an LLM generates? Like it’s either a case of using the LLM or not being able to produce anything?
I want a crayon drawn D&D campaign now.
Grok please generate a D&D art with a crayon
It literally doesn’t say that.
So you admit you don’t have the imagination, time, knowledge, or resources to be an effective DM […]
The “or” is important there because it means you can supply any mixture of those things to be effective. If you supply none of them (by having genAI do it for you), then you can’t be considered effective because at that point, the players can just throw their answers into an LLM and spit out the same garbage.
And you purposely omitted two words that add to, and thus expand, the scenario: “campaigns and”.
If someone is having genAI to create both the story and the visuals for the campaign, then then they are not an effective GM. I hardly ever have artwork for my sessions; I just do the GM’s job and describe my world.
But it says “campaigns or”, not “campaigns and”. That’s why I felt it reasonable to only focus on one.
Sure, if your imagination, time, knowledge and resources are such that you can’t do either, then you’re not offering much.
you’re reading things very literally vs understanding the authorial intent
I think well-articulated writing matches literal meaning with intent. I’m criticising the post because the literal meaning doesn’t make sense, and doesnt align with what I think the author meant. They wanted to say something like “I don’t appreciate AI art in d&d campaigns and would rather none at all” but instead tried to make a less subjective objection.
this approach is a great way to not get anyone to listen to you
Well, can you be constructive? What do you do when you see something that’s communicated poorly?
in a meme? i accept that it’s not a format for debate or nuanced discussion and assume the author doesn’t mean everything 100% literally, then i chuckle at the joke and keep scrolling
Is this claiming that you can’t be an effective DM if you don’t do your own art?
Literally yes.
It doesn’t say it has to be all you. A guide book is just fine, that’s what its there for! But if you’re just repeating what the chatbot generates, even if it’s slightly modified, I might as well talk to one myself.
You don’t have to be a great DM, if you’re trying you’re at least improving for next time. If you’re using a bot you’re not even doing that.You say “literally yes” but then the rest of your response sounds like it’s answering a different question. What I asked was:
Is this claiming that you can’t be an effective DM if you don’t do your own art?
So, an example of a DM not doing their own art would be a DM who doesn’t have any art in their campaign at all. My interpretation of the OP is that this DM is ineffective. And I think they’ve only said that because they’re so keen to criticise AI use that they don’t really care whether they write their criticism in a way that might criticise something else.
I interpreted “art” as the DM’s storytelling in this case. If the DM doesn’t do that much, why even bother.
I have no qualms about the use of supplemental materials such as a guidebook, reference images, or otherwise. Ones preferably obtained from real artists.I think storytelling would fall under “campaign”, and so “art” is in contrast
Who knows, I care little about arguing such hypotheticals.
Either way, guide books contain pictures and there are plenty of websites people post their art to. You can just use such as reference material. A handdrawn map, even if crummy, is more charming than some AI hallucination.
But if you’re happy for people to crib existing artwork then I don’t think the objection (that you shouldn’t be DMing if you lack the “imagination, time, knowledge or resources”) is one you hold to. I think you just don’t want to see AI art in a D&D campaign and would happy to just say that, rather than what OP said.
I respect a DM who’s gone out to find useful references made by others.
I do not respect a DM who has asked a bot to generate some supplemental images.
I do not want to play with a DM who tasks a bot with coming up with a story or responses during play.
Simple as.
Wait are there DMs out there painting their entire campaigns? Because if so then yeah fuck them lazy bitches who aren’t fully illustrating their entire lore.
Using AI is no better (and no worse) than all those fuckers who bought all of the books, pre-made campaigns, artwork, and other D&D related materials.
Terrible take.
Those books were made by people working for a living. Buying supplements, accessories, etc helps keep tabletop gaming alive.
AI is an infrastructure-destroying parasite which plagiarized those same products.
These are not in any way equivocal.
That was not the argument being made by the original post.
Shockingly, “AI” is really bad for a lot more than just that one reason. Fuck off with that lazy and tasteless bullshit.
And, shockingly, AI has some amazingly good uses. I’m all for calling it it’s faults, but people who cling in fear to their buggy whips are tiresome.
there are good uses, but replaceing your thought processes and creativity isn’t one of them.
No, its much worse, even low quality human writing typically has some intent and creativity, AI writing is always dull.
Leaving the parts of your campaign that don’t have any meaning blank is more respectful of the players than filling it with slop.
Some parts of the process are truly a waste of time, though. My DM uses ChatGPT to generate loot, and from time to time random encounters. It really doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t prevent him from making a good story and good places to explore.
AI is there to speed boring things up. I won’t blame him to not want to scroll d20pfsrd for hours to decide what to give us. And I prefer an AI generated (or usually retouched) map over no map at all or more sparse gaming sessions.Ever heard of donjon? It’s been around since 2009 and does all of that without the risk of an incorrect answer or the widespread deforestation.
Ah good ole donjon. Found them from a random Stumbleupon button push over 15 years ago and they’ve been in my bookmarks bar ever since lol
Yeah, whenever I think “well ai could do X” donjon just already does it better
I mainly use it to create descriptions, can donjon do that?
Nope, never heard of it. Shame on me, I don’t have the time, knowledge or resources to be an effective DM.
those are incredibly simple functions that likely have been done for free by simple websites for decades, to say nothing of manual tables for randomizing with dice you can find in books or free online. using ai for them is just a waste and probably gives the same generic group of answers all the time.
The post is basically saying that automating any part of a DnD campaign is wrong, because you don’t take part of a creative process. I argue that automating some part of a TTRPG is beneficial, because there are boring and low-value parts. You can despise LLMs for valid reasons, but we do use them to solve a real problem. Now, if there are other tools that could make the same job while using less computing power, why not. Meanwhile, LLMs are easy to use and can adapt their content to the actual context with low effort on the DM end.
I won’t shame my DM for not having the time to draw everything by hand, every week, which is what this post is about. We all have a life outside of our hobby.That’s not how i interpreted it.
To me it’s saying that “not enough time, therefore AI” is a bad excuse, and is conceding that you’re not doing your job as a DM.
Rather, it is preferable to use the time you do have with non-llm tools so that the experience is more enjoyable for all.
![Be creative, don't pawn off the creative process [Rule]](https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/f9267fd8-c41a-4d21-8fc4-04a7456cbf4d.png){kind=link}