Just The Caffeine Talking

Chatbots and Gamemasters

The author of one of my favorite roleplaying game blogs — he uses the handle "Noisms" and the blog is called Monsters & Manuals — recently tried an interesting experiment to see how well ChatGPT could run a solo roleplaying session using his own published game setting "Yoon-Suin." Short answer: not well. 

It's worth reading his post to see how the chatbot failed.

One problem was that its scenario seemed too generic, but that could be the result of asking it to use a somewhat obscure and quirky game setting. It might have done a better job using something with abundant on-line documentation like the Forgotten Realms or Golarion. (And, to be cranky, both of those settings are pretty generic anyway, so who would notice?)

The second problem was that the GM-bot simply assented to whatever the player decided to do — while simultaneously doing its best to "railroad" the player into a specific course of action. I was very amused by this, because this sounds exactly like the style of "cooperative storytelling" gamemastering which exists at one vertex of the Game-Narrative-Simulation triangle. Amused, because the flaws that ChatGPT displays are exactly the things some gamers find unsatisfying about that style of roleplaying: no meaningful challenges, and you're stuck in a plot you can't escape.

"Artificial Intelligence" (a term which gets overused even more egregiously than "force field") has always been unsatisfying at running games. In online fantasy combat games the AI-controlled NPCs are notorious for only being able to draw from a limited menu of canned responses. ChatGPT simply expands that menu to the entire online world, but ultimately it's still just spitting back something vaguely appropriate based on keywords.

In early roleplaying games the GM was often called the Referee or the Judge, a holdover from tabletop wargames, but it's worth remembering that all gamemasters still have that job when running a game. Judging requires judgement, and that's something which ChatGPT just doesn't have.

So for now, at least, gamemasters are safe.

 

In Memoriam

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

Buy a pup and your money will buy
Love unflinching that cannot lie —
Perfect passion and worship fed
By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.
Nevertheless it is hardly fair
To risk your heart for a dog to tear.

When the fourteen years which Nature permits
Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,
And the vet’s unspoken prescription runs
To lethal chambers or loaded guns,
Then you will find — it’s your own affair —
But… you’ve given your heart to a dog to tear.

When the body that lived at your single will,
With its whimper of welcome, is stilled (how still!).
When the spirit that answered your every mood
Is gone — wherever it goes — for good,
You will discover how much you care,
And will give your heart to a dog to tear.

We’ve sorrow enough in the natural way,
When it comes to burying Christian clay.
Our loves are not given, but only lent,
At compound interest of cent per cent.
Though it is not always the case, I believe,
That the longer we’ve kept ’em, the more do we grieve:
For, when debts are payable, right or wrong,
A short-time loan is as bad as a long —
So why in—Heaven (before we are there)
Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?

— Rudyard Kipling

"Astra"

2010-2023

Scarab Mission NOW Available

I have eyewitness confirmation from a friend that my new novel The Scarab Mission has reached bookstores. Or a bookstore, anyway. I'm assuming the distributor isn't just shipping to one retailer. So to everyone who has been waiting for a copy, go forth and buy! And if your local store doesn't have The Scarab Mission, demand it!

And for a little lagniappe, here's my latest podcast appearance, on Roger and Janet Carden's The Halfling and the Spaceman. You can listen to it here.