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.

 

The Big Idea: Writing For Games vs. Writing Fiction

I wrote a guest post for John Scalzi's Whatever blog, discussing my work writing roleplaying games and how that affected my fiction. You can find it here. For visual interest, check out the cover of Weird War I!

 

My WorldCon Schedule

In two and a half weeks I'll be in Chicago for ChiCon 8, the 80th World Science Fiction Convention. I offered to participate in programming events, and they're really making me sing for my supper this time.

Thursday, September 1

(all times are CDT)

2:30 P.M.: Writing and Story Development for Tabletop Games. This is a game design panel, obviously, focusing on fitting story to the game system and vice versa.

4:00 P.M.: Virtual Reading. I'll be reading from my forthcoming novel The Scarab Mission via video, so anyone in the world can watch.

5:30 P.M.: Science: The Core of Science Fiction's Sense of Wonder. This panel grapples with the central issue of why and how you can have a whole literary genre based on stories about science.

7:00 P.M.: Stroll With the Stars. Come for a walk with me and some other writers around downtown Chicago. I'll point out some of my favorite buildings and discuss how Chicago influenced my fiction.

Friday, September 2

10:00 A.M.: Really Big Things. A panel on megastructures. I've used some big ones in my fiction, but how big can structures really get?

1:00 P.M.: Table Talk. What used to be called a Kaffeklatsch or a Literary Beer, but now with masks on. I won't tattle if anyone cheats.

4:00 P.M.: March of Time. A virtual panel about the ways SF gets overtaken by real-world discoveries, and how to avoid it.

Saturday, September 3

11:30 A.M.: Re-Engineering the Solar System. A virtual panel discussing how humans — or our successors, whatever they may be — may rebuild the Solar System. 

2:30 P.M.: Tropes as Tools. Tropes aren't the same as cliches, nor are they something one must necessarily avoid. This panel will talk about how to use tropes intelligently to make better fiction.

4:00 P.M.: Autographing. I'll be signing books, bookplates, magazines, or anything my pen can make a mark on.

Sunday, September 4

11:30 A.M.: Science in Science Fiction: The Guesswork of 1946. The panel will look at how writers in 1946 envisioned the future, and try to understand why they made the assumptions and guesses they did. 

2:30 P.M.: The Science and Fiction of Droids. A combination science and literary panel about the long history of robots and AI in science fiction, and how everybody gets it wrong including me.

Whew! During the few moments I can snatch when I won't be doing convention programming, I plan to look up friends, relations and familiar sights in Chicago; satisfy my cravings for deep-dish pizza, proper hot dogs, fried chicken, and other Windy City delights; and hang out in the con suite or the hotel bar to see all the people I've missed for the past three years.

See you all in Chicago!

 

 

 

Boskone is GO!

After the sad cancellation of this year's Arisia convention, I'm very pleased and excited to announce that Boskone 59 is going ahead as planned this coming weekend, at the Westin hotel in Boston's seaport district! See the Web page here for membership information.

I'll be there in person, and here's my schedule:

Friday, February 18

6:00 p.m.: Very Far Future SF — a panel discussion about writing science fiction set thousands of years in the future, if not even more remote.

Saturday, February 19

10:00 a.m.: Reading — I'll be reading my short story "Out of the Dark" from the forthcoming anthology Lost Worlds and Mythological Kingdoms.

11:00 a.m.: When Comics Characters Get Old —panel about the problems with "comics time" vs. real time, and how to deal with the sheer weight of past history some iconic characters have to carry.

2:00 p.m.: Kaffeeklatsch — fellow program participant Grant Carrington and I will hang out and drink coffee with anyone who signs up. You set the topics!

4:00 p.m.: The Mind of the Alien — a real powerhouse of a panel discussing what alien intelligence might be like and how we can (or can't) relate to them.

Sunday, February 20

11:00 a.m.: Autographing — I'll be signing anything anyone can drag into the hotel (not contracts).

12:00 noon: Dungeons & Dragons — A classic Basic D&D dungeon with traps, wandering monsters, and puzzles.

See you all at the Westin this weekend!

Postmarked From the Stars Interview

Postmarked From the Stars is an online bookstore emphasizing fantasy and science fiction. They've also got a YouTube channel with reviews and interviews. And this week you can see an hour-long interview with me. It's quite wide-ranging, discussing my earlier works like A Darkling Sea and Corsair, as well as recent titles like The Godel Operation. Check it out!

AlbaCon 2021!

It takes more than an endemic to keep Albany's long-running SF convention down. AlbaCon 2021 is going on tonight and through this weekend, but only in virtual form.

I'll be there, participating in four events:

At 10:00 a.m. on Saturday the 18th I'll be part of a panel discussing "No One Goes to Space Anymore." Given that we just watched four private passengers launch into orbit, I'm going to be questioning the premises of that topic.

At 11:00 a.m. I'll be talking about "Why the DCU and the MCU Are So Different."

After a short break for lunch I'm doing a reading from The Godel Operation at 1:30. 

And then from 2-6 p.m. I'm running an online Weird War 1 game, "The Black Khan."

Afterward, drinks in the hotel bar. First round's on me.

 

Appendix JLC

Everyone who owned a copy of the old Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide knows about the legendary "Appendix N," in which Gary Gygax listed all the fictional influences on D&D. In recent years some younger gamers have rediscovered that list, leading to works like Jeffro Johnson's book Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons, and a number of alternate lists.

The pioneering science fiction roleplaying game Traveller never had an "Appendix N," but in 2016 the writer and game designer Shannon Appelcline wrote The Science Fiction in Traveller, an ambitious attempt to study both the fictional roots of Traveller and its licensed fiction spinoffs. Appelcline spoke with Traveller's creator Marc Miller about the science fiction works which influenced him the most.

The list includes some well-known SF like David Drake's "Hammer's Slammers" series and H. Beam Piper's Space Viking and other novels. It also has some books which modern readers probably aren't familiar with, like the "Dumarest of Terra" series by E.C. Tubb. (I certainly wasn't familiar with those back in 1979, even though they were still being published and I haunted the science fiction section of every bookstore in Greater New Orleans.)

A bit more than a year ago I started running a Traveller campaign of my own, which has continued as an online campaign during the virus lockdown. At one point I put together a little "Appendix JLC" of inspirational works for my players. In addition to the seminal works cited by Appelcline, I wanted to include more recent titles and series.

So, here's a list of Travelleresque books not mentioned by Marc Miller. It's roughly in chronological order. Some of the titles I list are modern compilations of short stories which didn't originally appear together. The ones marked with an asterisk were probably influenced by Traveller, but all of them have the right feel.

The Coming of the Terrans, the "Eric John Stark" stories, and the "Skaith" series by Leigh Brackett (and basically everything else she wrote)

Northwest of Earth, by C.L. Moore

The "Captain Grimes" and "Rimworlds" series by A. Bertram Chandler

Santiago and the "Widowmaker" series by Mike Resnick

Princes of the Air and Web of Angels, by John M. Ford*

The Shattered Stars, by Richard S. McEnroe*

Nightflyers, and other "Thousand Worlds" stories by George R.R. Martin

The "Expanse" series by "James S.A. Corey"

The January Dancer, by Michael Flynn

Of my own work, the only one I'd put on this list is the short story "Object Three," in the ebook Outlaws and Aliens.

I would love to see others' ideas about recent Travelleresque books. Feel free to list them in the comments.

Planetary Events Comes to Earth!

Most of what I've been writing lately has been fiction — The Godel Operation, some short stories in the Billion Worlds setting, and the followup novel (still in progress). But I call myself a "writer and game designer" for a reason: I haven't given up on writing game stuff. Recently I decided to take the plunge and try releasing some short self-published roleplaying products. The first of what I hope to be a long series is finally available.

Planetary Events is a supplement for any and all spacefaring science fiction roleplaying games, designed to help add some depth and realism to your star-spanning campaign. Too often planets in a space RPG are like rooms in a dungeon: you show up, do some stuff, and leave. When you come back, nothing much has changed. Planetary Events gives gamemasters a quick way to come up with events that change the situation on a world. Some are relatively small-scale, others can have effects which ripple through the entire campaign universe. It's "system-agnostic," which means it isn't tied to any one particular set of game rules. You can use it for Traveller (all editions), Starfinder, Star HERO, Stars Without Number, or whatever game you like.

I've put it up for sale at both DriveThruRPG and Itch.io, as a "pay what you want" product.

There will be other products in the future — although given my own broad interests and short attention span, you can assume the subject matter will vary widely. 

My First Story

Back in the 1990s I wrote some adventures and sourcebook material for the legendary Star Wars Roleplaying Game published by West End Games. Some of the worlds and plot elements I put in those pieces actually worked their way into the "canon" of the Star Wars universe, and I got paid, so I was happy.

But sadly, West End's Star Wars license got snarled in some legal traps and eventually yanked. This caught everyone by surprise, and an issue of the Star Wars Adventure Journal in production had to be scrapped just before release. I was particularly disappointed because that issue was to contain an original Star Wars short story I'd written. If the issue had actually gotten out, that would have been my first published fiction. 

However, fandom never forgets. Some West End fans have put the lost issues of Star Wars Adventure Journal on the web, including my never-published story "A Servant of the Empire." You can read it here.

Looking over the story, I'm not disappointed. I was still learning the art, and I was aiming for the pulpy, action-packed style of the Star Wars stories, and what I wrote was a competent pulp story. But I think it works, and I'm not ashamed of it.

 

  

PhilCon 2020 Goes Virtual

This year's PhilCon — the venerable Philadelphia-era science fiction con now in its 84th year — is going to be all-online. On the plus side that means no New Jersey traffic and mall food; on the minus side it means no spontaneous conversations in the hotel lobby, no room parties, and no basic human contact. But a virtual convention is better than none at all. 

Still, as in past years I will be participating, from my office in Massachusetts. Here's my schedule:

 

Friday November 20, 5:30 p.m.: Online Gaming: Not Just for Pandemics

Michael Ryan (moderator), Robert Hranek, James L. Cambias, Debby Lieven

The four of us will be discussing how the ongoing epidemic has affected how people play games -- will we go back to tabletops and rec rooms again, or is online gaming the future?

 

8:30 p.m.: From the Iron Bank to CHOAM: Business in Fiction

James L. Cambias (moderating), Anthony Dobranski, Elektra Hammond, Tom Doyle, Ian Randal Strock

A panel about the role of business and economics in fantastic fiction. How does a world's economy affect the stories one can tell? What does fiction get right and wrong?

 

Saturday November 20, 5:30 p.m.: The Oceans of Space

James L. Cambias, Tom Purdom, Kelli Fitzpatrick

I think I'm moderating this one. The three of us will discuss famous maritime science fiction, and how new discoveries in and beyond the Solar System may influence future ocean stories.

 

Sunday November 21, 1:00 p.m.: The Search for the Philosophers' Stone

Robert Hranek (moderator), Anastasia Klimchynskaya, James Prego, James L. Cambias, Elizabeth Crowens

We'll look at the history of alchemy, how discoveries in chemistry and physics changed our understanding of how matter works, and look at some other concepts which have shifted over time.

 

4:00 p.m.: Reading

I'll give con goers a glimpse into my forthcoming novel The Godel Operation, and the amazing far-future setting The Billion Worlds.