Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 189 - Using AI Tools

Episode Date: August 27, 2023

Some decry AI as the worst thing to come to RPGs since THAC0.  However, I’d like DMs and players to acknowledge the problems associated with AI use but also consider using AI as a tool to augment our games to make us better DMs and better players.   #dmtips #dnd #Pathfinder #ArtificialIntelligence #rpgtips Resources: How to use AI as a Dungeon Master by Annabelle Collins:  https://www.modularrealms.com/en-us/blogs/news/dungeon-master-tools-how-can-ai-help-me-dm https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2023/05/we-played-dd-with-a-chat-gpt-dungeon-master-can-ai-really-run-your-campaign.html Positive Experiences with an AI DM https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/zpepxi/i_played_dnd_with_an_ai_robot_and_it_was_amazing/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3   Cros.land generators:  https://cros.land/ai-rpg-location-generator/ https://bard.google.com   Game Master’s Book of Random Encounters:  https://a.co/d/4BtkOYL Bloomberg Article on AI face generation:  https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-generative-ai-bias/

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. Running games, especially sandboxes, require a lot out of a DM. And I think these resources make us better, makes our games better. Why can't AI do the same thing for us? Thank you for listening to the Taking20 Podcast, episode 189. Tips on using AI tools to make you a better player or DM. I want to thank this week's sponsor, Caterpillars. Did you know that Caterpillars are really, really poor swimmers? They haven't even learned the butterfly yet. This podcast survives thanks to donations from people

like you. for some of my initial costs of microphone and audio workstation. But if you could donate as little as $5 over at ko-fi.com slash taking20podcast, it would help keep this podcast alive. Quite literally, if all of my listeners in a week would donate just $5, that covers my costs for almost three full years. It's coming up on annual renewal time for a lot of my services, and that's making me sweat just a little bit, since costs of everything just keep going up. If you're a regular listener and enjoy the podcast, please consider donating if you can. Also, we're coming up on episode 200, which will be a milestone I honestly never thought I would hit.

I believe we're going to have a giveaway of some sort. Plans are still forming, so I'll make an announcement when the cement begins to dry, and there's something to actually announce, so stay tuned for that. If anyone would like to contribute anything to the giveaway in exchange for weeks of my plugging your product and my eternal gratitude, please reach out to me at feedback at taking20podcast or via direct message on social media. There were a lot of news stories in the past year about the potential rise of AI as dungeon masters. Wizards of the Coast, as a matter of fact, said they were trying to make AI DMs, and of course a small percentage of people, I believe the technical term is,

freaked the hell out. But so far, that's kind of come to nothing. Meanwhile, people have been playing with AI and fed data into ChatGPT and other AI tools to see if they could train it to become a DM. Results have been mixed. Some people said it worked fantastic, and some said it was riddled with tropes, some of them bordering on racism or ancestryism. However, when used with the proper guardrails and with the results of AI critiqued and adjusted appropriately for your game, I think AI can be a great tool for both DMs and players. Now let's get this out of the way. There are some things that AI won't be able to replace human DMs to do, at least not right now.

Social interaction, complex sandbox-type adventures, or other games that require keeping massive amounts of notes, adjusting the adventures behind the screens to make it more exciting, level appropriate, or even handling players that want to try things that require creative interpretation of the rules. Like, quote, I want to use a grappling hook to grab onto the chandelier, grab the charmed prince while still playing Greensleeves as inspiration with harmonica in my mouth. You know what? For shits and giggles. I fed that sentence into chat GPT specifying Pathfinder 2E rules,

and of course it borked the reaction economy just a little bit, but that's not unexpected. It mentioned using an attack roll to set the grappling hook. Makes sense. Athletics to swing. That also makes sense. But what I laughed at is it requested a diplomacy check to grab the prince. I don't think that's right. Swing? Oh, hello there. Hi, I'm Jeremy and I'm here to rescue you. Would you like to escape your captors? I don't think I can get that done in six seconds.

Just because AI may not be ready to be a full DM yet doesn't mean we should completely disregard it. No, I think there are things it's good at. And let's talk about those things specifically. Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you you need to use this AI tool or that AI tool. You have access to search engines and probably are better at it than I am. I'll let you determine which tools that you want to try. you determine which tools that you want to try? The ones that I have tinkered with are ChatGPT, Google Bard, Cross.Land, MidJourney, Canva.com, and a few other tools, and a lot of them I found can make your job easier. That being said, the AI tools that we have only work because they've

ingested other similar works and can draw on those examples. There are problems with this. The original author may or may not have been paid for their data to feed into the AI. AI has to be trained using existing works, and there are many that consider training AI without reimbursing the creator of the content unethical. I will grant that is true. I will support an AI tool that announces that they reimburse content creators appropriately, but that's an issue that I can't solve. I mean, I know my lane and I'm going to stay in it. Another issue with AI is that sometimes it draws on harmful stereotypes. It depends on the data input. Therefore, if the input data has stereotypes, the output likely would as well. Early this year, while playing with one, I was generating a sample prompt for a camp

of nomadic peoples, and it used the term gypsy, which is, of course, a pejorative term at best. I'll link to another article by Bloomberg, by the way, that showed AI tendencies regarding generating faces based on job title and gender. I'll put a link in the resources for the episode and simply say that AI tendencies of that study were problematic at best. AI is better at generating content derived from something that already exists, so it may not be able to handle something completely unique and off the wall. That's why the free AI tools that

are out there require some sort of initial input from a human being, and of course it ingests other works that have been created to help generate new works on the fly. At some point, maybe the next iteration of AI, maybe the AI that comes out in 2030, will probably be able to generate things on the fly themselves without this pre-generated input, but we're not there yet. These are real problems that people a lot smarter than I am are working to solve. That's not why I'm here. I acknowledge that there are problems with the sources of data fed into AI and perhaps what is generated by it.

If we want to use AI as DMs and players, we need to acknowledge these problems and be aware of them when we use these tools. Okay, back to RPG topics, which is my lane. we need to acknowledge these problems and be aware of them when we use these tools. Okay, back to RPG topics, which is my lane. One of the things I've heard is that using AI is cheating as a DM. Okay, honestly, that baffles me. I'm a believer that GMs should use whatever tools are available to make our games better. For example, in prepping for a game session that I'm having this week,

I used a book of random tables by Jeff Ashworth, details of a pirate's life I learned from the book Under the Black Flag by David Cordingly, monster descriptions out of the Pathfinder 1e Bestiary 3, the Let's Build subreddit, details from the Inner Sea World Guide, the D100 subreddit, and yes, I even used Canva.com to generate a picture of a bustling dockside in a pirate town. Would you consider using books and details from a monster manual cheating?

What if instead of using an AI to generate the image, I did a Google image search and just downloaded one of those instead? Would that be cheating? I say no. search and just downloaded one of those instead? Would that be cheating? I say no. Running games, especially sandboxes, require a lot out of a DM, and I think these resources make us better, makes our games better. Why can't AI do the same thing for us? I don't think using AI is any more cheating as reading something out of a book or pulling a description out of a movie that we like. Okay then, Jeremy, if it's not cheating, using an AI is definitely a crutch. Well, okay, if by crutch you mean something

that can help support you, I agree. If you've played in multiple games, you know that different DMs have different skills. If we were all the same, our stories would be the same, and then yes, we'd have AI DMs because we all do it the same. But that's definitely not the case. Speaking from experience, I'm not like other DMs, and I know what I'm good at. Story arcs, adventure development, improvisation, comedy. Those are my strengths, and I know also what I'm not good at. Generating long descriptions of things on the fly and having every nitinoid rule memorized. Those aren't my strong suit. I mean, I could bury my head in every corner of every rulebook and try to get to know every single obscure rule and try to avoid the gotcha moments, but I can't.

I don't have that kind of time. If you ever want to sit down at my table and have a gotcha moment, you're probably going to succeed. I know the rules for 95 plus percent of the situations out there, and I interpret the rules the rest of the time. Some DMs are not good at descriptions of people or places or actions. That doesn't make them bad DMs. No more than not knowing that the aid action is a reaction, not an action in Pathfinder 2E, and that raising a shield requires an action to gain an action in Pathfinder 2e, and that raising a shield requires

an action to gain its benefits in Pathfinder 2e. But what if you need to come up with a description for what the party sees when they first open a cold family crypt infested with vermin, and there's not a descriptive text in the adventure you're running? DMs that struggle with off-the-cuff descriptions may kind of just say, well, you see a cold, dark mausoleum with a long hallway of stone, and the stone corpse-holding thingies are all closed except for one that's been smashed with parts of a corpse sticking out of it. Yeah, that's it. If you're one of those DMs that struggles with off-the-cuff descriptions like this,

don't worry about it. I've run entire game nights where my creativity CPU is out getting coffee, and I just winged it with short descriptions. However, imagine you know the characters are going to be going to a mausoleum, and instead of trying to do something off-the-cuff, you feed the information to an AI generator. What would that sound like? For this example, I used the cross.land, C-R-O-S dot L-A-N-D, generator. I'll put a link in the resources, by the way. I fed it, quote, cold family crypt infested with vermin. And here was the result. The cold well mausoleum stands alone in a desolate graveyard, its stone facade weathered by time and neglect. Wisps of frost hang in the air, hinting at the cold that chills your bones as you approach it.

The entrance is guarded by a pair of stone statues, their outstretched hands grasping rusted swords. As you step inside, the pungent scent of decay assaults your senses, mingling with the scurrying sounds of vermin echoing through the dimly lit corridors. In the flickering candlelight, you see a broken wooden sarcophagus against the wall, its lid shattered, revealing the skeletal remains of a long-forgotten noble. It's not bad. But that brings me to my first piece of advice for DMs that want to use AI. AI is a tool, but you have to be smarter than the AI to fit this in your world.

For example, is this the Coldwell mausoleum or does it belong to another family? It looks like the tool that I was using latched onto the word cold in my prompt to generate the name of the family. Okay, so change it to make sense. Is the crypt stone or is it made of something else like marble, dirt, or wood? If you have two stone statues with rusted swords,

you need to decide who is represented by those statues and whether the swords are worth anything because you know your party's going to try to steal them. I know mine would. Also, flickering candlelight? Are there still candles in there? If so, why are they still lit? Does that even make sense in your game? And then finally, whose sarcophagus has been busted open? Is it a noble of renown that the looters were trying to grave rob, or was it busted out from the inside? AI, in my experience, is great for DMs in two ways. One, as a prompt or idea generator. AI is great for stuff like this, even if the output is a little tropey. Is tropey a word? I don't know. It relies too much on tropes is probably a better way to say that. Seriously, go to your AI tool of choice, say Bard, ChatGPT, whatever, and ask it for 10

unique RPG tavern names and see what it kicks out. I did, and they tended to be fairly simplistic. A formula of the adjective noun was the most common. I think eight of them were those. The Crooked Coin, the Whistling Skull, the the sleepy dragon. Sure, those names do in a pinch, and if you get caught and you don't have any names and don't have anything behind the screen, maybe you can look one up on a computer in the middle of the game. These AI tools are very good at generating pre-made lists, and I recommend that you have a lot of these lists behind your screen already. People's names, building or business names, town names that you can just have as a list,

cross them off when you use it, maybe even some brief descriptions. Which is the second thing that AI is good for, giving you ideas on how to provide more detail and iterate what you have into something more, better, or at least different. You give it a bare amount of information and it spits out something that it can augment your idea. As we've seen, it can turn a brief partial sentence description into a paragraph of information describing the crypt. Similarly, and I can't believe I'm just now mentioning it, by the way, because I just

thought of it, AI image generators can take brief descriptions and turn them into good looking art for your home game. If you need an NPC, a small map, or even a picture establishing an area where an adventure will take place, AI image generators can really help you there. For example, I told that same AI tool to describe the interior of the Sleepy Dragon in an output about a paragraph of information that indicates that it's small, cozy, dimly lit, with simple wooden furniture, candles on the tables. What's with the candles? God, it seems to have lodged on it. It likes candles for some reason. AI tool, do you want some candles

for holidays? A fire in the hearth, walls decorated with tapestries of dragons and knights. I mean, it's okay. It's not bad. Telling me that one wall was made of stone and the floor's made of uneven wooden planks, that gives it some character. With a couple of iterations, I was really able to make it something closer to what I imagined. Then I took that same description and fed it into an image generation AI. It generated a small tavern with a row of tables on one side and some booths on the other. Bar's nowhere to be seen, and it's brighter than I'd imagine, but the ceiling is low, there's a stone wall with a hearth in it, and the floorboards look like absolute shit. I'll be honest, I can't draw

or Photoshop images for crap. Even my hand-drawn maps have the appearance of being drawn by a baby elephant on a four-day meth binge, but without the cuteness of me being a baby elephant. AI image generation has done a great job of taking a description for an area and generating a picture of what it could look like. And if the first version isn't good enough of what it makes, you can iterate, providing more and more detail to hopefully get closer to what you want. DMs. If you need ideas for NPCs, AI can help. I'm sure you don't need me to show you how it can generate names and descriptions for your NPCs. You can easily

extrapolate what I've already done previously with lists and area descriptions to generate lists of NPCs in their descriptions. However, one additional thing that can help us while we're gaming is when the PCs latch onto random NPC number 339, Trina the Stablehand, and want to know all about her. If you're caught with no description, completely flat-footed, or as Pathfinder 2e Remastered will call it, off-guard, and you have nothing to say about it, AI can help you generate the major events of that NPC's life. I asked an AI for major life events of Trina the Stablehand. It gave me that she was an orphan because of freaking course she is. Does anybody in a fantasy

world have parents? Come on. I guess just being a character in a fantasy world, or an NPC at that matter, increases your likelihood of your parents dying by 9,000%. It's like the world is just awash with orphans. By age 12, she was taken in by the local stable master who taught her to care for horses. She loves her work and she's met a young knight and she is in love. They're to be married in a year. I'm going to stop there. DMs. Just with what I've given you already besides my rant about how everybody's an orphan, I would imagine you could generate plot hooks and adventure ideas for Trina. But what if you need more detail?

Like, what is she like? What's her personality? I asked an AI fed all this information in about Trina and asked for her personality based on her major life events, and it said she is strong, hardened against the world. She's a hard worker who's dedicated to her adopted family. She sounds nice, but too bad the AI generated an idea that the knight is looking to take advantage of this young woman. I took that to mean that maybe the knight is trying to rob the family blind. Again, idea from AI about Sir Robert

or Lady Robert, and come to find out she's not a knight at all. She's just posing as a knight. Tell me you couldn't run a night of adventuring based on this information alone. Give the fake knight some stats and sick the party to finding them on behalf of Trina and her adopted family. Finally, players. AI is a great tool for helping to flesh out character backstories. Beyond where you grew up and what happened to your family, did you have any siblings? How are they doing now?

What are the major life events of your character leading up to this point? With a few prompts and a couple of iterations, you can turn bullet points into full-fledged paragraphs to provide to your GM for your backstory. I could go on, but I'm in danger of running long already, and I think you get the point. AI is great for generating lists of ideas and iterating those ideas to give DMs more and

more information to make worlds feel rich and lived in. They do have some problems that we all must acknowledge, but if you keep those problems in mind and adjust the results you receive from an AI program, then this can be a wonderful tool for us DMs to use and lean on to reinforce areas where we need a little help. Ease yourself into using this powerful tool as a GM, and players, consider using this tool to help flesh out your characters, and I bet all of you would have fun doing it. Please consider sharing links to my podcast on social media.

I would love to see this podcast get more listeners, but I can only do that with your help. Please take a minute to like, rate, and share the link whenever you can. Tune in next week when I'm going to have a very special interview with an amazing GM, Rick Sandidge of Find the Path Ventures. He is an absolute wealth of information and has a voice that I can only describe as powerful and majestic. I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did making it. Before I go, though, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Caterpillars. I've never minded finding a caterpillar in my apple, but what was the problem when I found half of one? This has been episode 189 with tips on how to use AI tools.

My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2023. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.