Comment by empath75
4 days ago
The main problem with doing this on chatgpt is that it is _relentlessly_ cheerful and it's almost impossible for it to produce any kind of interpersonal drama or threat or danger.
I tried to get it to run space opera about a diplomatic mission to a newly recontacted planet, full of Game of Thrones-style intrigue and plotting and scheming, and it was like playing with a cheerily optimistic new UN intern that completely believes in the power of compromise and diplomacy to solve all problems.
It was always like: "And so the two of you hashed out your differences over a glass of Dubranian Forblik, and peace reigned forever and ever after."
That's true of how it does role playing games and any kind of fiction at all -- it always wants to tie a neat bow on it at the end of every few paragraphs with a moral and everything.
You also have to ask it to use python to dice roll for anything you want to potentially fail on, or it will always make everything you do succeed wonderfully.
I will say this -- the advanced audio mode for D&D is amazing and it really does act out the characters and it will occasionally slip into different voices or even add sound effects, even though it's not "allowed" to. It will also sometimes copy your voice and act out what it thinks you should do instead of letting you talk, though.
The researchers encountered this.
> raised by 3 out of 7 players was the perceived lack of danger for their characters. Participants noted that the gameplay did not present sufficient threats or challenges, which diminished the sense of urgency and excitement typically associated with D&D adventures.
Indeed. But for stuff like this, ChatGPT is overkill. It's better to get a dedicated RP finetune of LLaMA, Qwen, or some other open weights model (you can still run it in the cloud if you don't have hardware to do so locally). There are enough finetunes around by now that you can "dial in" how dark you want it, but for some examples:
https://huggingface.co/jukofyork/Dark-Miqu-70B
https://huggingface.co/SicariusSicariiStuff/Negative_LLAMA_7...
Just curious, how do you keep up to date on these models? Is there a community out there that discusses them?
https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ is the place to be, but it's a subreddit with an eclectic population, so apply some caution when browsing it at work.
r/LocalLLaMA has the discussions, but on top of that, I just periodically browse new model lists on Hugging Face. There's a lot of stuff, but most low-effort finetunes tend to focus on small models (since that's much cheaper and faster), so if you only look at 70B+ ones, there's a lot less garbage there.
Reminiscent of the Twilight Zone episode where a criminal ends up in the afterlife. Spoilers in link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nice_Place_to_Visit
The old gpt2 engine that used to drive AI Dungeon had the opposite problem, it was obviously trained on a ton of really bad fan fiction and would frequently either shift into filthy erotica or some kind of hyper violent serial killer story, no matter how innocently the story started.
I loved AI Dungeon for generating funny/stupid fanfiction style adventure/action/fantasy/scifi stories. It could keep track of characters and settings, have them return with motivations. And then something unexpected would happen. Provided me with a lot of entertainment.
But my problem with using it as a DM is that you have to police yourself. I could just declare that I did something and it would automatically succeed. There were no rules or antagonism in the system. It was more of a collaborative storytelling tool than a game.
To be fair I haven't used it in years so I dunno how it works nowadays.
Yep, in my game it tried always to "save" player it was impossible for LLM to jail or kill a player to end a game. I had to explicitly end it by game logic, not by LLM.