Comment by HanClinto

This is extremely interesting to me. I understand why so many people are surprised that people would want this, but for whatever reason, I'm very much in the target audience.

I'm a "perpetual DM" in most of my roleplaying groups, having led campaigns spanning years, but very rarely do I get to participate as a player. My kids love me running adventures and one-shots, and while I enjoy it, people don't always recognize how much work it is -- both the prep, as well as the mental effort of being "on" for the entire duration of the adventure. I like afternoon one-shot adventures, but I dislike reading through long sourcebooks. I enjoy crafting puzzles and presenting challenges to the players, but also recognize the mental effort that this takes, and sometimes I just want a copilot to handle the lore and the setting. I already rely on the rules-nerds in my group to act as copilots for the specifics of game mechanics -- I don't have time to read through that many tables and commit them to memory.

Re: datasets, the paper authors used a dataset that they created by scraping Critical Role transcripts -- I doubt they had permission for that. I like contributing to open datasets for training open-source LLMs, and I think it would be really sweet for a playgroup to be able to contribute their play transcripts for such a thing. I would love to see a standard open-source dataset be collected for this, and perhaps even a standardized benchmark for quantifying the performance of particular LLMs in RPG contexts -- rules compliance, needle-in-haystack fact finding, consistency of roleplaying, understanding user intent, challenge creation / resolution, etc.