Category: dungeons & dragons

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dungeons & dragons writing advice

How AI is Making Dungeon Mastering Easier Than Ever

I run a Dungeon & Dragons campaign for four students that meets for two hours a day, two days a week. Our campaign takes place in my home-brew world, Migia.

I don’t have the time or the skills to map a logical geography for a whole world, so I used the open-source Fantasy Map Generator created by GitHub user Azgaar, a JavaScript wizard from Richmond, Virginia, to generate and tweak a world map for Migia. 

The generator allows you to customize place names, stylize the design, focus the map on political borders, biomes, cultural zones, religions, etc., and render it as a flat map, a 3D scene, or a globe.

From there, the Internet offers a plethora of D&D-focused generators to help me bring Migia to life. There’s the city map generator, the dungeon generator and cave generator, the random encounter generator, the side quest generator, the backstory generator, the NPC generator, the fantasy name generator, and a whole list of auto-roll tables that will generate everything from a “breakfast at a traveler’s inn” to “resurrection consequences.” On days I prefer rolling dice to pressing buttons, I head over to the D100 tables on DNDSPEAK.com for inspiration.

Tables from the Dungeon Master’s Guide

Generators have been around as long as D&D has. Computers may make them easier and faster to use by combining a slew of tables into one button push, but at bottom, most generators are just the lists of tables Dungeon Masters find in the official rule books or create on their own.

In other words, generators are not artificial intelligence but glorified spreadsheets.

Midjourney Bot To Create Images For A Campaign 

In September, one of my D&D buddies added the Midjourney Bot to our Discord chat server. You enter a few words in the chat, and the bot will create an original image based on your prompt using artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

I started using it to create images of non-player characters in the campaign.

Take the image of the harengon, for example (a harengon is a kind of rabbit-like creature). I prompted the bot to create “a ferocious rabbit standing on the edge of a cliff with a sword in her hand.” After about a minute, Midjourney Bot provided me with four drafts based on the prompt.

Four options for my harengon

From there, I selected the draft in the bottom right and told the bot to “upscale” it. A minute later, I had the final image of my harengon. The upscale added brush strokes and more detail across the entire canvas. I could have continued to tweak, but the image served my needs, so boom…two minutes after having the idea for a ferocious rabbit sword fighter, I had a picture I could base the doe on.

The results of my various prompts were interesting and captured the vibes I intended (e.g., “a female elf with long white hair and dark skin standing in the center of a cloud made from daggers”), but they lacked the details that I need to really dig into their characters.

Then I realized that I could use the word “portrait” in my prompts to force the bot to create more realistic images of my NPCs.

For the last few months, whenever I’ve needed an NPC for the campaign, I type a few words into Midjourney Bot that summarize the kind of character I’m looking for and add the word “portrait.” A couple of minutes and a few drafts later, I’ve got an image I can show my players to help them imagine the individuals they encountered during the campaign.

From Characters To Scenes

A few weeks after I started using Midjourney, I decided I could use it to create illustrations of the previous D&D session’s scenes.

Most D&D campaigns last weeks, months, years, and sometimes decades. When you sit down with your friends (or students) for a session, there’s usually a few minutes of recap (“Last time on Dungeons & Dragons…”) to remind everyone where we left off.

How much cooler would those recaps be if I could throw in an illustration or two of where they were or the monsters they were still facing?

Thanks to the Midjourney artificial intelligence image creator, my D&D campaigns became much more visual.

Craft Assistant (GPT-3) To Write Original Histories & Backstories

I use Craft to manage all the information I need for Migia. Craft is like a note-taking app on steroids. I discovered it a few months back (long after Apple named it the “2021 Mac App of the Year”), and it’s the first app in a long time that I loved using. I immediately converted 90% of my document-creating/managing tasks to Craft; months later, I haven’t looked back (I really should write a blog post about it; it’s so good).

A couple of weeks ago, the folks behind Craft added GPT-3 to the app, calling the feature the “Craft AI Assistant.” As Craft wrote in their announcement, “We believe that GPT-3, one of the most impressive AI systems ever built, which applies machine learning to understand questions and generate human-like text, has now reached the point where it’s more than just a novelty.”

I tried it out — “Generate a list of blog post ideas” — but didn’t really see a way to integrate it into my daily habits, so I moved on with my life.

But on Wednesday this week, I found myself behind the 8-ball for this week’s D&D session with my students. The adventurers were on a ship on their way to a pirate haven named Maroon Cave, about 200 miles off the coast. I knew a giant shark was about to attack them (I’d ended the last session by playing the theme to JAWS), but if they made it past the shark, I didn’t know what they’d find at the pirate haven.

With less than an hour to prep, I opened Craft, brought up the Assistant, and asked it to “write a 400 word history of a pirate haven named Maroon Cave.”

Craft AI Assistant writes a history of a pirate haven for me.

Within seconds, the Craft AI Assistant had written an entire history, explaining why it was named Maroon Cave (from the French word for “fugitive”) and why pirates were safe there. It also attached famous pirates such as Blackbeard to the history, provided details on two specific events that occurred there, and summarized what the cave is used for today (“a popular tourist attraction”).

I couldn’t use all of that in my campaign, but after a few tweaks (French became Elvish, for example, and Blackbeard became a goblin pirate queen; plus, I deleted the section on it becoming a tourist spot), it was perfect.

Next, I needed a popular location at the pirate haven, a tavern where the adventurers could go to find the information that brought them to the island in the first place.

After a quick stop at the tavern name generator, tweaked with the help of some students who were in the room with me, I asked the Craft AI Assistant to “write a biography of a dwarven woman who runs a tavern named the Tipsy Turtle on an island that serves as a pirate haven.”

The Assistant created a story that begins, “Lydia, or ‘Lyd’, is a dwarf who runs a tavern, the Tipsy Turtle, on Maroon Cave. The cave is ruled by the law of the sea – piracy. Lyd, however, brings a touch of stability to this dangerous place.”

First, note how it recognized I wanted the tavern to be on Maroon Cave. I didn’t tell it that. It picked up the information from the other notes in my app.

It continued the story, “She arrived at the cave roughly 15 years ago as the young lover of the infamous pirate queen, Captain Aurora. After Aurora’s disappearance, Lyda decided to stay on the island. Seeing the need and the potential for profit, Lyd decided to build a tavern, and it quickly became a popular gathering place for the locals, as well as for pirates who passed through.”

It wasn’t perfect. I had to edit, tweak, and create D&D-specific details for Lyd. I gave her a dwarven last name (Trueboots), determined her alignment, gifted her a few stats unique stats (+5 to Charisma checks), and figured out her personality traits. Still, by starting with the story created by the Craft AI Assistant, I turned what could easily take 30 minutes into a five-minute task.

From there, I popped into Discord, submitted a similar prompt to the Midjourney Bot that I gave to GPT-3 (“a dwarven woman who runs a tavern on a pirate haven”), and two minutes later, I had a portrait of Lyd to help my students bring her to life.

Lyda, the owner of the Tipsy Turtle

There’s a lot of controversy around these AI assistants. Artists and illustrators are rightly crying foul because the images the bots come up with have, at their origin, unique works of art that can be found on the Internet. They also work at a high enough quality now to replace the need for human illustrators and artists, and like the Luddites of yore, the skilled workers feel undervalued and dismissed.

Meanwhile, the word-generating AI bots will make teaching students how to write essays incredibly problematic. It’s too easy for an unscrupulous teenager to generate an original report on whatever topic their teacher asks for. These things can create titles (see the one that accompanies this post) or analyze the theme of The Scarlett Letter:

The theme of The Scarlet Letter is that of the consequences of sin and guilt. The novel examines how individuals respond to these consequences, and how societal norms dictate how we process guilt and the importance of justice. In the novel, Hester Prynne wears the scarlet A (for adultery) as a badge of her shame and is ostracized by her Puritan community for her actions. The novel examines themes of confession, repentance, and how the truth is often obscured by the judgment and prejudice of others. It also speaks to the power of secrecy and the importance of owning up to one’s mistakes in the face of public scrutiny. Ultimately, it reminds us that everyone is capable of sin, and that it is important to be forgiving and understanding instead of harsh and judgmental. 

– Craft AI Assistant

There are real consequences to these technological advancements, ones that will not always be helpful to humanity.

I get that.

But I’m also a busy and stressed Dungeon Master, and if these things can make that role more manageable and fun, then I’m ready to roll.

Categories
dungeons & dragons

Rolling Deep in the Forgotten Realms

Earlier this week, a young woman named Sara, who describes herself as “a writer, disability consultant, sensitivity reader, and advocate for better disability representation in tabletop role-playing games,” released a mechanic for Dungeons & Dragons to provide players with a “Combat Wheelchair.” Many in the D&D Twitter-verse did not approve. 

Written as a seven-page supplement, the Combat Wheelchair allows disabled characters in the Forgotten Realms to live a life of adventure.

Fan artwork by Claudia Pozas

The wheelchair “takes its design from the chair used in sports such as wheelchair basketball and rugby.” Its slanted wheels allow for easy passage over most terrains; its side pockets allow for easy access to water, swords, and other weapons; its seat-tilt level makes it easy to get in and get out of the chair; its seat belts ensure secure and correct positioning in the chair; and magical Beacon Stones provide the energy to power the chair with the push of a button and give it the magical boost it needs to hover two feet in the air and glide up and down a short flight of stairs — long flights are more difficult, however, because the stones require a 30 second break for every 25 feet of hovering movement (in D&D, 30 seconds can equal five rounds(!) of combat).

There’s a lot more to the Combat Wheelchair.

Sara has developed a suite of upgrades that characters can use as they level up. Along with affixing weapons to various parts of the chair (a battering ram, knives coming out of the sides of the tires, etc.), players can upgrade their wheels to Suppression Tyres, which “absorb the sounds the wheels typically make when moving across certain terrains (e.g., crunching stone/gravel/puddles, etc.).” From a mechanical standpoint, this means the wheelchair-bound player now receives advantage on their Stealth checks. Other upgrades include Shin Shredders, a Mounted Sniper (a crossbow mounted on the armrest), Scatter Tacks, and more.

As is typical, many folks used Twitter to decry the idea of disabilities in the Forgotten Realms. It got to the point where Sara had to take a break from marketing her free mechanic because “today has been…a lot.” She later added, “I’ve only had one breakdown so I consider this as ‘I’m doing okay,’ I guess?”

I don’t want to provide a survey of everything the trolls spewed up in response to the Sara’s release of herCombat Wheelchair, but the general response was “In a world with magical healing, why would anyone be disabled?”

It’s a fair question, I think (outside of the ableist ideology at its root that assumes disabled people require “fixing”).

After all, the multiverse of D&D includes magical spells such as the seventh-level spell Regenerate, which allows a spell caster to touch another creature to “stimulate its natural healing ability” and fuse its severed body parts back into its healthy body, which would, of course, allow leg amputees to walk again. It also includes a second-level spell named Lesser Restoration, which allows spell casters to end another creature’s paralysis, and I imagine, could allow for the curing of a spinal cord injury that caused a character to require a wheelchair in the first place.

Sara’s response to her critics make it clear that she has thought about these facets of the multiverse. First, she points to Banak Brawnanvil, a disabled character in a series of novels canonical to the Forgotten Realms, to highlight the previous existence of wheelchairs in the multiverse. Brawnanvil lost the use of his legs when a goblin’s spear broke his spine. Thankfully, he knew a gnome alchemist named Nanfoodle Buswilligan (how great a name is that!). Buswillingan possessed the tinkering skills to build Brawnanvil a wheelchair. 

So if wheelchairs are already canonical in the Realms, why should a specialized Combat Wheelchair designed for disabled adventurers be a problem?

Second, Sara highlights the high costs associated with magical spells. A scroll containing a seventh-level spell such as Regenerate could cost a character anywhere between 5,000 and 50,000 gold pieces. The Wizards of the Coast (the publishers of Dungeons & Dragons) wrote back in 2006 that a gold piece in the Forgotten Realms contains approximately a quarter ounce of gold. Using today’s prices (which are near record highs, by the way), a single gold coin in the realms is worth roughly US$500, which means the cost of a seventh-level spell scroll equates to (at minimum) US$2.5 million.

With those kinds of prices, methinks the Realms might need a Universal Spellcare policy.

The point, of course, is that a typical adventurer won’t have the coin to regenerate or heal herself, if we even assume she wants to heal herself. As Sara writes to her critics, “Some of us? Well, we don’t want to be ‘fixed’.”

For myself, I think the mechanic adds a lovely sense of diversity to the potential for adventuring parties, and if my character gets killed by the three night hags and dracolich whom we have to fight in our game tomorrow night, I may just roll up a new character whose lived experience requires the assistance of a Combat Wheelchair.

Thank you, Sara, for expanding my vision for what is possible in the Realms.

Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum.

Categories
dungeons & dragons works in progress

Two Adventures are Better Than One

I’m currently running two different games of Dungeons & Dragons. The first is for a group of seven teachers who use the game to connect with their coworkers and escape the emotional stress we all feel thanks to our day jobs. The second is for my daughter’s two goodfathers (as an atheist family [kinda], we opted for goodfathers rather than godfathers). One goodfather lives in Maine, the other in Michigan.

The first game — the teacher game — meets face-to-face once a week in the middle of the week for about four to five hours, depending on when we get started. It may sound dorky to some people, but it’s basically our poker night.

It’s a diverse group (for Vermont). At 42, I am not the oldest member of the group; we also have members in their 30s and 20s. Two women grace us with their skills as full-time members of the party, while another plays a tricksy gnome whose character allows her to jump in and out of the game whenever she has the time. Most of our group members have played before, but this is the first time for one of them.

We started with an original story set in an Eastern region of the Forgotten Realms. The story has had three major parts to it so far. The first tested the party’s mettle in battle by challenging to capture a hoard of weapons from a group of goblin bandits. They all survived.

The second part of the story required them to travel to a distant town to recover an unusual magical object. Two members of the party (one of whom was a goblin they’d captured during the first part of the story) were killed on the journey, but new characters joined them once they reached the new town, and they spent several days seeking out the unusual object. During one of those days, two young elvish girls (played by my daughter and the daughter of another party member) requested their help in rescuing their father, who had been kidnapped by mysterious men in red robes. The side quest increased the party’s knowledge (if only slightly) about the story’s main foes.

The third part of the story reminded them that every door can lead to their doom. Their exploration of a seemingly abandoned wizard’s tower cost them the lives of two beloved characters, but they also found three more characters, expanding their numbers while also altering the party dynamic.

The next part of the story is going to come from an official Dungeons & Dragons book. They’re currently traveling down a river to move from one town to another (at our last session, they were attacked by four powerful and aggressive oozes in one of the swampier sections of the river), but when they arrive at the next town, they’ll find a richly developed suite of characters written and presented by the makers of Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve never run a game out of an official book before, so this will be a first. I’m eager to see how it goes.

I built the campaign as I’ve built all my campaigns, using instructions provided by The Dungeon Master’s Guide, coupled with copious use of the Internet. I borrowed ideas from the history of the Forgotten Realms (as determined by the Forgotten Realms Wiki), made notes on interesting and/or influential characters (some original, some borrowed), created a hook to pull the players into the world, blocked their way forward with a series of rich and exciting encounters (some requiring more forethought than others), and voila, we were ready to go.

The game I run with my daughter’s goodfathers is different. First, we don’t play in person, nor do we play simultaneously; instead, we “play by post.” I write some stuff on a forum, they write some stuff in response, and once in a while, I require them to do a dice roll (for which they include a screenshot). After they roll, we deal with the result: I write some stuff, they write some stuff, and the story moves forward.

None of us have played by post before, so we have no idea how it will turn out or whether it’s something we’ll ever want to do again.

The second difference about the goodfather game is that we’re using it to jointly create an original setting we may someday share with the world, a setting solid enough to support any campaign a Dungeon Master might want to drop on it.

Not knowing exactly how to begin such a process, we agreed to a few basic principles and a few basic facts about the world, then decided to run a play-test. They both wanted me to DM, but all of us will build the world together. We’re just getting started, so again, we have no idea how it will turn out, but it’s a way to be creative with two of my best friends, so why not do it?

I’ve been DM-ing games off and on for several years now. I got a late start when it comes to playing Dungeons & Dragons, but now that I’m in it, I’m in it.

As Fluid Imagination moves forward into 2020, I hope to share more about what I’ve learned as a Dungeon Master, including how I’ve used it and/or hope to use it in my capacities as a teacher and administrator. I’ve created a new category on the blog, aptly titled Dungeons & Dragons, where I’ll file what I write, and maybe someday, it’ll be useful to someone else.

Also, one of Fluid Imagination’s most visited links has to do with using Dungeons & Dragons in the classroom, and I recently learned that I was quoted in an article about how Dungeons & Dragons can help kids develop social-emotional learning skills. If so many people are coming to check out Fluid Imagination thanks to Dungeons & Dragons, I’d like to give then a little more to read while they’re here.

Of course…any regular readers know I don’t do well with goals, so I guess we’ll see how it goes.