I’m a big fan of a small app called UpNote. It’s clean and simple with a few power features you can use if you really dig into it. It largely has the same baseline set of features as Obsidian, but it supports syncing across devices out of the box and has a one-time purchase of a lifetime membership.

I didn’t even realize Avatar Legends had a box set 🤔

That’s honestly the biggest potential upside with Meta’s Threads in my opinion: better chance to grab more of the big online personalities (e.g. it’s on the record that they’ve been reaching out to major celebrities) and (at least for the foreseeable future) Meta seems invested in full-featured Fediverse interoperability including account migration, etc.

I think this is an entirely valid perspective. Some people are just overflowing with ideas and the use of ChatGPT (or any kind of aid in inspiration, such as random tables) seems redundant. Just for a point of comparison, my own experience is a combination of (a) I simply enjoy creating some kinds of content more than others, and (b) I don’t have enough spare time to personally author all of the content I want for my campaign. With my limited time, I want to focus on authoring the stuff that I enjoy creating and/or the stuff that’s going to have the biggest impact. As an example, I’m happy to delegate descriptions of rooms to books of tables or ChatGPT if it means I can focus instead on the lore of the dungeon as a whole or the background & motivations for its overarching villain.

I highly respect this bit of advice. It’s a classic. But I have also found it can assume a certain kind of player, and that there do exist players which seemingly desire a storyline they can just follow. They still want to have agency and make interesting and consequential decisions, but I still find them a bit aimless and lost when I drop them in a sandbox.

In fairness to this received wisdom, I think the phrase interesting situation is doing more work than I have historically given it credit for. It’s not just about it being interesting in the abstract, but (at least with some players and parties) presenting a status quo and then introducing (or threatening) the prospect of changing that status quo. I suppose my tl;dr is that with interesting situations inaction should feel like a meaningful choice. The orphanage will burn down, the criminal will escape, the freedom fighter will be caught. (Ideally, you leave the determination of whether they’re a criminal or a freedom fighter up to the players.)

I feel (rightly & legitimately) called out 😭 I literally got two months into my renaissance political intrigue campaign before I discovered Court of Blades. It’s a perfect fit for my interests, but now my campaign is lousy with so many d&d tropes (Tieflings! Dhampirs! Changelings! Dragons!) that I more than likely couldn’t switch systems without home brewing everything out the wazoo 😓

I’m fascinated to hear you actually use it during a session! Can you give an example of what that looks like? I can’t imagine it without majorly interrupting play personally, so I’d love to hear more about how you make that work

That area of “material that’s nontrivial to produce but not certain to be read/consumed by the players” might be the most useful place for chatgpt, in retrospect. I don’t want to draft an entire story that could well just be ignored, but I can edit or touch up something that an AI gives me.

It does seem to do pretty well in that regard. Can I ask if your game is a conventional d&d campaign or something else?

That’s awesome. ChatGPT seems to do pretty well when your campaign aligns with traditional D&D tropes, but I had no idea it would even generate hex maps! That’s wild

I have found it useful for handouts as well. I usually need to do a few rounds of editing and back and forth to get details and tone/voice just right, but it’s often still easier than writing it from scratch myself. It’s also nice for writing something yourself and then having it rewrite it in another voice e.g. “rephrase this letter like a victorian dandee wrote it”

I can understand the skepticism, but if helps things up at all, I would clarify that I think exceedingly few people who use random tables (even all the way back to the 70s) really use them as a final say in what’s happening next. Most who use it probably appreciate it more as a way of dislodging tired tropes and tricks they find themselves always falling back on.

I think of it as one more source of inspiration to keep in your toolbox, alongside the evergreen “steal from media you like.” That said, ymmv as with all things in life, and the best prep is the one that works for you!

So, far and away the greatest utility I have found for ChatGPT is in two areas:

• Brainstorming ideas like a random generator or book of tables. ChatGPT can be especially helpful with brainstorming ideas if your campaign doesn’t fit neatly into traditional genres or stories typically featured in role-playing games.
• Brainstorming how to tie up loose plot threads. This is beyond the ability of most traditional tools or aids to help with, and it’s a godsend if (like me) you often lay down clues long before you’ve fully worked out all the details of the mystery.

General Brainstorming

ChatGPT is pretty good at just coming up with ideas for your campaign in general. I’m talking about stuff like adventure ideas, encounter ideas, descriptive details of rooms, etc. It’s not great, though, and its output can feel pretty generic compared to material like Raging Swan Press which has entire books full of wonderfully evocative tables great for filling environments and dungeons with detail. There’s also stuff like this Random Adventure Generator by @slyfourish@ttrpg.network or this other Random Adventure Generator by donjon which are both probably just as good or better than ChatGPT in general at brainstorming adventure ideas.

Where ChatGPT shines however is that you can give it basically arbitrary thematic or fictional constraints and tell it to generate ideas within that context. ChatGPT is mediocre at generic D&D or traditional fantasy, but my campaign isn’t a typical D&D campaign world, and as a result ChatGPT is basically the only random generator that can reliably generate ideas that are actually useful for my campaign. In essence, ChatGPT is a random generator I can tailor to my campaign world.

Here’s an example below of how I might use ChatGPT for this. In practice, I often like to “prime” it with details of the major characters of my campaign as well. It’s not brilliant, and you can see in many places it’s effectively repeating back themes or ideas that I gave it in the first place, but it’s nonetheless incredibly useful compared to the kind of stuff I tend to get back from other random generators that focus on generic fantasy content.

My biggest challenge with this kind of usage of ChatGPT is that it tends towards sounding like a back-of-the-book summary of a plot, often generalizing or otherwise glossing over the specific details that I’m precisely interested in. The first response to my prompt in the example is a great demonstration of this, which is why you’ll see I have to follow up by prompting it for specifics about the McGuffins and the cast of characters. If anyone has ideas for prompts that can avoid this tendency to summarize without making it write novels of text, I’m all ears.

Tying Up Plot Threads

ChatGPT can be really helpful with brainstorming not just general ideas but specific plot points for your adventures and campaigns. I don’t know how to explain this well outside of sharing another example but the gist is that you give ChatGPT a lot of detail about your campaign and its themes, characters, world, and setting, and then explain how there’s a “gap” in the story somewhere and ask it to brainstorm how to fill it. In my example here, the “gap” is that I’m missing a clue to deliver some critical information, but I’ve also used it successfully for other things like:

• “Why or how would character ABC be connected to mysterious phenomena XYZ?”

• “Which of these characters could have summoned the monster, and why?”

• “What is the nefarious scheme this character is planning (which I hinted at in a prior session)?”

I’m a big fan of @slyflourish@ttrpg.network’s trick of preparing secrets, clues, or general plot point revelations in advance and without anticipating the context of where or how they will be revealed. That is, you just prepare a list of ten facts or details that will engage the players if and when they learn them, and you improvise how they learn them at the table. It’s great for when a player character unexpectedly goes to the library to aimlessly look for clues, or the PCs start talking with an NPC and you need to drop some nugget of info to make the conversation feel worthwhile.

https://slyflourish.com/sharing_secrets.html

I think I don’t run into the conversational issues as often but I might be more willing than most GMs to retcon that a given NPC has secret info that explains why they aren’t persuaded by a given interaction. When it’s a raw attempt to ingratiate with an NPC, I always find the line of “hmm, you said all right words but this seems a bit too convenient or neat and they suspect you have an ulterior motive” to work decently well.

Of course, it could always be that I’m just bad at detecting my own bullshit 😅 Either way, on the whole, I’m very drawn to more collaborative models of role-playing and letting the players have more reign of the narrative, but I do feel like they need to be coaxed into the mindset. So many players are used to playing RPGs as though they are piloting their characters like mechs in an imagined environment—very simulationist, in other words. I want to play more like a writing room of screenwriters workshoping a story. I just need to find systems and mechanics that let players dip their toes in the water before they’re asked to swim.

I feel like Go then Roll is more typical in (at least modern) d&d, which is my primary experience with role-playing. I’m actually really drawn to giving players more creative control over the scenario but I’ve found it’s not uncommon for players to be reluctant to assume that kind of control. The one exception is when there is a critical success with an attack or an otherwise crazy high roll on some skill check; in those cases, they universally seem to appreciate narrating their over-the-top accomplishment.

But when you start handing over the reins of the larger narrative? Or inviting them to have some creative control of the setting and world? That seems to be challenging to some players’ suspension of disbelief, like they’re seeing the man behind the curtain (indeed, being invited behind it themelves) when they wanted the wizard. Obviously d&d doesn’t really have a ton of support for these kinds of interactions at the table, so it’s perhaps not too surprising that players feel like they’re in uncharted territory when I spring it on them.

The two I would recommend are both centered around GM prep:

• The Lazy Dungeon Master by Mike Shea (@slyflourish@ttrpg.network , @slyflourish@chirp.enworld.org )
• Never Unprepared by Phil Vecchione (@dnaphil@dice.camp)

I don’t think either of these are perfect, but they both offer really good, actionable advice. The philosophies/systems described in these two don’t naturally mesh, and I think that’s a plus. Every GM needs to figure out for themselves how to prepare to run a game, because the things each GM needs are unique. I think having two books outline pretty drastically different approaches can help you triangulate your own needs and methods

I was a bit bummed to see that Mike didn’t mention any of the Fediverse options but honestly Lemmy and kbin are still cooking as technologies so I don’t exactly fault him. I was surprised to hear him skeptical of Patreon—the same incentives are there, surely, but I wasn’t aware of any recent actions they had taken.

Replacing Discord will definitely be painful if/when it comes.