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 @[email protected] 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)?”

A few sessions ago in my Monster of the Week campaign, I needed a folk tale of a Raven and a Fox who piss off some diety figures. I knew the beats of the tale but I didn’t really have time to write it all up, so I asked Bing to do it. I had to rewrite the last quarter of it, but the story it produced otherwise worked just fine. I then used stable diffusion to illustrate it and provided it as a handout that the players could (but didn’t) read. Ah well.

I’ve only used it once, so far. My players were in a place that was supposed to have prayers to an apocalyptic world-devouring entity written in secret text that could be discovered by the players.

I knew my players were likely to find it, so I asked ChatGPT to write out the text of these dark apocalyptic psalms. It did a great job, and when my players discovered the text it was appropriately verbose and creepy, instead of me just saying “you find prayers to the World Devourer”.

I don’t use ChatGPT and don’t plan to. For me, part of the fun of running games is being creative and doing the work of coming up with stuff myself. I don’t have as much of an issue with ChatGPT as with machine generated images, so that’s not why I avoid it. I just think the creative work is part of the experience, and us humans can also do that far better than a computer program. ChatGPT can’t easily draw on campaign-specific themes and symbolism, can’t foreshadow the greater mysteries going on. I mean, it likely can if specifically prompted to, but then you’re still doing most of the work myself.

And if I want to randomly generate something… Well, we’re all into TTRPG’s; that’s what dice are for. (Or tarot decks. I have too many of those. They’re just so pretty and I keep hoarding them.)

I’ve used chatGPT at the table as a suped up generator during games. I will usually tweak and change things it gives me to fit better with what i had planned, but it actually works pretty well, especially since you can feed it context and ask it to generate things that specifically fit with the current scenario

Just to chime in with a different perspective, I don’t use ChatGPT and have no plans to. Although I totally understand why some may find it useful, and don’t have judgements towards those that use it for personal purposes.

For me, one of the many reasons I enjoy DMing is specifically to push myself to improvise and creative. I wasn’t encouraged to be imaginative or creative as a child, and so as an adult I often find myself trying to make up for that. As well as letting go of the fear of not being in control, and having fun with making ideas on the spot. It also feels much more fulfilling when something I make up ends up going down well.

Also I tend to like coming up with new concepts that go against the grain, or at least attempt to. And while ChatGPT is good at scraping and spitting out what has been done before, I ambitiously want something that is more surprising or unique than what it offers.

I use it to plan my campaign. I cannot talk about the Contents and secrets with my players, my girlfriend foesvnt really care so I have ChatGPT just to spitball ideas with.

It does say dumb shit sometimes, or gives very generic ideas, but it serves to bounce your thoughts off of something and improve and improve. It’s like talking to someone about your next session

I’ve used it for random generation and that’s about it. Before each session I’ll generate a list of random people and stores. I’ve also used it to come up with lists of random items.

It’s basically just an all-in-one random generator for me.

I use it for ultra-lazy mode:

• Generate a Dungeons and Dragons adventure about X
• Ask for more in-depth information on things is mentions.
• Ask for a random dungeon based on the adventure
• Ask for a hex map for the area.

That’s honestly like 80% of the work. I just have to do some editing and jazz on top of it.

Edit: here’s an example from a couple months ago: https://imgchest.com/p/92493wqm4nk

I’m glad this kind of tooling works for people, but the idea of it is very alien to me. I’ve also never been fond of random tables. Somehow it feels “wrong” to use a table or chatgpt in a way that stealing ideas and mashing them into “what if the head vampire is basically nick fury but he has to take care of a baby-yoda like thing like from the mandalorian” doesn’t.

I haven’t used it in this way yet, but I want to use it to quickly generate things like news stories to pad put handouts. I’d really like to give my players full news papers in the style of Consulting Detective rather than just the relevant clippings.

Not a plug but more something that I ran across recently. In trying to get some text to speech to work as well as move a text generator to Linux and searching for help, I ran across “Silly Tavern”. Lots of videos on how to get it set up (most NSFW related, seems to be a thing) but the software itself looks to be quite powerful to put together characters, settings, storylines, and maybe active NPCs. It can use a local or internet LLM for the text generation, several TTS options for voices, and Stable Diffusion (and others?) for scenery creation.

I use ChatGPT (GPT4 version) for my homebrew campaign. I use it for generating stat blocks, adding filler details to settings I came up with (“describe this room with x y and z in it and foreshadow this thing at the end of the adventure”), and brainstorming options for how the plot could go going forward.

My party is 6 players, so there are a lot of individual subplots and backstories to keep track of. When I pitch new ideas to ChatGPT after refreshing it on the campaign’s context, it often will point out themes that would be good to highlight so I can tie some new event or setting into one or more characters’ backstories or emotional insecurities. It’s startlingly good at managing the complex interplay of ideas.

Everything else I just improv, so basically I use it for prep and setting the scene when entering a new location.

I’ve used it to run a campaign in single player.

Using Janitor AI, I setup a multi-personality AI using its D&D and games training presets and then fed it the SRD for 3.5 as well as all the stuff I wrote for my campaign and was able to play a game as a player all by myself because the AI handled being a DM and 3 other players.

It worked out pretty good. It didn’t always understand the rules which lead to arguments… Just like it would with real people! 😃

I often use GPT chat to refer to how to play games and it is very effective. It must be said that GPT chat is now trusted by many people. In addition to learning how to play, I also use it to create my own imagenes de buenas noches gratis website.