My (opinionated) ke. Will AI be the future of dungeons and dragons? Short answer, No.

Long answer, In the designing and development of games, yes, but probably in ways that don’t hurt. If WotC has an internal PowerPoint in a revenue meeting and that PowerPoint was made with the assistance of Microsoft Copilot, then AI is already altering our industry, but we’re not worried about that.

The thing that seperated the larger TTRPG companies from the smaller ones (particularly WotC but also Chaosium, Freeleague, Darrington Press’ etc) is the production of large, high quality products with good art. From my observations, exciting and innovative game design cames from all corners and all budgets of the industry, potentially because it doesn’t actually require money in any way, just time to put towards thinking about it.

This means that the rise of generative content to support TTRPGs creation is probably more likely to close the gap between smaller and larger publishers, as it’s currently in the creation of art filled, high quality books with elegant layouts and descriptions that independent and small publishers can’t compete with, and that’s all made easier by AI. The best thing these larger companies can do is pride themselves on everything being handmade and genuine, because they’re the only people in the industry who can afford to at this output cost, so I don’t see them throwing that away any time soon, infact I genuinely believe WotC actually want to avoid AI generated content and have been victims in their two scandals, from designers ignoring this. If I’m proven wrong here though and AI generated content becomes allowed and common, I wouldn’t be surprised either.

However at the table, I am not worried. Plenty of GMs are already using ChatGPT for prompts and to bounce ideas against, or image generation to share the vibe locations and characters with players. I hope we see generative tools and machine learning continue to support GMs in ensuring everyone is having the most fun. Do I ever think we’ll have AI GMs? No, never. At least none that will ever be commonplace or better than regular GMs, I’m sure some startup will give it a go at some point and it’ll be bland.

Let me tell a quick anecdote. In the pandemic I DMd a 1-17 campaign of D&D 5e over 45 sessions averaging 7-10 hours each. That’s because we were all home and bored and could put that much time into a game. Since then, I have played in a campaign with a similar number of sessions at probably 4-5 hours each, and it’s taken us 3 years, with a few pauses to play different systems and let others run one-shots. As a player, I really miss DMing weekly and was building up to DMing alongside this game in a style where even if some players can’t make it, we play anyway, with ways to get strangers involved to ensure seats are always filled, and that the story would be guaranteed to get told as long as I, the DM, could be there. Months into planning this, I had a realisation. I love TTRPGs and 5e because my friends and I told a wonderful story, and I loved doing that with them and their characters. If I made a game that was effectively indifferent to them and their characters in favour of the story progressing, then I’m cutting out the reason I love the game, it wasn’t the story, it was sharing that with my friends.

An AI GM cuts out one of the core things that’s amazing about this game; friends. We want to tell compelling stories and have great characters in a well realised world, but most importantly we want to do that with eachother. Tools that supplement and support this will always be welcome, regardless of if they’re generative ‘AI’ tools or anything else, but they’ll never successfully usurp the soul of the game which is collaborative storytelling with friends.