AI Tools for homebrew in Basic Fantasy

[Rutibex]

AI tools, such as ChatGPT, offer a convenient solution for generating fresh content for tabletop games, such as Basic Fantasy. These tools can effortlessly generate new spells, feats, dungeons, room descriptions, and more, making game design more efficient!

ChatGPT:
https://chat.openai.com/chat
This AI tool uses a variant of the popular GPT language model to generate text-based content. You can use it to generate new descriptions for spells or magic items, or to come up with ideas for new quests or adventures. ChatGPT is also highly customizable, allowing you to fine-tune the type of content it generates based on your specific needs. But far be it from me to explain things, let GPT tell you what they are capable of in their own words:

ChatGPT can be a valuable tool for creating content for the Basic Fantasy roleplaying system. Basic Fantasy is an open-source, rules-light tabletop roleplaying game (RPG) system that is designed to emulate classic RPGs of the 1970s and 1980s.

One way to use ChatGPT is to generate non-player characters (NPCs) and creatures for your Basic Fantasy games. To do this, simply start a prompt with a description of the type of NPC or creature you want to create, such as "Create a goblin NPC for Basic Fantasy" or "Generate a dragon for Basic Fantasy". ChatGPT will then generate a description of the NPC or creature, along with its stats and abilities, which you can use as-is or modify to suit your needs.

Another way to use ChatGPT is to generate location descriptions for your Basic Fantasy games. To do this, start a prompt with a description of the type of location you want to create, such as "Describe a goblin village for Basic Fantasy" or "Generate a dungeon for Basic Fantasy". ChatGPT will then generate a detailed description of the location, which you can use to create a rich and immersive game world for your players to explore.

You can also use ChatGPT to generate quests and adventure hooks for your Basic Fantasy games. To do this, start a prompt with a description of the type of quest or adventure you want to create, such as "Generate a goblin-related quest for Basic Fantasy" or "Create an adventure hook involving dragons for Basic Fantasy". ChatGPT will then generate a detailed description of the quest or adventure, including the motivations of the NPCs involved and the obstacles the players will need to overcome.

Finally, you can use ChatGPT to generate magic items and spells for your Basic Fantasy games. To do this, start a prompt with a description of the type of magic item or spell you want to create, such as "Generate a magic sword for Basic Fantasy" or "Create a spell for controlling dragons for Basic Fantasy". ChatGPT will then generate a description of the magic item or spell, along with its effects and any necessary incantations or components.

In conclusion, ChatGPT can be an extremely useful tool for creating content for the Basic Fantasy role-playing system. Whether you're looking to generate NPCs, locations, quests, or magic items, ChatGPT can help you create rich and detailed content for your games quickly and easily.

As you can see, ChatGPT knows what Basic Fantasy is! It has an innate understanding of the game, likely from crawling every module and rule book. This means it is perfectly suited to making content for Basic Fantasy!

I have created a bunch of prompt templates that allow ChatGPT to produce exactly the kind of content you need, just replace the descriptive text portion. So for example the monster creator template makes a Selkie, just replace the word "Selkie" with "Uranium Skeleton" and that's what ChatGPT will produce for you, with unique stats and monster description all formatted correctly for Basic Fantasy.

Basic Fantasy formatted ChatGPT Prompts
https://www.mediafire.com/file/8186m88u ... s.zip/file

You can also check out Malidrex Grand Grimoire, its my first experiment making AI content. Most of it is rubbish but a lot of the magic items are really cool. Its all Creative Commons of course:

Malidrex Grand Grimoire
https://www.mediafire.com/file/a53zyshe ... 0.pdf/file

ChatGPT is often overloaded so here is a second tool that I like to play around with. I have programmed a number of Character.AI chat bots to design different aspects of RPG content:

History Lord:
https://beta.character.ai/chat?char=gUg ... T414LFGuG4

Region Master:
https://beta.character.ai/chat?char=H6M ... sgxInEsxDA

Hex Master:
https://beta.character.ai/chat?char=XpH ... F0TVGRaIac

Spell Maker:
https://beta.character.ai/chat?char=CAk ... uLCoXjiBrM

Magic Item Maker:
https://beta.character.ai/chat?char=CBy ... kNrsyQN2Yo

Monster Creator:
https://beta.character.ai/chat?char=J4H ... RZi5wXUYqI

Feat Master (warning this one is very 5e D&D focused)
https://beta.character.ai/chat?char=LOh ... iL2xo8VhYw


~This post generated with assistance by ChatGPT

[Jim1804]

I understand people's concern about AI writing (I'm dealing with these issues in my job at the moment), but on one level this is just a natural extension of using a random dungeon generator or one of the books of "101 Adventure Prompts" etc. I think it could be a really interesting tool if it's not abused. Where that line is, of course, is up for debate.

[Rutibex]

I understand people's concern about AI writing (I'm dealing with these issues in my job at the moment), but on one level this is just a natural extension of using a random dungeon generator or one of the books of "101 Adventure Prompts" etc. I think it could be a really interesting tool if it's not abused. Where that line is, of course, is up for debate.

If the rumors are true WotC is planning to integrate GPT3 into their new OneD&D "platform" as a kind of solo DM. I don't know how great of an idea that is, but they seem to have thrown a lot of money at the concept.

[LibraryLass]

I couldn't be more strongly against this. No. Never. I would give up BFRPG forever over this.

[Rutibex]

I couldn't be more strongly against this. No. Never. I would give up BFRPG forever over this.

Care to elaborate?

[Solomoriah]

I'm not sure LL needs to. Their position seems clear enough.

I'll never accept AI-generated materials for publication, if I know that's what they are. We're not about that. I won't tell you how to run your home game, that's not my place, and you are welcome to discuss AI with whoever you want. I probably won't comment here again, as I'd be detracting from the conversation.

But the Basic Fantasy Project is not about this kind of thing, and neither am I.

I started out to say that I could see using AI tools to assist with on-the-fly content while actually running a game... then I realized that even there, the act of creating things out of thin air is way more fun than asking a neural net to give me an answer.

And someone just commented about using random generators. I do use them. But by their very nature, random generators create nonsense, and as GM I must either reroll or find an answer to why the nonsense isn't nonsense. Using random tables actually forces me to stretch my creativity to reconcile the results and to follow them where they lead me. AI-generated content (that which I've seen or experimented with, anyway) doesn't do that.

[ThorinSchmidt]

My take on using AI comes more from the art world, I suppose, since two of mt children are artists.
The thing about art AI, and incidentally, this proposed AI, is that the "learning" it does is from art done by *actual =* artists. Now, sure, a human learns from multiple sources, examines different techniques, practices them, and chooses the ones they like best and synthesizes it all into their own style.

However, my oldest son has looked at AI art, and seen "chunks" of their friends' art kind of "smooshed" together. It's not using the same style: the same *art*. This ChatGPT AI has been "fed" off a diet of actual content creators' work. And it produces content in much the same way, directly from the creators' content *without attribution* There is no sentience synthesizing new dontent, merely an algorithm stitching together content created by others.

This is not what *this* game is about. Neither is the community. I do like technology, and I do like research into AI. I do not like the current trend of AIs creating content. If these algorithms were built another way, without directly cribbing from actual creators, I'd be less hostile toward it, I think

[gabeprime]

My sentiment is similar to Thorin’s. The technology itself is pretty cool but the way it went about making it great is pretty crummy towards the creators who have had their works used to teach AI without their permission and without compensation.

[Rutibex]

My take on using AI comes more from the art world, I suppose, since two of mt children are artists.
The thing about art AI, and incidentally, this proposed AI, is that the "learning" it does is from art done by *actual =* artists. Now, sure, a human learns from multiple sources, examines different techniques, practices them, and chooses the ones they like best and synthesizes it all into their own style.

However, my oldest son has looked at AI art, and seen "chunks" of their friends' art kind of "smooshed" together. It's not using the same style: the same *art*. This ChatGPT AI has been "fed" off a diet of actual content creators' work. And it produces content in much the same way, directly from the creators' content *without attribution* There is no sentience synthesizing new dontent, merely an algorithm stitching together content created by others.

This is not what *this* game is about. Neither is the community. I do like technology, and I do like research into AI. I do not like the current trend of AIs creating content. If these algorithms were built another way, without directly cribbing from actual creators, I'd be less hostile toward it, I think

I specifically didn't include any AI art content in the OP for this very reason.

My feelings on this stem a lot from my feeling on copyright. I don't think copyright is a moral right, I think its a practical right that was useful for a long dead age. No one is 100% original, everything is built from something else. The internet made copyright obsolete and we have been struggling with that for years, now AIs make copyright absolutely pointless and I think its time we take a look at doing something new. What would an "ethical" AI model look like under the current system? It would look like Disney corporation paying every artist $1 million dollars (the artist would be happy, they could retire!) then getting an advanced AI model that they have a monopoly on. No midjourney or stable diffusion for the masses, just Disney AI producing content for their shareholders. You want you own AI? Sorry its not ethical you can't pay 5000 artists, so you can't have access.

[Solomoriah]

Ack. I said I wouldn't comment, but there's a point here you are just missing.

Both humans and AI systems learn about various types of content in the same way. Humans and AIs read books, or look at pictures, or whatever, and absorb the patterns within the content; both create at least in part by assembling materials from the patterns they have absorbed. I deny none of this.

But.

A human being creates material by combining these concepts with intent. The human knows, or should know, that all those other creators from whom they learned are worthy of at least some respect, and their art isn't used with any precision, not even in parts. We rightly chastise people who merely copy from others. The artist or writer has both positive and negative intent, in that they know what they want to create (positive) and what they want to avoid (negative).

AIs regurgitate the patterns they've learned without intent. They don't "know" what they "want" to create, they just wander randomly through the pattern space they've absorbed printing or painting bits and pieces in a fashion that may end up looking "good" if the AI is well designed and well trained, but in the end the AI had no capacity to either "know" or "care" about what it created.

You could reasonably argue that a human curating the content (you, in this case) can supply the intent. But the artist or writer likely knows where the material they are emulating comes from, if not in detail then at least in general. Some may be from mythology or cultural sources; some might resemble the work of an author or artist, well-known or not, who influenced the creative work. Indeed, an art or literature curation done by an expert has the same advantage, since they have deep knowledge of the material selected. Someone who has not learned so broadly cannot curate the AIs materials adequately to achieve the intent with any sensitivity to the source material. You cannot examine a fully-trained neural network and figure out with any reliability where any part of the information came from... it has been compiled into a pattern space, with the "serial numbers" stripped away. And the AI very likely has consumed far more materials than you have; it has nothing better to do, after all.

The AI has neither consciousness nor intent. What it "creates" is not created, but merely shuffled around and spat out.