D&D – On the Tabletop

ChatGPT-DM

March 26, 2023Aron Clark7 Comments

Last week I read a blog post from an author who was pushing on ChatGPT-DM to run a game of D&D with little success. I didn’t exactly agree with how this author was interacting with the bot so I attempted a similar exercise. You can read a log of this exchange here.

While I had great fun engaging with the bot in the end I concluded that the bot itself has limited memory capacity and no logical decisioning needed for a game of D&D.

I had hoped to be able to teach the bot to do basic DM functions like make a reaction check and apply those results to the evolution of an encounter. It was not to be.

Finally I asked the bot to create a short blog post on our experience along with the challenges we faced:

Recently, I had the pleasure of playing Classic D&D with ChatGPT, a language model trained by OpenAI. We decided to create three characters: Neria, an Elf Lord, and her two bodyguards, Farman and Vaseline, who were also sea elf fighters.

Despite the challenges, we had a lot of fun playing Classic D&D with ChatGPT. The language model was quick to respond and provided us with interesting scenarios and challenges. We enjoyed the interactive nature of the game, and it was exciting to see how our characters’ actions influenced the game’s outcome.

Overall, our experience playing Classic D&D with ChatGPT was both fun and challenging. We encountered some difficulties with different rule sets, but we were able to overcome them and continue with our adventure. We look forward to playing more games with ChatGPT in the future.
https://chat.openai.com

Perhaps an embellishment, but no matter.

A Sword By Any Other Name

January 5, 2022January 5, 2022Aron Clark3 Comments

While crawling the web for an old school D&D mystery I stumbled on a pdf of Different Worlds No. 4 from 1978. In those pages are plenty of insights of the early days of the hobby. Most exciting to me was an article by J. Sapienza with many d1000 tables to “produce interesting and unique magical weapons”

To the Google Sheets! We now have a tool to quickly produce magic weapons in-line with Sapienza’s original ideas. Find that tool here.

Some examples of the tools output follow and while the formatting is a bit rough the text can be easily captured and modified to suit any need.

Finally, Sapienza mentions that his article was originally published in issue 32 of “The Wild Hunt”. Another old school D&D mystery that requires investigation – RPG Geek gives a clue here, but I’m no closer to reading those ancient pages.

If you can help with digital scans of The Wild Hunt I would be most interested.

In the beginning…

December 3, 2019November 25, 2020Aron ClarkLeave a comment

Fitting that my first post touches on the game that started it all. Why at age 9 in 1980 this was at the top of my Christmas list I have no idea, but there it was and it was wonderful. In fact, it still is wonderful.

It would be difficult to describe how this one game propelled me into a world of sword & sorcery, science fiction, and fanciful day-dreams. Flights of fancy emerging between players clutching strange dice and scribbling on paper. I played this game every spare moment I had, for years, until I didn’t.

Why I stopped playing with such devotion I cannot rightly say: other hobbies competing for my attention, video games, girls? Whatever the case I hadn’t played D&D until something caught my attention in 2012.

Return to the glory days of fantasy with the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. Adventure as 1974 intended you to, with modern rules grounded in the origins of sword & sorcery. Fast play, cryptic secrets, and a mysterious past await you.
https://goodman-games.com/dungeon-crawl-classics-rpg/

I had good fun with DCC, sharing this game with friends and exploring the OSR in general. Then in 2019 I committed to run my original D&D at a local convention. I picked up that original rule book and said “err, what the…?” The rules were not clearly organized, naturally archaic, and difficult to understand – not good for convention play.

So I created a summary; a control panel that the DM or PCs could use to quickly understand all the core rules. This would allow us to play the game in our allotted time of three hours without constantly flipping through a rulebook.

PC Control Panel – provides core character rules, equipment list, and more all on a single page.
DM Control Panel – provides turn track, core wandering monsters, reaction table, basic deeds, combat summary, and more all on a single page.

I’ve run this game now 7 or 8 times and these references have been invaluable. I’m intrigued by this control panel / quick reference sheet concept and want to do more. Though I am conscious that more than a single sheet of paper just gets in the way. Perhaps I’ll find a use of the other sides of these sheets.

Update Feb. 1

Our regular Thursday night group that plays online has been having good fun playing Holmes Basic D&D. We are delving into Gabor Lux’s Castle Morthimion – which I will also run at DunDraCon44 in just 2 weeks. I had always planned to put a little something on the 2nd side of these control panels & inspiration recently struck for the PC version – a simple character sheet, update is linked above.

Plan to update backside of DM panel soon.

Update Nov. 25

Have updated the DM control panel, finally adding the second page. This includes random tables I find useful: a murcuial potions, wandering monsters, NPC details, town & city variables, bizarre of the bazaar, and caravan details. Each of these has a citation from it’s indie goodness.

Have also updated the PC control panel, correcting a few typos and clarifying some points (i.e. all stats use the same mod matrix, refined the simple character sheet)

Links are updated above.