Ginny-Di got me to convert from 3.5 to 5e after being a know-it-all murder Hobo PC for 20ish years.. Also ❤ Dungeon Dudes, AJ Pickett & Grim Hollow on Kickstarter 😅
31:20 I love Dael’s business corner segment about TH-cam. It’s the clear info that anyone looking into starting out (and many that are already doing it)
Since running the in-store 4e Encounters and then Adventurers League sessions, our groups have just always ran every two weeks in Wednesday evenings (even during the switch to online during lockdown). Each group plays on alternating weeks, and unless I the DM am ill ir we have less than 3 players available, the game goes ahead.
For scheduling games, because I run mostly online games, I use discord's event feature. I set the game dates to automatic/repeated and the Tuesday before a game I sent out a reminder/tagged post to see who is interested or if we are available. I have to do that because my players I know, i know will often forget. It is very older brother of me to just do it for them.
I'm gonna echo what James said (and tweak a tinge): If it wasn't for the absolutely batshit amount of energy and water that it consumes, and its unethical training bases, I would be fine with AI (I guess.) I hate that it steals creatives work (art, writing, voice,) and I hate that it is continuing to advance our climate catastrophe.
It was an aspect I hadn't even considered until James mentioned it on the podcast. The energy cost makes a lot of sense and it isn't getting talked about enough in the ethical conversations about AI use
@@dragonmindttrpgs all these companies that made pledges to decrease emissions after jumping on the Ai bandwagon (that still to this day isn't profitable and the vast majority of people barely use) had their energy consumption skyrocket instead.
I really enjoyed Dale's thesis on TH-cam niches. Obviously its also about the tenor of the content's voice (it's format, camera personality, video quality, etc) and if they comes across as a valid expert. Full disclosure, I do content marketing for a corpo, so of course its a subject near and dear to me. In the D&D'verse of YT, there are some content creators that I personally find just plain annoying in its obvious gaslighting. 180° eyeroll from me, but some people enjoy that. The same could be said of various corpo voices. All your voices of course are beautiful and melodious to my beholder ;) and your clear earnestness brings me a lot of solace in knowing that I'm getting the straight dope because, frankly, I don't have time for anything else. Keep up the great work.
I think Dale and Ben have inadvertently created the new spell Wisty Step (cousin of the Satyr species feature Mirthful Leap). Wisty Step: 2nd-Level Conjuration Casting Time: 1 bonus action Range: Self Components: V Duration: Instantaneous Eyes briefly getting a little misty, you teleport up to 30 feet to an unoccupied space that you can faintly see through the cascade of tears welling up. You have disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks until the end of your next turn, but if you have a cool DM, they will definitely consider giving you Heroic Inspiration depending on how well you role-play the memories of vague (and possibly evocative) yearning or desire tinged with melancholy that you find yourself preoccupied with at the current moment. Stay tuned for their other cousin "Garrulous Chatter," who will never get a job in the TTPRG industry for obvious reasons and also happens to be the mortal enemy of both Kelsey Dionne and Ernest Hemingway.
Gonna try to be vague to avoid spoilers but there's a specific moment in waterdeep dragonheist where an npc uses a magic item to cast a spell that, in comparison to some of the powerful amges living in the city, isn't all too high level or threatening, but to the ordinary street level residents is a huge disaster, and so running the game, where until the mcguffin gets involved it is all about street level conflict like low stakes spiderman stories, I presented this spell as if it was like, a terror attack almost, really going into detail about how shocking and earth shattering the events were and what the fallout is like for the street and how much of a disruption it is both to add tension and pressure but also to make ivnestigating and trying to help the victims in the aftermath really carry a lot of weight. This moment is where the street level conflicts begin to bridge into the more higher tier threats and so it needs to be a big moment as the bridge and major inciting incident for the whole campaign off of this one spell. (Edit: Spelling and also I think part of why it worked well in my campaign and I didn;t have to worry about the same implications is that once the players got far enough in level to cast the same spell, neither of them took it, one was a wizard who was afraid of spells like it due toa disaster almost destroying his farm when he tried learning magic a few decades prior, the other was a copper draconic sorcerer who was trying her hardest to pick thematic damage type spells, especially ones of draconic breath damage types, she kidna lamented how few acid damage spells there were that she felt she occasionally had to branch out, and most of her 3rd level picks were more utiltiy or control, stuff like slow and gaseous form)
I do this in reverse. I pick a time good for me. I post up a game at X time with X system for X players. So the only people that join already have availability. Then, I run for a minimum of 5 people. My quorum to run a game is 3, so 2 can miss a session and we still play. I also run 100% online, so it's super convenient for the players.The last bit is that the game has to be the focus. Wednesday night is game night. So everything else is the exception. It's rare that anyone calls off. I have been running for the same group of "strangers" for years now weekly, every Wednesday night.
I have played one RPG's of one kind or another for decades. We schedule an evening game every week. Every September we review and decide if Tues, Wed or Thurs. works best that year.
All credit to the guy in my group who decided to be an absolute hardass about "We're playing every week on this day, and two or more consecutive weeks off is strictly verboten." The group absolutely would have fallen apart years ago without him. I'd be very curious to be a fly on the wall for Chris Cocks' C-suite AI-loving D&D campaign. I bet it would be like watching a train wreck in painfully slow motion. I really like Laws of Magic in principle (shout out to the Dresden Files), but I tend to prefer a distribution of human (specifically NPC) access to magic that makes them make less sense in my game worlds. When the NPC magic users are, like, a disparate network of weird hermits in towers who occasionally write each other letters or dispatch adventurers to steal each other's books, hard-coded legal doctrines regarding magic don't make a whole lot of sense.
From my understanding I think Draw Steal might work even better than 5e for Transformations. From how I understand them Transformations could be implemented as Titles rather than adding an additional system to the game.
My group had the same issue with Thursdays; I had to change it after 8 years b/c of my goddamn job. After that, it’s slowly fallen apart. Not sure it can be fixed, but I’m going to have to start over with a new time and probably a new group
The scuttlebutt is that the hasbros are trying to create an "AI DM" to integrate into DNDB in order to address "the DM shortage." If this is true--well, that server is going to _melt down_ the second the PCs start doing something really creative--but that aside, it does have a real "no no, dig _up,_ st-pid" quality to it because what I'm hearing from DMs who burn out is that "the players don't treat them like humans who put a lot of time and effort into making the game." I don't know that the solution to that problem is to make the DM an actual bot. TTRPG is, at its heart, a social experience. I don't think it's a coincidence that its going through a boom in popularity while we're also dealing with a epidemic of loneliness. Thinking you can swap out the heart of that experience with an AI is... ill-advised.
My physical D&D 2024 PHB was cancelled. They ended up giving me a discount code to order it later (within 90 days) as I had bought the physical/digital bundle which was nice. It was annoying because I had paid in full but they ran it piecemeal for some reason :/
While I'm excited for the Grim Halo update for the players handbook 2024, do the people making the show have conflicted feelings about having to update to a rule set that they have generally voiced disliking?
@@RumRunneerFilms I think that describes like half of internet these days. Bots responding to bots. Occasionally a confused Middle-Aged Human wanders in, and the bots all jump in with their scam attempts.
A.I should only be used for inspiration, NEVER as replacment for us meatbags hard work. I got two siblings that fear their art aspirations for work and hobbies will be annihilated by A.I But try tell such healthy worries to the corpo suits😂 If they could they would replace ALL human made art, music, voice acting and creative aspects with A.I and robots. Then they wouldnt need to pay us annoying, fellow humans demanding fair treatment, unionizing, sane working conditions and fostering of a wholesome, fun and yet open for workplace. Of course with healthy challenges and obstacles. But thats needed to grow as a human😁
@@soldierbreed it's not though. If you ask AI to give you a realistic image of a Parisian street, or a heron, or a samurai, there's a great chance that it will put UK street signs in front of a French cafe, mess up the anatomy of that bird and give you an over-rendered fantasy demon armor. Until AI came along, it was trivially easy to find reference images for almost anything online. Now, if you don't know the subject matter well, you can be easily misled by a jumbled up AI mess. And it sucks at iterating and making small alterations to give you precisely what you want, like, you won't get consistent results if you ask it to rotate 20° left and replace the tree with a lamppost. It not only sucks as a tool for artists, it actively makes it more difficult for artists to get a good reference.
TTRPGs are a human endeavor. I know some people like to use AI for character ideas, but it's really just a trap. Rely on your own imagination. That's what these games are all about. Who cares if you character isn't the most original idea? At least it's your idea. And the more you rely on your own mind for this stuff, the better you'll become at it and the more memorable those characters will be. On the industry side, every company that exists is looking for ways to utilize AI tech. Mostly because we're ultimately talking about the same people; shareholders that hold stocks in companies that also own companies, that in turn hold stocks in entirely different companies in entirely different industries. We can voice our objections and they'll weigh the choices before them as to which response will cost them the most money, which is the real driver here. They can say whatever they want now to assuage the players, but it's not about what makes us happy. At the end of the day, the shareholders are the only people they care about, and they know that there will always be a core group of people that will only ever play D&D when they play a rpg. Any opposition to the company's policies can be weathered through with a little bit of time and half-assed apologies.
100% this. To me using genAI to play TTRPGs is completely missing the point. It's like inventing a machine that will eat cake for me. If I want to experience the game without actually playing the game, I have actual plays for this. With passionate and talented people expressing their ideas in beautiful, human ways.
We were thrilled to have both James Intercaso and James Haeck on our show Tabletop Journeys." They were both amazing and dynamic, and the door is perpetually open for a return visit by these incredible talents. And of course, I'd love to extend that invitation to Shawn, Dale, and Ben too! Just let us know when and where, and we'd be delighted to welcome you all on our journey to TTRPG adventure!👋✌🎤
just like any other group activity there is a responsability to the rest of the group. Fi you really cant make it, fine, we are playign wthout you, see ya next weerk, if you consistently cant make it, this isnt the game for you.
As someone who has DM'd for 30 years, AI is awesome. Its been great to create whatever images, tokens, back ground music, terrain, portraits, etc. that I need. No more spending hours and hours of my precious free time tracking down things for my digital games. As far as how wotc wants to implement it with a focus on play I could see them just doing something like a GME oracle that allow for DM or PC emulation. Sounds good to me. Plenty of times I would love to play as a PC with my friends who all seem to be allergic to DMing. As far as ethics goes. People are so hypocritical. Your cellphone, tablet, laptop, PC, has direct links to sl*ve labor. Probably involving children. So do your clothes. If you aren't out protesting those things, which are much worse than AI "stealing", then just stop virtue signaling and admit you don't really care about ethics. AI is the easy thing to complain about to get your likes and upvotes and you don't need to leave your house.
Oh yes, the "and yet you participate in the society" argument. Listen, just because one Bad Thing is unavoidable if you want to exist in the world, it doesn't excuse embracing every other Bad Thing you encounter, especially the ones that ARE easily avoided. Honestly, my dude, you are at least in your 40s. This is the "shallow end of a kiddie pool" level of an ethics discussion, I'm slightly embarrassed for you.
@@Ykesha Can you explain in what way I proved your point exactly? Your ethical justification of using genAI is nonsensical, I don't see how anything I said proves the opposite?
@@dziooooo I think a more median counterpoint would be that we all conscientiously decide the cost/benefit ratio of useful tech to climate damage. For instance, TH-cam itself is one of those things that, regardless of how much climate damage it could prove to be causing (surely more than several small countries’ worth), nothing could really outweigh the usefulness infinite streaming video on-demand brings to my own life. Now, one issue with AI is that it’s not universal consistent output - that is, most of the energy expenditure is spent training and not actually retrieving from the model. Once it’s finished and trained, you just query the model, which is a lot less taxing. But we’re honestly still at the very early stages of figuring out what exactly they can do and what they can bring us, so I think it’s just too premature to judge that cost/benefit ratio right now. I know use cases are kinda skewed public-wise, because most people see mediocre art or writing and think “well, this isn’t worth it!” But AI has been groundbreaking a lot in the manufacturing, agricultural and medical sectors, and I think we need a bit more time to make that call. Grok, however, I think can be objectively called a waste haha
What would you think if the AI was a sentence reader that referenced the DnD artifacts in the VTT? e.g. "I want a 5 room dungeon with a red dragon and a group of kobolds and traps" and it just pulled existing models from the VTT and simply assembles them for you and creates a bunch of automated pretty pictures of the scenes and puts them in a folder so you can say "this is what the cave looks like. and this is the dragon!" "*snarling model pose of the dragon taken from a cool angle with cool lighting*". DnD is a very specific knowledge base that a specialized AI could be much more reasonable for them to add. It doesn't need to create whole-cloth new things.
I prefer to make dungeons myself by hand, but for new DM's or more improvisational DM's? This could be really handy. (and a lot of these tools already exist, except for reading the sentence (that's AI). instead it's just a bunch of dropdowns, but the glory pictures would make a difference I think - even for those who like to build their own dungeon).
12:31 it is okay for companies to fail and employees to be fired. It is uncomfortable for them, but I am confident that they will survive and find jobs.
Sure always hope, but try tell that to the unemployed. And for those in countries without welfare, safety net if everything goes shredded through the fan? Yeah no, A.I is a threat that need to be chained HARD before theres NO point of return. No matter the usage. And yes I do enjoy faulty A.I creating fever dream like YT vids like Vin Diesel drinking diesel, The Rock eating rocks and spellcasting mages invading fast food resturants. But that barely as much as I would allow the unhinged A.I to do😂
@@SeldonnHari People who struggle to feed their kids for a year while they look for work will, I'm sure, be nourished by your estimation of what is good in the grand scheme of things. They have the confidence of someone leaving comments on a TH-cam video, and what more could anyone ask for? Oh, I know--a job.
@@TheRealKLT I often reference coal mining and power plants, the people who lost their jobs when they shut down went through a difficult time but it was probably for the best. I think there is something ridiculous about acquiescing to capitalism and companies because we fear the unknown of new employment.
AI uses less electricity than we use doing laundry. Laundry uses 740 TwH (terawatt hours) of electricity where as AI will only be using 85 TwH of electricity by the year 2027.
the hypocrisy of it all is that the same poeple complaining they dont want a push towards digital, or depsise AI are the same poeple completely depedent on D&DBeyond to do something as simple as create a character and play thru roll20 and other online platforms. If yo dont want or NEEd a digital opffering fomr WOTc, thats GREAT!~!~ dont buy it!! i dont, but i dont hate them for pffering a prodcut or service that poeple will use, and pay for , thats what corporations do.
It's sad to see this echo chamber forming in TTRPG community once again. 4 people with "AI bad, capitalism bad" attitude just patting each other on the back. Thanks to this narrative, a friend of mine is getting gatekept from the community for use of AI in their home campaign. C'mon guys, you can do better than that. Maybe include someone with an opposing view for once? There is a lot of people for whom AI is transformative for their lives and hobbies. When the hell did "old man yelling at the cloud" become a compliment?
26:30 Ben discussing how third party TH-cam publisher would tie themselves to a particular game. Ben Ben Ben, as if a publisher or the game owner or the user has anything to do with that. The TH-cam algorithm is Sauren "one algorithm to rule them all one algorithm to bind them"
We figured, once the backer packet was out, folks were going to start making shit anyway. Might as well make it easy and legal for them.
You and MCDM are a river to your people.
Makes sense 👍
Now I can draw up encounters for Draw Steel.
Ginny-Di got me to convert from 3.5 to 5e after being a know-it-all murder Hobo PC for 20ish years..
Also ❤ Dungeon Dudes, AJ Pickett & Grim Hollow on Kickstarter 😅
31:20 I love Dael’s business corner segment about TH-cam. It’s the clear info that anyone looking into starting out (and many that are already doing it)
I was not expecting to be sniped by a zoids reference of all things here. We had the exact same opening here in the US for that show.
In a weird way, it makes me feel better that you folks, who are ttrpg pros, have the same game scheduling issues I have.
Props to Dael who - through a combination of background location and choice of shirt - created a light motif as her leitmotif for this week's episode.
Since running the in-store 4e Encounters and then Adventurers League sessions, our groups have just always ran every two weeks in Wednesday evenings (even during the switch to online during lockdown). Each group plays on alternating weeks, and unless I the DM am ill ir we have less than 3 players available, the game goes ahead.
Draw Shadow Steel? Yes please. lol
For scheduling games, because I run mostly online games, I use discord's event feature. I set the game dates to automatic/repeated and the Tuesday before a game I sent out a reminder/tagged post to see who is interested or if we are available.
I have to do that because my players I know, i know will often forget. It is very older brother of me to just do it for them.
0:23:18 "Grim Steel" 😎
I love this title!
I'm gonna echo what James said (and tweak a tinge): If it wasn't for the absolutely batshit amount of energy and water that it consumes, and its unethical training bases, I would be fine with AI (I guess.) I hate that it steals creatives work (art, writing, voice,) and I hate that it is continuing to advance our climate catastrophe.
Muppet. "I'd be fine with the death of all creative industries, as long as they didn't use too much heckin' fossil fuels!"
It was an aspect I hadn't even considered until James mentioned it on the podcast. The energy cost makes a lot of sense and it isn't getting talked about enough in the ethical conversations about AI use
@@dragonmindttrpgs all these companies that made pledges to decrease emissions after jumping on the Ai bandwagon (that still to this day isn't profitable and the vast majority of people barely use) had their energy consumption skyrocket instead.
there is no climate catastrophe.
I really enjoyed Dale's thesis on TH-cam niches. Obviously its also about the tenor of the content's voice (it's format, camera personality, video quality, etc) and if they comes across as a valid expert. Full disclosure, I do content marketing for a corpo, so of course its a subject near and dear to me. In the D&D'verse of YT, there are some content creators that I personally find just plain annoying in its obvious gaslighting. 180° eyeroll from me, but some people enjoy that. The same could be said of various corpo voices. All your voices of course are beautiful and melodious to my beholder ;) and your clear earnestness brings me a lot of solace in knowing that I'm getting the straight dope because, frankly, I don't have time for anything else. Keep up the great work.
I think Dale and Ben have inadvertently created the new spell Wisty Step (cousin of the Satyr species feature Mirthful Leap).
Wisty Step:
2nd-Level Conjuration
Casting Time: 1 bonus action
Range: Self
Components: V
Duration: Instantaneous
Eyes briefly getting a little misty, you teleport up to 30 feet to an unoccupied space that you can faintly see through the cascade of tears welling up. You have disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks until the end of your next turn, but if you have a cool DM, they will definitely consider giving you Heroic Inspiration depending on how well you role-play the memories of vague (and possibly evocative) yearning or desire tinged with melancholy that you find yourself preoccupied with at the current moment.
Stay tuned for their other cousin "Garrulous Chatter," who will never get a job in the TTPRG industry for obvious reasons and also happens to be the mortal enemy of both Kelsey Dionne and Ernest Hemingway.
Gonna try to be vague to avoid spoilers but there's a specific moment in waterdeep dragonheist where an npc uses a magic item to cast a spell that, in comparison to some of the powerful amges living in the city, isn't all too high level or threatening, but to the ordinary street level residents is a huge disaster, and so running the game, where until the mcguffin gets involved it is all about street level conflict like low stakes spiderman stories, I presented this spell as if it was like, a terror attack almost, really going into detail about how shocking and earth shattering the events were and what the fallout is like for the street and how much of a disruption it is both to add tension and pressure but also to make ivnestigating and trying to help the victims in the aftermath really carry a lot of weight. This moment is where the street level conflicts begin to bridge into the more higher tier threats and so it needs to be a big moment as the bridge and major inciting incident for the whole campaign off of this one spell.
(Edit: Spelling and also I think part of why it worked well in my campaign and I didn;t have to worry about the same implications is that once the players got far enough in level to cast the same spell, neither of them took it, one was a wizard who was afraid of spells like it due toa disaster almost destroying his farm when he tried learning magic a few decades prior, the other was a copper draconic sorcerer who was trying her hardest to pick thematic damage type spells, especially ones of draconic breath damage types, she kidna lamented how few acid damage spells there were that she felt she occasionally had to branch out, and most of her 3rd level picks were more utiltiy or control, stuff like slow and gaseous form)
10:13 The energy cost won't be a problem once the AI learns to use humans as batteries, tho.
The crew: make it happen, dante👋🏾
Dante: your whim is my will. MY LIFE FOR CONTENT!
I really liked the magic laws discussion
I do this in reverse. I pick a time good for me. I post up a game at X time with X system for X players. So the only people that join already have availability. Then, I run for a minimum of 5 people. My quorum to run a game is 3, so 2 can miss a session and we still play. I also run 100% online, so it's super convenient for the players.The last bit is that the game has to be the focus. Wednesday night is game night. So everything else is the exception. It's rare that anyone calls off. I have been running for the same group of "strangers" for years now weekly, every Wednesday night.
I wasnt sure this was going to be a great episode and then dael said, "boobidy boop, zip zap boing!" And i knew we were in for a treat.
I have played one RPG's of one kind or another for decades. We schedule an evening game every week. Every September we review and decide if Tues, Wed or Thurs. works best that year.
All credit to the guy in my group who decided to be an absolute hardass about "We're playing every week on this day, and two or more consecutive weeks off is strictly verboten." The group absolutely would have fallen apart years ago without him.
I'd be very curious to be a fly on the wall for Chris Cocks' C-suite AI-loving D&D campaign. I bet it would be like watching a train wreck in painfully slow motion.
I really like Laws of Magic in principle (shout out to the Dresden Files), but I tend to prefer a distribution of human (specifically NPC) access to magic that makes them make less sense in my game worlds. When the NPC magic users are, like, a disparate network of weird hermits in towers who occasionally write each other letters or dispatch adventurers to steal each other's books, hard-coded legal doctrines regarding magic don't make a whole lot of sense.
From my understanding I think Draw Steal might work even better than 5e for Transformations. From how I understand them Transformations could be implemented as Titles rather than adding an additional system to the game.
My group had the same issue with Thursdays; I had to change it after 8 years b/c of my goddamn job. After that, it’s slowly fallen apart. Not sure it can be fixed, but I’m going to have to start over with a new time and probably a new group
Dael rubbing her hands together with an evil look on her face, very scary!
The scuttlebutt is that the hasbros are trying to create an "AI DM" to integrate into DNDB in order to address "the DM shortage." If this is true--well, that server is going to _melt down_ the second the PCs start doing something really creative--but that aside, it does have a real "no no, dig _up,_ st-pid" quality to it because what I'm hearing from DMs who burn out is that "the players don't treat them like humans who put a lot of time and effort into making the game." I don't know that the solution to that problem is to make the DM an actual bot. TTRPG is, at its heart, a social experience. I don't think it's a coincidence that its going through a boom in popularity while we're also dealing with a epidemic of loneliness. Thinking you can swap out the heart of that experience with an AI is... ill-advised.
when2meet is goated
Yay... we have a Dael ❤
My physical D&D 2024 PHB was cancelled. They ended up giving me a discount code to order it later (within 90 days) as I had bought the physical/digital bundle which was nice. It was annoying because I had paid in full but they ran it piecemeal for some reason :/
I like Ginny Di and MCDM!
Aw man, I would have liked to have entered the Drivethru Jam, that would have been fun. Sadly finding out now does not provided me with enough time :(
While I'm excited for the Grim Halo update for the players handbook 2024, do the people making the show have conflicted feelings about having to update to a rule set that they have generally voiced disliking?
I was one of the people whose orders got cancelled. It was all squared away though.
Chris Cox - West Marches player?
DMs should use AI. Players should use AI. Then Ai can play with AI and there will be zero scheduling conflicts.
@@RumRunneerFilms I think that describes like half of internet these days. Bots responding to bots. Occasionally a confused Middle-Aged Human wanders in, and the bots all jump in with their scam attempts.
A.I should only be used for inspiration, NEVER as replacment for us meatbags hard work. I got two siblings that fear their art aspirations for work and hobbies will be annihilated by A.I But try tell such healthy worries to the corpo suits😂 If they could they would replace ALL human made art, music, voice acting and creative aspects with A.I and robots. Then they wouldnt need to pay us annoying, fellow humans demanding fair treatment, unionizing, sane working conditions and fostering of a wholesome, fun and yet open for workplace. Of course with healthy challenges and obstacles. But thats needed to grow as a human😁
Yeah i would agree. I think AI can be very useful as reference material.
@@soldierbreed it's not though. If you ask AI to give you a realistic image of a Parisian street, or a heron, or a samurai, there's a great chance that it will put UK street signs in front of a French cafe, mess up the anatomy of that bird and give you an over-rendered fantasy demon armor.
Until AI came along, it was trivially easy to find reference images for almost anything online. Now, if you don't know the subject matter well, you can be easily misled by a jumbled up AI mess. And it sucks at iterating and making small alterations to give you precisely what you want, like, you won't get consistent results if you ask it to rotate 20° left and replace the tree with a lamppost.
It not only sucks as a tool for artists, it actively makes it more difficult for artists to get a good reference.
TTRPGs are a human endeavor. I know some people like to use AI for character ideas, but it's really just a trap. Rely on your own imagination. That's what these games are all about. Who cares if you character isn't the most original idea? At least it's your idea. And the more you rely on your own mind for this stuff, the better you'll become at it and the more memorable those characters will be.
On the industry side, every company that exists is looking for ways to utilize AI tech. Mostly because we're ultimately talking about the same people; shareholders that hold stocks in companies that also own companies, that in turn hold stocks in entirely different companies in entirely different industries. We can voice our objections and they'll weigh the choices before them as to which response will cost them the most money, which is the real driver here. They can say whatever they want now to assuage the players, but it's not about what makes us happy. At the end of the day, the shareholders are the only people they care about, and they know that there will always be a core group of people that will only ever play D&D when they play a rpg. Any opposition to the company's policies can be weathered through with a little bit of time and half-assed apologies.
100% this. To me using genAI to play TTRPGs is completely missing the point. It's like inventing a machine that will eat cake for me. If I want to experience the game without actually playing the game, I have actual plays for this. With passionate and talented people expressing their ideas in beautiful, human ways.
Thanks for the discussion...
Draw Steel, Daggerheart, and Nimble are the future of my gaming table.
We were thrilled to have both James Intercaso and James Haeck on our show Tabletop Journeys." They were both amazing and dynamic, and the door is perpetually open for a return visit by these incredible talents.
And of course, I'd love to extend that invitation to Shawn, Dale, and Ben too! Just let us know when and where, and we'd be delighted to welcome you all on our journey to TTRPG adventure!👋✌🎤
just like any other group activity there is a responsability to the rest of the group. Fi you really cant make it, fine, we are playign wthout you, see ya next weerk, if you consistently cant make it, this isnt the game for you.
I embrace my AI overlords.
As someone who has DM'd for 30 years, AI is awesome. Its been great to create whatever images, tokens, back ground music, terrain, portraits, etc. that I need. No more spending hours and hours of my precious free time tracking down things for my digital games. As far as how wotc wants to implement it with a focus on play I could see them just doing something like a GME oracle that allow for DM or PC emulation. Sounds good to me. Plenty of times I would love to play as a PC with my friends who all seem to be allergic to DMing.
As far as ethics goes. People are so hypocritical. Your cellphone, tablet, laptop, PC, has direct links to sl*ve labor. Probably involving children. So do your clothes. If you aren't out protesting those things, which are much worse than AI "stealing", then just stop virtue signaling and admit you don't really care about ethics. AI is the easy thing to complain about to get your likes and upvotes and you don't need to leave your house.
Oh yes, the "and yet you participate in the society" argument. Listen, just because one Bad Thing is unavoidable if you want to exist in the world, it doesn't excuse embracing every other Bad Thing you encounter, especially the ones that ARE easily avoided.
Honestly, my dude, you are at least in your 40s. This is the "shallow end of a kiddie pool" level of an ethics discussion, I'm slightly embarrassed for you.
@@dziooooo Thanks for proving my point. Hope you didn't spend too much time writing all that out.
@@Ykesha Can you explain in what way I proved your point exactly? Your ethical justification of using genAI is nonsensical, I don't see how anything I said proves the opposite?
@@Ykesha u read, lol
@@dziooooo I think a more median counterpoint would be that we all conscientiously decide the cost/benefit ratio of useful tech to climate damage. For instance, TH-cam itself is one of those things that, regardless of how much climate damage it could prove to be causing (surely more than several small countries’ worth), nothing could really outweigh the usefulness infinite streaming video on-demand brings to my own life.
Now, one issue with AI is that it’s not universal consistent output - that is, most of the energy expenditure is spent training and not actually retrieving from the model. Once it’s finished and trained, you just query the model, which is a lot less taxing. But we’re honestly still at the very early stages of figuring out what exactly they can do and what they can bring us, so I think it’s just too premature to judge that cost/benefit ratio right now.
I know use cases are kinda skewed public-wise, because most people see mediocre art or writing and think “well, this isn’t worth it!” But AI has been groundbreaking a lot in the manufacturing, agricultural and medical sectors, and I think we need a bit more time to make that call. Grok, however, I think can be objectively called a waste haha
Wait a minute...
I can make adventures using chatgpt AI!!!
How do I do this???
What would you think if the AI was a sentence reader that referenced the DnD artifacts in the VTT? e.g. "I want a 5 room dungeon with a red dragon and a group of kobolds and traps" and it just pulled existing models from the VTT and simply assembles them for you and creates a bunch of automated pretty pictures of the scenes and puts them in a folder so you can say "this is what the cave looks like. and this is the dragon!" "*snarling model pose of the dragon taken from a cool angle with cool lighting*". DnD is a very specific knowledge base that a specialized AI could be much more reasonable for them to add. It doesn't need to create whole-cloth new things.
I prefer to make dungeons myself by hand, but for new DM's or more improvisational DM's? This could be really handy. (and a lot of these tools already exist, except for reading the sentence (that's AI). instead it's just a bunch of dropdowns, but the glory pictures would make a difference I think - even for those who like to build their own dungeon).
Is his name Chris Cocks or Chris Cox?? 😂
12:31 it is okay for companies to fail and employees to be fired. It is uncomfortable for them, but I am confident that they will survive and find jobs.
Sure always hope, but try tell that to the unemployed. And for those in countries without welfare, safety net if everything goes shredded through the fan? Yeah no, A.I is a threat that need to be chained HARD before theres NO point of return. No matter the usage. And yes I do enjoy faulty A.I creating fever dream like YT vids like Vin Diesel drinking diesel, The Rock eating rocks and spellcasting mages invading fast food resturants. But that barely as much as I would allow the unhinged A.I to do😂
@@odinulveson9101 I was more referencing that a company could refuse AI and tank and have to pay off employees and that is okay in the grand scheme
@@SeldonnHari People who struggle to feed their kids for a year while they look for work will, I'm sure, be nourished by your estimation of what is good in the grand scheme of things. They have the confidence of someone leaving comments on a TH-cam video, and what more could anyone ask for? Oh, I know--a job.
@@TheRealKLT I often reference coal mining and power plants, the people who lost their jobs when they shut down went through a difficult time but it was probably for the best. I think there is something ridiculous about acquiescing to capitalism and companies because we fear the unknown of new employment.
@@SeldonnHari Thank you, heartless robot.
AI uses less electricity than we use doing laundry. Laundry uses 740 TwH (terawatt hours) of electricity where as AI will only be using 85 TwH of electricity by the year 2027.
the hypocrisy of it all is that the same poeple complaining they dont want a push towards digital, or depsise AI are the same poeple completely depedent on D&DBeyond to do something as simple as create a character and play thru roll20 and other online platforms. If yo dont want or NEEd a digital opffering fomr WOTc, thats GREAT!~!~ dont buy it!! i dont, but i dont hate them for pffering a prodcut or service that poeple will use, and pay for , thats what corporations do.
Source: th-cam.com/video/GM-e46xdcUo/w-d-xo.html
Luddites. Skynet is inevitable.
It's sad to see this echo chamber forming in TTRPG community once again. 4 people with "AI bad, capitalism bad" attitude just patting each other on the back. Thanks to this narrative, a friend of mine is getting gatekept from the community for use of AI in their home campaign.
C'mon guys, you can do better than that. Maybe include someone with an opposing view for once? There is a lot of people for whom AI is transformative for their lives and hobbies. When the hell did "old man yelling at the cloud" become a compliment?
Maybe don't talk about economics when you don't have a clue how it all works? Thanks!
59:58
26:30 Ben discussing how third party TH-cam publisher would tie themselves to a particular game. Ben Ben Ben, as if a publisher or the game owner or the user has anything to do with that. The TH-cam algorithm is Sauren "one algorithm to rule them all one algorithm to bind them"