Back on the topic of the thread, Beyond has a post on the homepage reaffirming their commitment to not using AI in writing books or in their art. A similar statement was made over on Magic’s site.
I expect this was directly inspired by the conversation surrounding layoffs—there has been a lot of rampant speculation that laying off members of the art department might mean more AI content is coming. I am not sure that speculation was really warranted—Wizards stated they would not use AI art just a couple months ago and one of the individuals laid off was an art director who quire possibly approved someone’s controversial AI art submission to D&D —but it certainly existed.
I think that is a positive step for the game, and shows a commitment to protecting the independent artist contractors who make up a core component of what makes this game and Magic great. It also is nice to see the commitment to not having AI produce any written content for the game—it was hinted that Wizards was anti-AI across the board, but I believe this is the first time the actively said “no, we won’t be using AI in any parts of production.”
You probably should have led with the "I don't know anything about that" part.
Poker sites aren't competing in hands directly against players. They make their money scooping a percentage of each pot or tournament buy-in. Their business model is driven by increasing their user base, not milking whales -- although obviously the more you play, and the higher stakes you play for, the more money they get from you.
They would lose money by selling better hands, but only because people would stop playing on that site once the competition was no longer perceived to be fair. Just as people would stop using a WOTC VTT if other players at their table could simply buy more spell slots or ki points or whatever when they ran out, because that violates the implicit contract between players to be "fair".
Brennan Lee Mulligan did a bit recently about the guy who brings his own overpowered character to a new table. That's the classic archetype of a player no one wants to be in a party with. How is that any different than your hypothetical "whale" player who buys all the microtransaction advantages they can to try and "win" D&D?
I see, I had initially thought that with the way poker worked the implication was that the player was making money that the site was fronting. Thank you for explaining that.
Back on the topic of the thread, Beyond has a post on the homepage reaffirming their commitment to not using AI in writing books or in their art. A similar statement was made over on Magic’s site.
I expect this was directly inspired by the conversation surrounding layoffs—there has been a lot of rampant speculation that laying off members of the art department might mean more AI content is coming. I am not sure that speculation was really warranted—Wizards stated they would not use AI art just a couple months ago and one of the individuals laid off was an art director who quire possibly approved someone’s controversial AI art submission to D&D —but it certainly existed.
I think that is a positive step for the game, and shows a commitment to protecting the independent artist contractors who make up a core component of what makes this game and Magic great. It also is nice to see the commitment to not having AI produce any written content for the game—it was hinted that Wizards was anti-AI across the board, but I believe this is the first time the actively said “no, we won’t be using AI in any parts of production.”
As I understand, the re-affirmation was driven by folks online suggesting the dwarf art from the new PHB, which they showed at PAX unplugged, was AI created. The artist has rejected that claim, and WotC has re-asserted their policy of not using AI.
I don't imagine it would have anything to do with winning or beating. Rather, how much money can they squeeze out of it. Which they have stated their intention of doing in their own cooperate terms, and the extant of which is my worry.
If they try to sell anything but cosmetics and rulebooks I'll be right there in the trenches with you, but you have yet to provide a single concrete example of what has you so petrified.
Evidence that the digital gaming industry is currently rampant with exploitative practices of generating recurrent spending from customers? Or evidence that WotC plan to unlock the type of recurrent spending we see in digital games?
They probably will monetize the VTT by providing value to the users, or they could by exploiting them not in an unsimilar fashion to what we have witnessed take place in other digital games. You trust it will be the former, IF it is the later I will be upset. Why is pointing that out so rectally inclined?
We can pretty easily extrapolate from the current D&DBeyond business model (and current VTT business models) what the basic model of the D&D VTT will be. There will likely be a "free" account tier with very limited functionality aimed at new players & new DMs - my prediction is that this will be a version of the current "Maps" tool but with compatibility for the DM to share any additional assets / tools they have access to. Full 3D will require the DM to have a subscription, and occasionally free trials will be offered to entice players to try it out and be persuaded to pitch in for their DM to get a subscription.
There will be an extensive DM-facing online store where you can purchase 3D models of each different monster individually, or NPC or an individual map or one particular object/asset (for those who play in HB worlds / settings). These will be a supplement to bundles that will include all components required for a particular adventure module at a discounted rate compared to individual item purchases.
There will also be a player-facing store for "microtransaction" cosmetic options attached to something like Hero-Forge to create your custom 3D character model, as well as interface customization / aesthetics similar to the current digital dice and pay-for character sheet backgrounds.
The only big question in my mind is whether they will create an enemy-AI to allow on-demand combats against the enemy AI. I would absolutely believe there is demand for this that would make it viable even as a subscription or one-off payment service, however, there is definitely a risk of PR backlash and it would be pretty challenging to implement for WotC without extensive expertise from a proper game studio like Larian.
While they in theory could adopt a play-to-win exploitative casual business model, they already have Magic to appeal to the players who like that play-style, and trying to morph D&D into that would drastically reduce their player-base long-term. It is certainly possible that short-sighted upper management might demand WotC do that, IMO, the OGL fiasco actually demonstrated that there are people in WotC who do understand that building a happy long-term playerbase is more important than short-term profiteering. It is simply a question of which side will prevail.
It's not nothing, but considering it's relatively simple to grab a screenshot from D&DB and make it into a token for a Roll20 campaign, I'd say WotC needs something stronger to really give them a strong selling point. They're the latecomers, so they need to convince consumers who either are already using another product or who feel the current product isn't worth spending money on that they want WotC's product.
Grabbing a single screenshot is indeed easy. Grabbing 15 is where convenience starts to become a selling point. And depending on your VTT (e.g. Owlbear Rodeo) you might end up having to do that every time you fire up the campaign, since there's no server to store anything on.
But maybe you're a Roll20 guy instead. Definitely more bells and whistles there. ...And still no cellphone or console support after a decade. Oh, and you have to buy your books through them, possibly for the third time, because of licensing.
In short, there's an addressable market here.
There is absolutely an addressable market, my major worry is that they are overestimating the size & desires of that market and as a result they will spend too much money and time developing the VTT with a bunch of extra features that nobody really cares about, that the subscription fee required to make the VTT profitable will end up prohibitively high and people will just stick with competition anyway.
We can pretty easily extrapolate from the current D&DBeyond business model (and current VTT business models) what the basic model of the D&D VTT will be. There will likely be a "free" account tier with very limited functionality aimed at new players & new DMs - my prediction is that this will be a version of the current "Maps" tool but with compatibility for the DM to share any additional assets / tools they have access to. Full 3D will require the DM to have a subscription, and occasionally free trials will be offered to entice players to try it out and be persuaded to pitch in for their DM to get a subscription.
There will be an extensive DM-facing online store where you can purchase 3D models of each different monster individually, or NPC or an individual map or one particular object/asset (for those who play in HB worlds / settings). These will be a supplement to bundles that will include all components required for a particular adventure module at a discounted rate compared to individual item purchases.
There will also be a player-facing store for "microtransaction" cosmetic options attached to something like Hero-Forge to create your custom 3D character model, as well as interface customization / aesthetics similar to the current digital dice and pay-for character sheet backgrounds.
The only big question in my mind is whether they will create an enemy-AI to allow on-demand combats against the enemy AI. I would absolutely believe there is demand for this that would make it viable even as a subscription or one-off payment service, however, there is definitely a risk of PR backlash and it would be pretty challenging to implement for WotC without extensive expertise from a proper game studio like Larian.
While they in theory could adopt a play-to-win exploitative casual business model, they already have Magic to appeal to the players who like that play-style, and trying to morph D&D into that would drastically reduce their player-base long-term. It is certainly possible that short-sighted upper management might demand WotC do that, IMO, the OGL fiasco actually demonstrated that there are people in WotC who do understand that building a happy long-term playerbase is more important than short-term profiteering. It is simply a question of which side will prevail.
Fully agreed. What do you think about AI-DM's? If the growth of the game is no longer bottle-necked by the number of available DM's, that could potentially do wonders for the number of users. I wonder if their recent statement completely excludes all forms of AI, not limited just art and writing for final products, and they're nipping it in the bud early.
We can pretty easily extrapolate from the current D&DBeyond business model (and current VTT business models) what the basic model of the D&D VTT will be. There will likely be a "free" account tier with very limited functionality aimed at new players & new DMs - my prediction is that this will be a version of the current "Maps" tool but with compatibility for the DM to share any additional assets / tools they have access to. Full 3D will require the DM to have a subscription, and occasionally free trials will be offered to entice players to try it out and be persuaded to pitch in for their DM to get a subscription.
There will be an extensive DM-facing online store where you can purchase 3D models of each different monster individually, or NPC or an individual map or one particular object/asset (for those who play in HB worlds / settings). These will be a supplement to bundles that will include all components required for a particular adventure module at a discounted rate compared to individual item purchases.
There will also be a player-facing store for "microtransaction" cosmetic options attached to something like Hero-Forge to create your custom 3D character model, as well as interface customization / aesthetics similar to the current digital dice and pay-for character sheet backgrounds.
The only big question in my mind is whether they will create an enemy-AI to allow on-demand combats against the enemy AI. I would absolutely believe there is demand for this that would make it viable even as a subscription or one-off payment service, however, there is definitely a risk of PR backlash and it would be pretty challenging to implement for WotC without extensive expertise from a proper game studio like Larian.
While they in theory could adopt a play-to-win exploitative casual business model, they already have Magic to appeal to the players who like that play-style, and trying to morph D&D into that would drastically reduce their player-base long-term. It is certainly possible that short-sighted upper management might demand WotC do that, IMO, the OGL fiasco actually demonstrated that there are people in WotC who do understand that building a happy long-term playerbase is more important than short-term profiteering. It is simply a question of which side will prevail.
Fully agreed. What do you think about AI-DM's? If the growth of the game is no longer bottle-necked by the number of available DM's, that could potentially do wonders for the number of users. I wonder if their recent statement completely excludes all forms of AI, not limited just art and writing for final products, and they're nipping it in the bud early.
AI DMs are still a pipe dream at the moment. If you give an AI a simple open-ended prompt it can stitch together a generic response without glaring issues, but they objectively do not have the capacity to actually formulate or run an ongoing narrative.
Fully agreed. What do you think about AI-DM's? If the growth of the game is no longer bottle-necked by the number of available DM's, that could potentially do wonders for the number of users. I wonder if their recent statement completely excludes all forms of AI, not limited just art and writing for final products, and they're nipping it in the bud early.
AI DMs are still a pipe dream at the moment. If you give an AI a simple open-ended prompt it can stitch together a generic response without glaring issues, but they objectively do not have the capacity to actually formulate or run an ongoing narrative.
One day one can hope, it'll only get better from now.
Back on the topic of the thread, Beyond has a post on the homepage reaffirming their commitment to not using AI in writing books or in their art. A similar statement was made over on Magic’s site.
I expect this was directly inspired by the conversation surrounding layoffs—there has been a lot of rampant speculation that laying off members of the art department might mean more AI content is coming. I am not sure that speculation was really warranted—Wizards stated they would not use AI art just a couple months ago and one of the individuals laid off was an art director who quire possibly approved someone’s controversial AI art submission to D&D —but it certainly existed.
I think that is a positive step for the game, and shows a commitment to protecting the independent artist contractors who make up a core component of what makes this game and Magic great. It also is nice to see the commitment to not having AI produce any written content for the game—it was hinted that Wizards was anti-AI across the board, but I believe this is the first time the actively said “no, we won’t be using AI in any parts of production.”
While I appreciate that execs at WotC recognize the industry PR problems of allowing AI art to be published with the Wizards logo associated with it, I don't see how this would dissuade them from developing (or contracting to be developed) an AI to replace some of the major roles played by DMs. They are already aware that one of the biggest constraint to further expansion is the # of people who want to DM (leaving aside the economic constraints fr a minute). It's logical to extrapolate that the easiest solution to that is the mechanize as many aspects of DM work as possible. This could very well be sold using a "We're doing this for our customers" angle, since there will always be a much larger percentage of people who want to "just play the game already" than people who want to DM.
He makes a good point of comparing Nintendo to Hasbro. The Nintendo CEO chose to take a pay cut (and presumably ordered some other execs to accept a pay cut as well) instead of laying off scores of employees. That speaks to how, in Japan, the patronage system of corporations is to look out for employees like family as opposed to the norm in US business where "family" is more a euphemism from HR. This norm is not without it's detractors, however, as some business analysts claim that this is one of the major reasons for Japan's decades-long recession.
How many of those "business analysts" are CEOs, or former CEOs, or soon-to-be CEOs who have a personal financial incentive to justify CEOs making outrageous incomes? Japan's "recession" (which FYI is on average just half the economic growth seen in the other G7 countries) is due to the stagnant and aging population due to their highly restrictive immigration rules.
That is, perhaps, a good point. In the interests of fairness, I thought it would be useful to at least provide that critique of the Japanese corporate model as I don't have the macroeconomics education to assess those critiques myself.
They are already aware that one of the biggest constraint to further expansion is the # of people who want to DM (leaving aside the economic constraints fr a minute). It's logical to extrapolate that the easiest solution to that is the mechanize as many aspects of DM work as possible. This could very well be sold using a "We're doing this for our customers" angle, since there will always be a much larger percentage of people who want to "just play the game already" than people who want to DM.
Alternatively, they'd create a set of tools that make it easier for DMs to do the fun creative work that the AI can't replicate. That's the worker-augmenting change I'd like to see.
They are already aware that one of the biggest constraint to further expansion is the # of people who want to DM (leaving aside the economic constraints fr a minute). It's logical to extrapolate that the easiest solution to that is the mechanize as many aspects of DM work as possible. This could very well be sold using a "We're doing this for our customers" angle, since there will always be a much larger percentage of people who want to "just play the game already" than people who want to DM.
Alternatively, they'd create a set of tools that make it easier for DMs to do the fun creative work that the AI can't replicate. That's the worker-augmenting change I'd like to see.
Why not both? Isn't that the most profitable?
Note that I'm not against automation per se. I just want to point out that there is a slippery slope here. The more DM functions are effectively replicated by A.I., the more superfluous human DMs become. They don't need to entirely replace human DMs either, just make it so that they can "Mechanical Turk" the system so that a human makes micro-decisions here and there for multiple live games at a time.
Back on the topic of the thread, Beyond has a post on the homepage reaffirming their commitment to not using AI in writing books or in their art. A similar statement was made over on Magic’s site.
I expect this was directly inspired by the conversation surrounding layoffs—there has been a lot of rampant speculation that laying off members of the art department might mean more AI content is coming. I am not sure that speculation was really warranted—Wizards stated they would not use AI art just a couple months ago and one of the individuals laid off was an art director who quire possibly approved someone’s controversial AI art submission to D&D —but it certainly existed.
I think that is a positive step for the game, and shows a commitment to protecting the independent artist contractors who make up a core component of what makes this game and Magic great. It also is nice to see the commitment to not having AI produce any written content for the game—it was hinted that Wizards was anti-AI across the board, but I believe this is the first time the actively said “no, we won’t be using AI in any parts of production.”
While I appreciate that execs at WotC recognize the industry PR problems of allowing AI art to be published with the Wizards logo associated with it, I don't see how this would dissuade them from developing (or contracting to be developed) an AI to replace some of the major roles played by DMs. They are already aware that one of the biggest constraint to further expansion is the # of people who want to DM (leaving aside the economic constraints fr a minute). It's logical to extrapolate that the easiest solution to that is the mechanize as many aspects of DM work as possible. This could very well be sold using a "We're doing this for our customers" angle, since there will always be a much larger percentage of people who want to "just play the game already" than people who want to DM.
The only problem being that until the fundamental nature of an “AI” program is massively improved, they’re unlikely to have a viable product. DMing anything more advanced than “proceed down passage, kill monsters, repeat” calls for initiative and flexibility of thought, and current alleged “AIs” possess neither.
While I appreciate that execs at WotC recognize the industry PR problems of allowing AI art to be published with the Wizards logo associated with it, I don't see how this would dissuade them from developing (or contracting to be developed) an AI to replace some of the major roles played by DMs. They are already aware that one of the biggest constraint to further expansion is the # of people who want to DM (leaving aside the economic constraints fr a minute). It's logical to extrapolate that the easiest solution to that is the mechanize as many aspects of DM work as possible. This could very well be sold using a "We're doing this for our customers" angle, since there will always be a much larger percentage of people who want to "just play the game already" than people who want to DM.
The only problem being that until the fundamental nature of an “AI” program is massively improved, they’re unlikely to have a viable product. DMing anything more advanced than “proceed down passage, kill monsters, repeat” calls for initiative and flexibility of thought, and current alleged “AIs” possess neither.
They are already aware that one of the biggest constraint to further expansion is the # of people who want to DM (leaving aside the economic constraints fr a minute). It's logical to extrapolate that the easiest solution to that is the mechanize as many aspects of DM work as possible. This could very well be sold using a "We're doing this for our customers" angle, since there will always be a much larger percentage of people who want to "just play the game already" than people who want to DM.
Alternatively, they'd create a set of tools that make it easier for DMs to do the fun creative work that the AI can't replicate. That's the worker-augmenting change I'd like to see.
Why not both? Isn't that the most profitable?
Note that I'm not against automation per se. I just want to point out that there is a slippery slope here. The more DM functions are effectively replicated by A.I., the more superfluous human DMs become. They don't need to entirely replace human DMs either, just make it so that they can "Mechanical Turk" the system so that a human makes micro-decisions here and there for multiple live games at a time.
Making both is not necessarily the most profitable because that results in a higher initial investment of resources, and if one is demonstrably or even just likely/perceived to be significantly more profitable while targeting largely the same niche in the same market segment, it’s better to focus your resources on the most profitable venture rather than allocate a portion of your resources to something that will offer a lower return to the detriment of the more profitable offering.
The only problem being that until the fundamental nature of an “AI” program is massively improved, they’re unlikely to have a viable product. DMing anything more advanced than “proceed down passage, kill monsters, repeat” calls for initiative and flexibility of thought, and current alleged “AIs” possess neither.
The word to emphasize here is currently.
Sure, but in the long run we're all dead, yeah? The current iteration of Chat-GPT cost over $100 million to train and has a trillion parameters floating around, and it isn't even close to viable as a DM. The cost to train something that could be viable as a DM in terms of cash and computational power would be potentially orders of magnitude more.
While I appreciate that execs at WotC recognize the industry PR problems of allowing AI art to be published with the Wizards logo associated with it, I don't see how this would dissuade them from developing (or contracting to be developed) an AI to replace some of the major roles played by DMs. They are already aware that one of the biggest constraint to further expansion is the # of people who want to DM (leaving aside the economic constraints fr a minute). It's logical to extrapolate that the easiest solution to that is the mechanize as many aspects of DM work as possible. This could very well be sold using a "We're doing this for our customers" angle, since there will always be a much larger percentage of people who want to "just play the game already" than people who want to DM.
The only problem being that until the fundamental nature of an “AI” program is massively improved, they’re unlikely to have a viable product. DMing anything more advanced than “proceed down passage, kill monsters, repeat” calls for initiative and flexibility of thought, and current alleged “AIs” possess neither.
The word to emphasize here is currently.
Yes, in much the same way that “currently” manned intrasolar travel to anything outside of Earth’s orbit is not viable; it’s not a question of simply improving the existing tech, it’s a matter of making a breakthrough that completely changes the paradigm. If WotC is considering it at all, it’s on the “maybe someday” board, not the “what’s our 5 year plan” board.
Fully agreed. What do you think about AI-DM's? If the growth of the game is no longer bottle-necked by the number of available DM's, that could potentially do wonders for the number of users. I wonder if their recent statement completely excludes all forms of AI, not limited just art and writing for final products, and they're nipping it in the bud early.
AI DMs are still a pipe dream at the moment. If you give an AI a simple open-ended prompt it can stitch together a generic response without glaring issues, but they objectively do not have the capacity to actually formulate or run an ongoing narrative.
One day one can hope, it'll only get better from now.
It's not something that can be done with the current generation of "AI" tech. Large language models are fundamentally incapable of doing it. (Also, they're hideously expensive to train, expensive to run, and the huge datasets that they need make them easy to poke into spitting out some pretty hideous stuff, which is the sort of PR nightmare that WotC has the sense to avoid.)
Much more limited stuff like running monsters in combat could be done with machine learning, but you'd need a full rule model first, which is difficult, and it will only work if groups are playing fully by the rules in expected conditions. And sometimes you don't want the monsters to be doing the optimal thing.
Fully agreed. What do you think about AI-DM's? If the growth of the game is no longer bottle-necked by the number of available DM's, that could potentially do wonders for the number of users. I wonder if their recent statement completely excludes all forms of AI, not limited just art and writing for final products, and they're nipping it in the bud early.
AI-DMs are currently not a good option, they can't construct a logical long-term narrative currently and most are biased to agreeing with whomever interacts with them which makes it impossible for them to act as a fair and consistent arbiter of the rules while still preserving the open-ended-ness that is what make TTRPGs different from regular RPGs. And implementing them would be a slap in the face of the human DMs who are the ones who buy most of the content WotC produces. The main thing to really consider is why do people choose to play D&D rather than a digital RPG? To me it comes down to two things: 1) the human connection - D&D is a community, you play it with your friends and may make new friends by playing it. 2) the creative freedom - there are no invisible walls in D&D, no pre-programmed move set that are the only things your character can do.
AI DMs destroy #1 to a large extent, and would either have to limit #2 or would be easily broken / driven insane. But I fully acknowledge other people want other things out of the game, but IMO most of those people are the combat-focused power-gamers - who just want to make that character that can do 10,000 damage on turn 1, because big numbers make them happy. For those people, I'd be happy for them to have an AI to beat up with their OP builds.
Something like a "D&D Arena" where you can pit your character (or a party of character you design) against a random set of monsters on a random map, where the enemies are controlled by AI would be doable and I suspect relatively viable financially. The quality of the AI will be limited and I'm certain players would find ways to exploit it, but the kind of player it would appeal to are the kind that would find figuring out how to exploit it fun and empowering.
Back on the topic of the thread, Beyond has a post on the homepage reaffirming their commitment to not using AI in writing books or in their art. A similar statement was made over on Magic’s site.
I expect this was directly inspired by the conversation surrounding layoffs—there has been a lot of rampant speculation that laying off members of the art department might mean more AI content is coming. I am not sure that speculation was really warranted—Wizards stated they would not use AI art just a couple months ago and one of the individuals laid off was an art director who quire possibly approved someone’s controversial AI art submission to D&D —but it certainly existed.
I think that is a positive step for the game, and shows a commitment to protecting the independent artist contractors who make up a core component of what makes this game and Magic great. It also is nice to see the commitment to not having AI produce any written content for the game—it was hinted that Wizards was anti-AI across the board, but I believe this is the first time the actively said “no, we won’t be using AI in any parts of production.”
I see, I had initially thought that with the way poker worked the implication was that the player was making money that the site was fronting. Thank you for explaining that.
Free Content: [Basic Rules],
[Phandelver],[Frozen Sick],[Acquisitions Inc.],[Vecna Dossier],[Radiant Citadel], [Spelljammer],[Dragonlance], [Prisoner 13],[Minecraft],[Star Forge], [Baldur’s Gate], [Lightning Keep], [Stormwreck Isle], [Pinebrook], [Caverns of Tsojcanth], [The Lost Horn], [Elemental Evil].Free Dice: [Frostmaiden],
[Flourishing], [Sanguine],[Themberchaud], [Baldur's Gate 3], [Lego].As I understand, the re-affirmation was driven by folks online suggesting the dwarf art from the new PHB, which they showed at PAX unplugged, was AI created. The artist has rejected that claim, and WotC has re-asserted their policy of not using AI.
We can pretty easily extrapolate from the current D&DBeyond business model (and current VTT business models) what the basic model of the D&D VTT will be. There will likely be a "free" account tier with very limited functionality aimed at new players & new DMs - my prediction is that this will be a version of the current "Maps" tool but with compatibility for the DM to share any additional assets / tools they have access to. Full 3D will require the DM to have a subscription, and occasionally free trials will be offered to entice players to try it out and be persuaded to pitch in for their DM to get a subscription.
There will be an extensive DM-facing online store where you can purchase 3D models of each different monster individually, or NPC or an individual map or one particular object/asset (for those who play in HB worlds / settings). These will be a supplement to bundles that will include all components required for a particular adventure module at a discounted rate compared to individual item purchases.
There will also be a player-facing store for "microtransaction" cosmetic options attached to something like Hero-Forge to create your custom 3D character model, as well as interface customization / aesthetics similar to the current digital dice and pay-for character sheet backgrounds.
The only big question in my mind is whether they will create an enemy-AI to allow on-demand combats against the enemy AI. I would absolutely believe there is demand for this that would make it viable even as a subscription or one-off payment service, however, there is definitely a risk of PR backlash and it would be pretty challenging to implement for WotC without extensive expertise from a proper game studio like Larian.
While they in theory could adopt a play-to-win exploitative casual business model, they already have Magic to appeal to the players who like that play-style, and trying to morph D&D into that would drastically reduce their player-base long-term. It is certainly possible that short-sighted upper management might demand WotC do that, IMO, the OGL fiasco actually demonstrated that there are people in WotC who do understand that building a happy long-term playerbase is more important than short-term profiteering. It is simply a question of which side will prevail.
There is absolutely an addressable market, my major worry is that they are overestimating the size & desires of that market and as a result they will spend too much money and time developing the VTT with a bunch of extra features that nobody really cares about, that the subscription fee required to make the VTT profitable will end up prohibitively high and people will just stick with competition anyway.
Fully agreed. What do you think about AI-DM's? If the growth of the game is no longer bottle-necked by the number of available DM's, that could potentially do wonders for the number of users. I wonder if their recent statement completely excludes all forms of AI, not limited just art and writing for final products, and they're nipping it in the bud early.
Free Content: [Basic Rules],
[Phandelver],[Frozen Sick],[Acquisitions Inc.],[Vecna Dossier],[Radiant Citadel], [Spelljammer],[Dragonlance], [Prisoner 13],[Minecraft],[Star Forge], [Baldur’s Gate], [Lightning Keep], [Stormwreck Isle], [Pinebrook], [Caverns of Tsojcanth], [The Lost Horn], [Elemental Evil].Free Dice: [Frostmaiden],
[Flourishing], [Sanguine],[Themberchaud], [Baldur's Gate 3], [Lego].AI DMs are still a pipe dream at the moment. If you give an AI a simple open-ended prompt it can stitch together a generic response without glaring issues, but they objectively do not have the capacity to actually formulate or run an ongoing narrative.
One day one can hope, it'll only get better from now.
Free Content: [Basic Rules],
[Phandelver],[Frozen Sick],[Acquisitions Inc.],[Vecna Dossier],[Radiant Citadel], [Spelljammer],[Dragonlance], [Prisoner 13],[Minecraft],[Star Forge], [Baldur’s Gate], [Lightning Keep], [Stormwreck Isle], [Pinebrook], [Caverns of Tsojcanth], [The Lost Horn], [Elemental Evil].Free Dice: [Frostmaiden],
[Flourishing], [Sanguine],[Themberchaud], [Baldur's Gate 3], [Lego].While I appreciate that execs at WotC recognize the industry PR problems of allowing AI art to be published with the Wizards logo associated with it, I don't see how this would dissuade them from developing (or contracting to be developed) an AI to replace some of the major roles played by DMs. They are already aware that one of the biggest constraint to further expansion is the # of people who want to DM (leaving aside the economic constraints fr a minute). It's logical to extrapolate that the easiest solution to that is the mechanize as many aspects of DM work as possible. This could very well be sold using a "We're doing this for our customers" angle, since there will always be a much larger percentage of people who want to "just play the game already" than people who want to DM.
That is, perhaps, a good point. In the interests of fairness, I thought it would be useful to at least provide that critique of the Japanese corporate model as I don't have the macroeconomics education to assess those critiques myself.
Alternatively, they'd create a set of tools that make it easier for DMs to do the fun creative work that the AI can't replicate. That's the worker-augmenting change I'd like to see.
Why not both? Isn't that the most profitable?
Note that I'm not against automation per se. I just want to point out that there is a slippery slope here. The more DM functions are effectively replicated by A.I., the more superfluous human DMs become. They don't need to entirely replace human DMs either, just make it so that they can "Mechanical Turk" the system so that a human makes micro-decisions here and there for multiple live games at a time.
The only problem being that until the fundamental nature of an “AI” program is massively improved, they’re unlikely to have a viable product. DMing anything more advanced than “proceed down passage, kill monsters, repeat” calls for initiative and flexibility of thought, and current alleged “AIs” possess neither.
Hard to say. DMs are the ones who buy the lion's share of D&D books and peripherals. Cut out the DM and you lose those sales.
The word to emphasize here is currently.
Making both is not necessarily the most profitable because that results in a higher initial investment of resources, and if one is demonstrably or even just likely/perceived to be significantly more profitable while targeting largely the same niche in the same market segment, it’s better to focus your resources on the most profitable venture rather than allocate a portion of your resources to something that will offer a lower return to the detriment of the more profitable offering.
Sure, but in the long run we're all dead, yeah? The current iteration of Chat-GPT cost over $100 million to train and has a trillion parameters floating around, and it isn't even close to viable as a DM. The cost to train something that could be viable as a DM in terms of cash and computational power would be potentially orders of magnitude more.
Yes, in much the same way that “currently” manned intrasolar travel to anything outside of Earth’s orbit is not viable; it’s not a question of simply improving the existing tech, it’s a matter of making a breakthrough that completely changes the paradigm. If WotC is considering it at all, it’s on the “maybe someday” board, not the “what’s our 5 year plan” board.
It's not something that can be done with the current generation of "AI" tech. Large language models are fundamentally incapable of doing it. (Also, they're hideously expensive to train, expensive to run, and the huge datasets that they need make them easy to poke into spitting out some pretty hideous stuff, which is the sort of PR nightmare that WotC has the sense to avoid.)
Much more limited stuff like running monsters in combat could be done with machine learning, but you'd need a full rule model first, which is difficult, and it will only work if groups are playing fully by the rules in expected conditions. And sometimes you don't want the monsters to be doing the optimal thing.
AI-DMs are currently not a good option, they can't construct a logical long-term narrative currently and most are biased to agreeing with whomever interacts with them which makes it impossible for them to act as a fair and consistent arbiter of the rules while still preserving the open-ended-ness that is what make TTRPGs different from regular RPGs. And implementing them would be a slap in the face of the human DMs who are the ones who buy most of the content WotC produces. The main thing to really consider is why do people choose to play D&D rather than a digital RPG?
To me it comes down to two things:
1) the human connection - D&D is a community, you play it with your friends and may make new friends by playing it.
2) the creative freedom - there are no invisible walls in D&D, no pre-programmed move set that are the only things your character can do.
AI DMs destroy #1 to a large extent, and would either have to limit #2 or would be easily broken / driven insane. But I fully acknowledge other people want other things out of the game, but IMO most of those people are the combat-focused power-gamers - who just want to make that character that can do 10,000 damage on turn 1, because big numbers make them happy. For those people, I'd be happy for them to have an AI to beat up with their OP builds.
Something like a "D&D Arena" where you can pit your character (or a party of character you design) against a random set of monsters on a random map, where the enemies are controlled by AI would be doable and I suspect relatively viable financially. The quality of the AI will be limited and I'm certain players would find ways to exploit it, but the kind of player it would appeal to are the kind that would find figuring out how to exploit it fun and empowering.