AI is pretty controversial and understandably gets a lot of hate in the TTRPG community. As a company building something at the intersection of AI and TTRPGs, we hear a lot of reasons why people don’t want AI in TTRPGs. We understand where it all comes from and think it’s justified, but we do think that some of the issues people have may stem from misconceptions or misunderstandings that we’d like to try and clear up.
Our goal with this blog post is not to try to convince everyone to use AI at their table, but to address some potential misconceptions, provide some more information about how we’re thinking about AI in Friends & Fables, and outline some of the benefits we see in generative AI. We’re obviously a biased party, but we’ve been thinking about this quite deeply and wanted to add our perspective to the conversation. If you give this a read, we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Before diving into the details, we wanted to first layout how we’re seeing AI used in TTRPGs today:
We’ll dive deep into the concerns around this AI usage but ultimately we think that these use cases bring benefits like
For a lot of people, getting into TTRPGs can be quite a challenge. Imagine you don’t already have any friends who play TTRPGs. You could try to convince some friends to try it out with you, but you’re all noobs unsure of how to play and need a dungeon master (DM) to guide you. You could step up and try to be the DM, but that comes with it’s own set of challenges as you need to learn the rules and prepare for each session; and if you’re a good DM then you can be in a spot where you’re always the DM for your group even if you want to play. If your friends aren’t as interested, then things can fall apart. You could maybe go to the local game shop and try to find a group of strangers to play with, but maybe you don’t quite fit in with them.
But let’s say that’s not the case, and you DO have a great group of friends to play with. You can run into scheduling issues and need to cancel sessions, or your friends get new jobs and move to different cities, or your DM now has 2 kids and can no longer make the time to be the DM.
The point is, without the right circumstances, getting into TTRPGs can be hard. It’s undeniable that there are groups of people out there who are curious about and might love TTRPGs, but are too intimidated by all the barriers to even try.
AI can help lower these barriers by answering rules questions for new players, being a copilot for new DMs, filling in as a DM or a player when needed, and giving everyone a comfortable environment to explore ideas and storylines before bringing them to the table.
AI makes it possible to do things like real time translation, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text. These types of features make TTRPGs more accessible to non-english speakers and for people who can’t play in-person or on VTTs due to a disability.
By lowering all of these barriers to entry, we think it opens the door for more people to try out roleplaying games, and also gives friends more opportunities to connect and play. AI isn’t a replacement to the human element of TTRPGs, but a tool that makes the TTRPG experience more available to all.
…but replacing the dungeon master, stripping the human element away from this fundamentally human activity, no please no! I firmly believe TTRPGs are a type of magic and that magic comes from the human connection and the human stories that we tell together and the human experiences that we have as we tell those stories, so please can we not replace the human element with an AI. Use AI to make lives of dungeon masters easier, not replace them. - The Buff DM @thousandfaces
For Friends & Fables specifically, let us just say that our goal is NOT to replace human GMs with AI GMs.
Finding a GM is hard and there’s often not enough game masters for all the groups who want to play. Even though we have built an AI GM, it’s not at all a replacement for humans, but rather an alternative and addition for folks who may not be able to find one or don’t have the ability to spend hours on a VTT. Rather than replacing existing sessions, it fills a gap to enable more sessions and lets people play who otherwise would not have before.
Some might argue that instead of using an AI GM, “you should just go out and hire one” or “someone in the group should just be the GM”. But we don’t think it’s always that simple. Maybe your group’s schedules don’t align with available GMs, or maybe no one in your group wants to be the GM. In these situations, an AI GM can be a possible alternative.
Additionally, for Friends & Fables specifically, the end goal is not to create an AI GM but instead to create a platform for people to create, share, and connect with each other through TTRPGs. We’re not there yet, but we’re building features so humans can still GM and AI is just there as a copilot to make the GM’s life easier. We’re hoping that by using AI to make GMing easier, we’ll be able to increase the overall availability of GMs and ultimately connect more GMs to players.
One common perception is that AI is soulless and by introducing AI into the hobby it results in making it less social.
We agree with the idea that playing with AI is less social than playing with humans. Of course its always better to play in person with your friends! It’s also better to meet up with an old friend for coffee than to catch up over video call or texting. There is an inverse relationship between how convenient something is and how much human connection you get from it. But sometimes you just can’t meet up in person and a Zoom call or text is better than nothing!
With Friends & Fables, we’re not trying to replace IRL sessions or even VTT sessions, we’re just trying to fill in that gap between playing on a VTT and not playing at all. You can think of us as a group text built for TTRPGs or a next-gen play by post platform. The AI can never replicate or replace your IRL sessions, it’s just there to provide an alternative experience so you can connect more with your friends and dive right into playing.
It might not be as good as playing in person or virtually, but we think that it ultimately gives humans even more opportunities to connect, and that’s a good thing.
AI bots have been around in digital versions of social games for a long time. Take Settlers of Catan for example, its a social board game, but there’s an online version where you can play against bots. That doesn’t mean that people are no longer playing in person, and it doesn’t devalue any of the time that people are spending together in person. Or consider a team game, like Rocket League. Sometimes you only have 3 humans and you need to throw in an AI to even out the teams. In this case, humans might actually be playing with other humans less if it weren’t for AI being available.
If you already have a GM and a full party, then you don’t need AI! No one is saying that every table needs to have an AI GM or AI characters, but they can be great as tool to help fill in gaps when needed.
Another common argument is that “AI will never be creative like a human”. We completely agree! However, we don’t think the point or purpose of AI is to be creative or to replace human creativity. AI is a tool that can reflect and augment human creativity. In Friends & Fables, humans are and will always be the creative directors. Humans build out the world they want to play in, and provide the AI with the lore and rules they want it to follow. During a campaign, it’s still up to the humans to react creatively to what the AI dishes out.
When you have a group of 5 friends who build out a world together and played a campaign with 1 AI game master, that’s still 5 humans having fun and being creative. AI is just a small part of the creative process that facilitates these sessions - humans are the bigger part and always the core of creativity and connection.
While BG3 shares a lot of similarities with TTRPGs, it is still a video game and not a TTRPG. The key difference is that a TTRPG is played with natural language, while BG3 is played with predefined actions and dialogue options. In a TTRPG, you can attempt virtually anything you can imagine, but in BG3, you're limited to the choices programmed into the game.
AI allows us to create something that is still digital, but feels much closer to a true TTRPG experience - it’s like playing a video game with natural language. The narrative is not programmed ahead of time and is instead improvised and written together by both the players and the GM, which is a much more creative and open-ended experience than a video game.
We hope that what we’ve shared here demonstrates how AI can make TTRPGs more accessible, bolster human creativity, and help more friends connect over TTRPGs than before. If you still don’t like the idea of using AI, that’s totally fine! The point of this article is not to convince you to start using AI, but just to give you some more context from the other side of the conversation.
