
The Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D - pmoriarty
https://www.wired.com/story/forget-chess-real-challenge-teaching-ai-play-dandd
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time0ut
A lower bar might be a Paranoia[0] GM. For those that haven't played, Paranoia
is a tabletop RPG that takes place in a dystopian future ruled by an
insane/evil AI. It is hilarious fun. I could see it being easier for an AI to
RP an insane AI than a D&D DM. :D

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-
playing_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_\(role-playing_game\))

~~~
C1sc0cat
Most of the fun in Paranioa is backstabbing the other players.

There an AP of paranoia with Felica Day as a play that woman is scary good.

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v01dlight
A huge part of the charm of TTRPGs is playing a non-digital game face to face
with other humans. Even if we had AI that was as entertaining as a skilled
human DM (unlikely to be possible IMHO), the human might end up being
preferable since hanging out with humans is one of the goals of this
particular pursuit.

Plus, we already have (weak) AI DMs. They're called video game RPGs. You're
the player (as are many others in the case of an MMO), the game itself is the
GM. They do many things better than a human could (handle lots of background
math, present gorgeously rendered environments, have professionally voice
acted NPCs, have skill based real time combat), but the audiences don't
entirely overlap because TTRPG players are seeking the freedom of choice and
limitless outcome that video games cannot really match.

~~~
v01dlight
There's no end of people making video games that are direct attempts to
convert D&D to a digital format. Take the new Baldur's Gate for example[0].
All the same spells present, digital dice rolling, etc.

Personally, I say let things fall to the medium that best suits them. If D&D
is sufficiently complicated rules wise that it is actually more fun to have
software take care of that so you can just focus on the tactical combat and
scripted story choices, then the video game is probably your best bet! There
are many other TTRPGs where this is not the case, and where any digitization
would take away much more than it would add. Such RPGs are elegant enough
rules wise that they do not slow down play at the table, and you can spend 99%
of your time just relishing each other's madcap plans and imaginative
descriptions of things.

[0] [https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/27/21156082/baldurs-
gate-3-di...](https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/27/21156082/baldurs-
gate-3-divinity-original-sin-differences-changes-impressions-preview-larian-
studios)

~~~
ajuc
CRPGs are no competition, there's no comparison, really. When you do anything
outside the box CRPGs just break, while a good game master will run with it
and that's how the best stories happen. We found a boss we didn't wanted to
fight. Our spellcasters decided sending a construct with 2 bags of holding to
put one into another near the boss will destroy it. It worked, but it also
created portal to another dimension, and when we tried to recover the hostages
2 player characters got thrown into that dimension. The rest of the party had
to pay a powerful mage to recover them with our best magical weapon. Half a
session (several hours) was spent arguing over who owns the magical weapon and
if it's good idea to give it away :) They almost fought in game :) Meanwhile
my character stranded in another dimension decided to become a priest (I was a
barbarian before).

These kind of stuff never happens in CRPGs - it couldn't because there's
infinite number of possible open-ended solutions to any problem. If AI can
improvise them I'd argue it's as good as a Turing Test.

BTW complicated rules aren't that big of a problem - there is a compromise
between CRPGs and TTRPGs - and it's computer-assisted TTRPGs played over
internet. The most important advantage is that you can play with people from
other continent, so it's much easier to find players. But the computer-
assisted part is also making the rules much less of a problem. You set up your
character (all the items, feats, skills, abilities) before the game, and when
DM wants he asks you to roll the attack, you click and the system rolls the
dices for everybody to see, adds the needed modifiers, calculates the damage
(including critical hit if needed etc. ) and shows how much hitpoints you
lost.

It's faster than doing all this stuff physically and beyond the initial setup
and occasional level-up it makes complicated rules more bearable.

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dreen
Of course the article is actually about writing a digital DM not a player. But
isn't the main problem with this defining win conditions? Pretty easy to
define win condition for chess or go.

Now, I haven't really played DnD (much to my sadness), but how do you win?

edit: I know the answer but I'm making a point with my question

~~~
grawprog
Every d&d game i've played tends to end either with the players becoming
godlike and destroying the world, more often everybody dying, or everyone
getting bored or busy in life and just stopping.

>but how do you win?

When you've provided a fun and engaging experience for your players?

I do mean this seriously. Being a DM is about making sure the players are
having fun and always giving players something interesting to do. It shouldn't
be too easy or too hard. The things should have some variety, you have to be
able to adapt to what your players decide to do. Just because you have some
cool stuff planned doesn't mean they'll find it, you can guide them a bit, but
don't funnel them and accept they may not see your cool stuff, you can always
save it for another time.

I guess my point is, keeping player fun and engagement high while allowing the
game to run its natural course would be what I would think of as the win
condition for a dm. Finding a way to measure this and provide this seems like
a fairly difficult task though.

~~~
com2kid
IMHO one of the hardest parts of DMing is building tension and a sense that
there is real danger, without just bringing out enemies that can completely
roll over the players. Ideally the group should survive, but constantly feel
threatened and like they "just barely" made it through a story's climax.

In other words those victories need to be earned, which is a fine balancing
act since dice rolls are random and bad things happen.

It can also lead to awesome situations when the dice go extremely well,
everything lines up, and the players feel like legit bad-asses. It is the DM's
job to create situations where that can happen!

~~~
grawprog
I'll usually fudge at least a few dice rolls as a DM depending on how the game
or encounter's going as the situation requires. If I roll a bunch of crits in
a row for example, i'll maybe just call it one instead a bunch, maybe that
wasn't a one hit kill when it should have been, stuff like that. If it's too
random it usually stops being fun for everyone. It's a really hard balance
though you don't want the players to be frustrated, but you don't want them to
feel like their cheesing through the game.

For dungeons at least i try to go for that nethack or metroidvania vibe of
slowly going deeper while your supplies and health dwindle, so each encounter
needs to be considered more as they get deeper.

Above world adventures I try and let them be more free in their decisions but
keep the consequences a bit higher for things.

I've yet to play any computer or console rpgs that really come close to the
feeling of playing a good d&d game, even the ones that heavily use the rules.
Nwn online came close, but those typically had human DMS the single player
game was fun, but even on coop, still wasn't really like playing dnd without a
DM player.

~~~
dhosek
I remember one looking through the rule book for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer
RPG which had an interesting concept: players had a certain number of "plot
points" (I forget exactly what they called them) which allowed them to
overturn an unfortunate die roll. It was based on the idea that in the TV
show, the main characters would often manage to get out of a tight spot
through well-timed luck.

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DonaldFisk
Not Dungeons and Dragons, but Doug Lenat's Eurisko entered fleets for the
role-playing game Traveller Adventure 5: Trillion Credit Squadron. It won the
1981 and 1982 championships.

Eurisko was GOFAI, written in RLL, a frame-based language implemented in Lisp.

[https://aliciapatterson.org/stories/eurisko-computer-mind-
it...](https://aliciapatterson.org/stories/eurisko-computer-mind-its-own)

~~~
RugnirViking
To be fair, that AI seems to have essentially solved a complex spreadsheet-
type optimisation challenge rather than anything with an open-ended narrative.
Nonetheless, it is a very interesting story

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b3kart
> Forget X, the real challenge for AI is Y.

As soon as Ys become Xs over time, and we come up with new Ys: we’re making
progress.

~~~
ska
You forget the step where when we get comfortable enough with something we
stop calling X AI at all because obviously it' just Z.

NB: I'm not convinced this is the wrong thing to do, many of the things we've
historically labeled "AI" are very obviously not, at least in retrospect.

Perhaps the cycle ends only when an AI can explain to us how we are getting it
wrong.

~~~
b3kart
We just don't have a very good definition of what "intelligence" actually is.
Hence we're trying to set the bar somewhere. "Surely a machine that can play
chess is intelligent". Nope, that's not it. "But surely a machine that
recognizes objects in images is intelligent". Nah, it's just good at
recognizing patterns of pixels. And so on and so forth. It's a noisy process,
but we're slowly moving in the right direction.

~~~
ska
Right, we've been doing this for coming on 60 years now, and we have a much
better idea of what isn't intelligence than what is. But that's still useful.

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xamuel
This is sort of like asking: If you had Star Trek replicators, what would be
the optimal configuration to use those replicators as paperweights?

D&D is not a game with rigorously defined rules and winning conditions,
instead it's a means to an end, the end being: have fun with friends through a
mutual fantasy. If you had a genuine post-singularity superhuman AGI, it would
be silly to use it for D&D, because you could just directly instruct it, "Make
my friends and I have fun through a mutual fantasy". This might be inherently
dangerous because a truly superhuman AGI would probably be so effective that
you and your friends would end up unable to distinguish said mutual fantasy
from reality and you'd all end up blissfully running around in the resulting
fantasy for the rest of your lives.

~~~
DivisionSol
"dangerous"?

Edit: I personally know a good amount of people for that is a life goal.

~~~
xamuel
Depends on your definition of dangerous. Dangerous in the same sense that a
button you could press to directly stimulate your brain's pleasure centers
would be dangerous, because you'd probably end up pressing it to the exclusion
of everything else (personal hygiene, family, eating...)

~~~
chongli
This is called the wireheading problem [1]. It was solved (for AI) by Stuart
Russell in his new book _Human Compatible_ [2].

[1]
[https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Wireheading](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Wireheading)

[2] [https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/30/book-review-human-
comp...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/30/book-review-human-compatible/)

~~~
xamuel
>It was solved (for AI) by Stuart Russell in his new book Human Compatible

Correction: it was _downplayed_ by Stuart Russell. Stuart took simplistic
strawman examples and made them look silly by assuming perfectly calibrated
common sense in the hypothetical AGI. (Based on skimming the link you posted;
I haven't read Stuart's book.)

~~~
chongli
You should read instead of skim. Stuart Russell specifically rejects the idea
of “perfectly calibrated common sense” in AI. He says AI should not interpret
any command literally, but instead take a Bayesian approach. This is much
closer to how humans respond to one another’s demands.

~~~
naniwaduni
Congratulations, you've reduced a hard problem to a harder problem!

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eximius
While the problem is not quite AGI, it's damn close.

~~~
grabbalacious
Why is it not full AGI? Seems to me that the ability to perform 'spontaneous
yet coherent storytelling' perforce makes one a universal explainer (i.e. a
person).

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FryHigh
I didn’t realise D&D was this challenging.

On the flip side, this is what people said. Forget Chess - Go is the one.
Forget Go - D&D is the one.

~~~
danso
I haven't played D&D in a looong time, but making a human-like dungeonmaster
seems like the textbook example of a hard problem for AI.

~~~
zentiggr
It's a hard enough problem for many humans... I completely agree with you.

If someone can make even a decent AI DM, I'd say turn that one loose on NP-
complete for a followup softball question.

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ausbah
I think creating an AI dungeon master has a wide range of difficulty depending
on how open ended the game is intended to be.

The more structured and rules based the game is, the easier it is to create a
dungeon master - the more free form and "on the fly" the game is the harder
the task. So while creating a dungeon master may be "easy" if the rules and
story are heavily enumerated, it likely won't be very fun as it doesn't
capture the free-formedness that makes D&D so fun.

~~~
com2kid
D&D isn't even the most free form RPG out there, there are plenty of systems
that run the gamut from "highly tactical and rules based" to "almost freeform
collaborative story telling."

D&D at least has well defined combat rules. I've ran games that use cinematic
combat rules, where the books have suggestions and some math, but a lot of
things are left up in the air with the general guidance of "whatever is
awesome."

So there aren't rules for shooting grenades out of mid air, but it made for an
awesome climax to the story as the team raced onto the escape ship and the
hanger bay door was slamming down, so of course I allowed it.

I was playing one game where we the players objected to how the military was
prepping for an AI invasion so we rebelled, next session the DM brought in a
giant map and it turned into a base building tower defense session.

D&D can go off the rails, other systems can go off the rails then continue
until things are off planet!

~~~
LanceH
Forget D&D. I won't be satisfied until the computer is GM for a nice game of
Paranoia.

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mxcrossb
I always have thought Apples to Apples would be a great next playground for
AI.

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redisman
Isn't this just a more constrained turing test?

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jbverschoor
Just roll natural 20s and you’ll be fine

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danschumann
Just don't let the fire breathing dragon AI out into the world in an apache...
lol.

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anthk
He did with Nethack. It won.

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deltaveedaddy
The real challenge is teaching AI to teach AI.

