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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

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.

dreen 7y ago
This is kind of the point I was making with my question. Playing DnD is not about winning. Being a DM is not about reaching some sort of conclusion. So it's essentially impossible to make an AI good at this without achieving true general AI (not within our lifetime for sure)
- ljp_206 7y ago
  True, but I can imagine a world where AI DMs are in vogue, and are curated not for their one-size-fits-all perfection, but for their aesthetic or functional qualities. The hardest thing to capture will be truly surprising off-screen storytelling moments that role playing games enable. Otherwise, you can probably optimize for 'challenging combat,' 'fun puzzles,' 'social interaction' etc... Have a hard-nosed, Old School Revival (OSR) group who enjoys hack and slash dungeon crawls? Great, all you need is an AI who picks hard but fair challenges, describes dire and interesting settings, and keeps rewarding moments (in this case, hard-fought victories) coming frequently. Like to tell stories instead? Seed a plot with a laid-back AI who leaves lots of room to breathe, throws lots of skill checks at crafty players, and excels at creating complex personalities and interactions via a cast of interesting NPCs. Rimworld is an simulation/tactics/base-building game that offers more traditionally game oriented "AI Directors," but the different kinds of directors offer different prioritization over moments of peace, intense challenge, battle, etc., based on just a few settings. Even blowing out that settings list a bit more could create interesting results.
  - dreen 7y ago
    interesting, i didnt know about that setting in rimworld. the game has been high on my list due to the fact ive had much FUN with DF, so im gonna bring rimworld up on that list!
    - kiaulen 7y ago
      Now is the perfect time! Rimworld just got a gigantic (free) 1.1 update and a smaller (paid) DLC to go with it. Rimworld is like 2d dwarf fortress, but way more accessible. The controls make sense, and the game teaches you as you play. Also Rimworld has about 3 and a half metric tons of mods. I first saw RimWorld while chilling in a hotel room watching YouTube a while back, and I bought it back while it was still in early access. Tynan has done a phenomenal job making the game go from good to fantastic.
com2kid 7y ago
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!
- carapace 7y ago
  I still remember a friend of mine telling me that he had been genuinely scared at one point in an adventure. Like watching-a-horror-movie scared. (A flying castle attacks the city; it's made to crash; someone has to go in there and find out what's up; cue our heros; they enter through a breach in the wall into a kind of internal moat; it's dark, you're up to your waist in water, and there's something in here with you! (Water Weirds. Damn near invisible snake-like water elementals...) Good times!)
  - ajuc 7y ago
    My best horror dungeon so far was a 3-level abandoned dwarven mine. 2 first levels are infested with kobolds and pseudodragons, players kill some kobolds, block off some others with explosions, solve puzzles to get through blocked lift to the last level and see that it was blocked from inside on purpose, there are dwarven runes on the walls written with blood warning not to speak to each other and not to read anything or you'll get infected by HIM. I borrowed it from SCP series - it's a "memetic hazard" - nonmagically infects brains when it's thought of or spoken of. Mechanically players roll a Wisdom save whenever there's infection opportunity, on a fail they start shouting the meme (then others have to roll :)), on a bad fail they become possesed and run somewhere. You of course don't explain it to the players, just ask them to roll when needed :) As they explore searching for the artifact they were hired to recover they find the whole mine is full of dead bodies calmly sitting in circles, pools of dried blood, all the books are burned and there are bodies of dwarves who were fighting each other before they died. Then there's the last room with a huge portal that starts to activate when players who got possesed run into it. The climax is a big pvp fight between the players that try to teleport to their new god and the rest of the party trying to knock them unconscious and drag them away before the portal activates :)

dreen 7y ago

This is kind of the point I was making with my question. Playing DnD is not about winning. Being a DM is not about reaching some sort of conclusion. So it's essentially impossible to make an AI good at this without achieving true general AI (not within our lifetime for sure)

ljp_206 7y ago
True, but I can imagine a world where AI DMs are in vogue, and are curated not for their one-size-fits-all perfection, but for their aesthetic or functional qualities. The hardest thing to capture will be truly surprising off-screen storytelling moments that role playing games enable. Otherwise, you can probably optimize for 'challenging combat,' 'fun puzzles,' 'social interaction' etc... Have a hard-nosed, Old School Revival (OSR) group who enjoys hack and slash dungeon crawls? Great, all you need is an AI who picks hard but fair challenges, describes dire and interesting settings, and keeps rewarding moments (in this case, hard-fought victories) coming frequently. Like to tell stories instead? Seed a plot with a laid-back AI who leaves lots of room to breathe, throws lots of skill checks at crafty players, and excels at creating complex personalities and interactions via a cast of interesting NPCs. Rimworld is an simulation/tactics/base-building game that offers more traditionally game oriented "AI Directors," but the different kinds of directors offer different prioritization over moments of peace, intense challenge, battle, etc., based on just a few settings. Even blowing out that settings list a bit more could create interesting results.
- dreen 7y ago
  interesting, i didnt know about that setting in rimworld. the game has been high on my list due to the fact ive had much FUN with DF, so im gonna bring rimworld up on that list!
  - kiaulen 7y ago
    Now is the perfect time! Rimworld just got a gigantic (free) 1.1 update and a smaller (paid) DLC to go with it. Rimworld is like 2d dwarf fortress, but way more accessible. The controls make sense, and the game teaches you as you play. Also Rimworld has about 3 and a half metric tons of mods. I first saw RimWorld while chilling in a hotel room watching YouTube a while back, and I bought it back while it was still in early access. Tynan has done a phenomenal job making the game go from good to fantastic.

com2kid 7y ago

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!

carapace 7y ago
I still remember a friend of mine telling me that he had been genuinely scared at one point in an adventure. Like watching-a-horror-movie scared. (A flying castle attacks the city; it's made to crash; someone has to go in there and find out what's up; cue our heros; they enter through a breach in the wall into a kind of internal moat; it's dark, you're up to your waist in water, and there's something in here with you! (Water Weirds. Damn near invisible snake-like water elementals...) Good times!)
- ajuc 7y ago
  My best horror dungeon so far was a 3-level abandoned dwarven mine. 2 first levels are infested with kobolds and pseudodragons, players kill some kobolds, block off some others with explosions, solve puzzles to get through blocked lift to the last level and see that it was blocked from inside on purpose, there are dwarven runes on the walls written with blood warning not to speak to each other and not to read anything or you'll get infected by HIM. I borrowed it from SCP series - it's a "memetic hazard" - nonmagically infects brains when it's thought of or spoken of. Mechanically players roll a Wisdom save whenever there's infection opportunity, on a fail they start shouting the meme (then others have to roll :)), on a bad fail they become possesed and run somewhere. You of course don't explain it to the players, just ask them to roll when needed :) As they explore searching for the artifact they were hired to recover they find the whole mine is full of dead bodies calmly sitting in circles, pools of dried blood, all the books are burned and there are bodies of dwarves who were fighting each other before they died. Then there's the last room with a huge portal that starts to activate when players who got possesed run into it. The climax is a big pvp fight between the players that try to teleport to their new god and the rest of the party trying to knock them unconscious and drag them away before the portal activates :)