The only video game I can think of that seriously tries to replicate the experience of playing old-school D&D is Nethack and its forks. Nethack goes to great le

The only video game I can think of that seriously tries to replicate the experience of playing old-school D&D is Nethack and its forks. Nethack goes to great lengths to allow for player creativity, even at the cost of game balance. E.g. there are monsters (cockatrices) that petrify on touch. If you kill one, it's possible to pick it up (wearing gloves) and instantly petrify other enemies by hitting them with the corpse. This isn't without risk, e.g. if you fall into a pit trap while attempting this you'll end up petrifying yourself, and enemies can do the same to you if they're capable of wielding weapons and are wearing gloves. There's a simulationist approach to its design that goes beyond other games. There's a community saying: "the dev team thinks of everything." The problem is this isn't actually true. They certainly think of a lot of things, but it's still only a finite, predetermined set. All the clever tricks are common knowledge now. Anybody can read the Wiki and learn how to win without much difficulty. Nethack becomes boring once you understand how it works. If you want to play it but haven't yet done so I recommend avoiding spoilers as much as possible (the cockatrice thing is so well known that I don't think there's any real problem sharing that one; the game was designed around less extensive pre-Wiki-era sharing of knowledge, not zero sharing). Real D&D doesn't have this problem. A human DM can adjudicate improvisation without needing to program it in advance, and do this while maintaining consistency in a way that LLMs still fail at. Well-run tabletop RPGs are still the best games available for allowing player creativity.