Growing Old Gaming With AI — Still Rolling the Dice
Well, here's something I never thought I'd be writing about when I started this blog.
I've been playing roleplaying games for a very long time. I've created worlds, written adventures, designed rules, rolled more dice than I care to count, and sent a fair number of unfortunate adventurers to meet their gods along the way.
Like many of us who've been at this hobby for decades, I've seen a lot of changes. Some wonderful, some questionable, and a few that have left me scratching my head and wondering what on earth everyone was thinking.
But recently I've been experimenting with something that has genuinely surprised me.
Artificial Intelligence.
Yes, that AI. The one everyone's either terribly excited about or convinced is going to bring about the end of civilisation. Possibly both before lunchtime.
And I have to say, it's been quite an adventure.
A New Way to Keep Playing
A little background first.
For various health reasons, including tremors that make some of the more fiddly physical aspects of our hobby increasingly difficult, I've found myself rather limited in what I can comfortably do. I'm also fairly socially isolated these days, which doesn't exactly make getting a group of adventurers around the table particularly easy.
The imagination is still there, thank goodness. The ideas certainly haven't stopped coming, and I still love creating games, characters, worlds and adventures.
It's just that sometimes the body isn't terribly cooperative.
Anyone who's had to deal with chronic illness will probably understand the frustration of still wanting to do all the things you enjoy but finding the practical business of actually doing them increasingly difficult.
And that's where AI has started to make a rather unexpected difference.
Not by doing everything for me, but by helping me do things I might otherwise have struggled to do at all.
My Very Own Digital Referee
One of my first great discoveries was that an AI could actually referee a roleplaying adventure.
Now, before anyone starts sharpening their pencils and preparing a strongly worded response, I'm not suggesting that it can replace a good human referee. Far from it.
A good referee brings personality, judgement, humour, creativity and that wonderful ability to look you straight in the eye while describing something truly horrible that's about to happen to your character.
But AI can do something rather remarkable.
It can sit down with you, so to speak, at practically any time of the day or night, and play.
I've been using it to referee adventures using my own rules, including Lost Tales: Dungeon Delves and, more recently, First Light, a smaller, simpler roleplaying game I've been developing.
And sometimes it's been absolutely wonderful.
I've explored forgotten ruins, followed suspicious tracks through dark forests, investigated strange disappearances, argued with uncooperative characters and rescued people from some rather unpleasant situations.
My roadwarden Mara, for instance, has been wandering around Keldenwood trying to discover what's happened to a number of missing villagers and what dreadful thing might be lurking in the woods.
What has delighted me isn't simply the adventure itself, but the unexpected little moments that emerge during play.
A character says something I wasn't expecting. A clue leads somewhere interesting. An apparently insignificant encounter suddenly develops into something rather important.
And occasionally a mule decides that someone's cloak looks like a perfectly good lunch.
Thistle, I'm looking at you.
Those moments can produce a genuine feeling of surprise and happiness. I'm sitting there grinning like an idiot because something completely unexpected has happened in a make-believe world.
And for a little while I'm not thinking about what I can't do.
I'm simply playing.
That's worth quite a lot.
Of Course, It Sometimes Makes a Complete Pig's Ear of Things
Now, I'd be doing everyone a disservice if I pretended this all works perfectly.
It most certainly does not.
AI referees can forget things, confuse characters, invent information they shouldn't know, and occasionally behave as though they've had a rather substantial blow to the head.
We've caught characters knowing things they couldn't possibly know. I've had to correct the referee when it wandered away from the established rules or started making assumptions about what my character intended to do.
And, rather more frustratingly, I've had portions of an ongoing adventure disappear from the conversation.
There's nothing quite like spending hours exploring a mysterious location, rescuing its inhabitants and uncovering its secrets, only to discover that your referee appears to have misplaced several chapters of the story.
Somewhere, presumably, there's a digital filing cabinet containing the missing adventures of several thoroughly confused heroes.
But these failures have taught me something important.
An AI referee needs rules for refereeing, not just rules for the game.
It needs to understand that the players make their own decisions. That characters don't magically know things they haven't learned. That dice rolls matter, even when the results are inconvenient.
And perhaps most importantly, that the world should respond to what the players do rather than simply pushing them towards a predetermined story.
That discovery has become a big part of my game-design work.
Building Games With a Very Enthusiastic Assistant
I've also been using AI as a collaborator in creating and refining my own roleplaying systems.
And this is where things have become particularly interesting.
I can have an idea for a mechanic, discuss it, explore the possibilities, put it into a draft, and then actually test it through play.
Sometimes the idea works beautifully.
Sometimes it collapses the moment an adventurer tries something particularly foolish.
Which, let's face it, is usually about five minutes after the adventure begins.
We've spent a good deal of time developing Lost Tales and First Light, experimenting with opposed dice rolls, degrees of success, consequences, danger, character abilities and the business of keeping the game moving.
What's especially useful is the ability to brainstorm.
I can throw out a half-formed idea, receive a response, disagree with it, change direction completely, and explore something else.
It's rather like having an endlessly patient gaming companion who doesn't mind discussing the finer points of a two-dice mechanic for the forty-seventh time.
Although I suspect even an AI occasionally wishes I'd make up my mind.
The real discoveries often come during playtesting.
An apparently sensible rule turns out to be awkward. A situation exposes a hole in the system. A character finds a perfectly reasonable solution that the adventure never anticipated.
And we go back and improve it.
There have been plenty of failures along the way. I've had revisions that fixed one problem while undoing something we'd already sorted out. Beautifully illustrated documents have occasionally emerged from a rules update looking considerably less beautiful than when they went in.
Apparently it's possible to improve the mechanics and accidentally demolish the decorating.
Still, we're learning.
And there's a tremendous satisfaction in taking something from a vague idea to a playable game, particularly when you've helped test it yourself.
Pictures, Stories, Edits and Other Adventures
Another great pleasure has been using AI to help turn adventures into things I can share.
After a game, we can take the events of play and turn them into an adventure account. We can experiment with different styles of storytelling, revise the writing, and create illustrations of memorable moments.
I've always loved the rough old illustrations that appeared in early gaming books and fanzines.
You know the sort. Pencil sketches, slightly wonky figures, sinister-looking monsters, and just enough detail to get the imagination going.
Trying to persuade an AI image generator to produce something genuinely rough and amateurish has been an adventure in itself.
"Make it rougher."
"More amateurish."
"No, not THAT amateurish."
"Somewhere between the last two, please."
Who would have thought that getting a computer to draw badly, but in just the right way, could be so difficult?
But when it gets it right, there's something wonderful about seeing a scene you've imagined, and perhaps actually played through, suddenly appear as an illustration.
It's another way of bringing those imaginary worlds to life.
The Lantern Bearers Guild
More recently I've been exploring another possibility.
Using AI to help create videos about roleplaying games.
With the help of AI tools, I've been developing scripts, creating a virtual presenter named Rowan Grey, producing videos, editing, preparing subtitles, making thumbnails and sharing ideas about solo and cooperative gaming.
It's been quite a learning experience.
There have been some very satisfying successes, and some extraordinarily annoying technical failures.
Files go missing. Edits don't behave as expected. Something that worked perfectly yesterday suddenly decides it has other plans. And occasionally a simple change turns into a lengthy exercise in persuading several pieces of software to cooperate.
All while trying not to spend unnecessary money or AI video credits.
I suspect there's a little goblin somewhere inside the machinery whose sole purpose is to make the simplest jobs as complicated as possible.
But despite all that, I've been able to create and share things that I might otherwise never have attempted.
And that's the important part.
Finding My Way Back to the Gaming Community
Perhaps the most significant thing about all this isn't actually the technology.
It's what the technology is helping me do.
Being socially isolated can slowly distance you from the people, activities and communities that once formed a big part of your life.
You don't necessarily stop being interested in those things. You don't stop having ideas or wanting to contribute.
It's just that the opportunities become fewer, and the practical difficulties become greater.
AI has given me another way to participate.
I can continue writing adventures, designing games, experimenting with mechanics, creating illustrations, making videos and putting my work out into the world.
Through this blog, YouTube and my gaming projects, I can share ideas with other gamers and creatives, invite discussion, learn from other people's experiences and remain involved in a hobby that's meant so much to me for so many years.
I'm not suggesting that talking to an AI is the same as spending an evening around a table with good friends.
It isn't.
And I wouldn't want it to be.
The human connections are still the important part.
But if AI can help me create something that another gamer enjoys, starts a conversation, encourages someone to try a different approach, or perhaps inspires them to make something of their own, then it's doing something rather worthwhile.
It's helping me find my way back into the conversation.
The Bit That Really Surprised Me
I think what has surprised me most is the sheer enjoyment I've found in collaborating this way.
There have been moments of real wonder.
Not because I believe the machine is some sort of magical creative genius, but because of what becomes possible when I combine my own imagination, experience and ideas with a tool that can help me explore them.
I might begin with a simple notion for a ruined tower, an odd creature, a game mechanic or an adventure hook.
A few hours later I could be exploring that tower, discovering what lives beneath it, testing the rules that govern the adventure, and preparing an account of what happened.
Sometimes the results are dreadful.
Sometimes they're hilarious.
And sometimes something happens that genuinely takes me by surprise.
Those are the moments I treasure.
It's also made me think a little differently about creativity itself.
I don't see the AI as the author of my imagination. The worlds, the choices, the things I find interesting, the things I reject and the direction I want to take are still mine.
It's a collaborator, an assistant, a sometimes unreliable referee and, on occasion, a rather eccentric sounding board.
I still need to make decisions, exercise judgement, recognise mistakes and know when something simply isn't good enough.
In fact, I've discovered that working successfully with AI involves considerably more thinking than merely asking it to make something and accepting whatever comes back.
The trick is to remain the creative force behind the work.
And to never be afraid to tell the machine that it's talking nonsense.
Still Growing Old, Still Gaming
I don't know where all this will lead.
AI is developing so quickly that something which seems remarkable today may be commonplace next year.
There are certainly some very real concerns surrounding the technology, particularly where creative work and the livelihoods of artists and writers are involved. Those discussions matter, and I don't pretend to have all the answers.
All I can really speak about is my own experience.
For someone who loves creating and playing games, but whose circumstances have made those things increasingly difficult, AI has opened up some doors that I thought might be closing.
It's helped me keep playing.
It's helped me keep creating.
And, perhaps most importantly, it's helped me keep sharing that creativity with other people.
I'm still making mistakes, still experimenting, still getting things wrong and occasionally managing to produce something I'm rather pleased with.
In other words, not all that different from the way I've always approached gaming.
There's still plenty I want to try, plenty I want to learn, and more than a few monsters waiting patiently to make someone's life miserable.
And I fully intend to keep going.
After all, just because we're growing old doesn't mean we have to stop gaming.
Sometimes we simply need to find another way to roll the dice.
Until next time, happy gaming!
And if you've been experimenting with AI in your own games, whether as a referee, writing assistant, world-builder or something completely different, I'd love to hear about it.
The successes, the failures, the unexpected discoveries, and particularly those wonderful moments when something happens that you never saw coming.
There's light enough for everyone at the Lantern Bearers Guild.
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