[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...

[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.

[smush]

> 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!

No kidding. I've been writing a WinForms program that is basically a combination character progression tracking, inventory management and basic battle system for Star Wars Fantasy Flight Games.

Why? Do we not want the person-to-person experience? Hardly! We need more wetware space for strategy and thinking of creative ideas, so we need to free up the parts for calculating what number of ability vs proficiency dice and what talents may mess with the roll etc.

[ajuc]

There are ways to play traditional pen and paper rpg over internet now (roll20 for example), and it's actually better than playing them physically in many respects - the system draws the map, allows moving the tokens zooming and scrolling, calculates the distances, shows the fog of war, throws dices and includes bonuses in the rolls. After initial setup it makes it much easier for GM and players because you don't need to remember to include all the bonuses every time you attack with your sword.

You still use voice (usually over discord) and DM decides what happens on the fly.

But most importantly you don't have to play with people that live close to you, makes it much easier to find someone to play with, it's why I started playing p&p rpg again after over a decade.

I could see sites like roll20 recording the sessions with metadata (at this point they said this and GM told "roll perception" and they rolled d20 + 3) as a way to train a virtual DM. Of course it would need crazy amount of games.

[bradknowles]

Roll20 requires a lot of upfront work to create those integrated character sheets. Many games on roll20 are only partially implemented, and many more are not implemented at all. An untold number could not be implemented on roll20 because they have requirements which were not considered early in the development phase for the system, and therefore are impossible to implement.

It also requires a lot of GM research and development, even for those games that are at least partially supported.

Roll20 also has a marginal audio chat solution. It was so bad that we chose to replace that part with Discord in my current campaign.

There is a background music solution available in roll20, but I was never impressed by it.

In my current game, we found it was better in the long run to convert everything to Discord, because it was better on the collaboration and audio chat functions, which helped the humans communicate with each other better and resulted in an overall better game. We lost the interactive mapping functions and the mostly kinda semi sorta integrated character sheets of roll20, but in the end, those were less important to us than the other collaboration functions of Discord.

[ajuc]

Yes the voice chat in roll20 sucks and everybody use discord instead, also for background music as it allows players to set relative volume of each player and music. You can easily keep discord in the background and do everything else on roll20. The system for rolling is pretty good for the games I played (D&D 5th edition and Pathfinder 1st edition).

There's some tips for 5e:

- set "always roll with advantage" in campaign settings to true, it removes the fiddling with the system by the player each time they want to roll, now it's just a click on a weapon or a skill, and it lets DM decide after the roll if it was advantage and change the interpretation without rerolling. You simply ignore the second roll if it was a straight test, take worse or better out of the 2 rolls if player had disadvantage/advantage

- install free chrome extension "vtt enhancement suite" - it allows for executing macros on all selected tokens at once - especially useful for starting combat with lots of enemies - you select for example 10 tokens and click on a macro that rolls initiative for each of them and adds them to the initiative tracker, you ask players to select their tokens and click the same macro - 5 seconds and combat with 16 participants is ready to go - normally I would have to roll physically 10 times, ask players and sort it manually and it would take a minute or 2

- use DM layer for hidden enemies/traps/secret doors/notes/etc - you can then easily move them to map/token layer when players roll perception

- reinforcements in a combat are easy when you put some tokens in DM layer - you can add them all to the combat tracker and the tokens on DM layer will be hidden from the players until you move them to token layer

- make players drag and drop their most used spells and items to a quick-use bar on the bottom left of the screen - it's 15 minutes to set this up on the session 0, but later it eliminates the problem "I closed my character sheet, wait 20 seconds for me to find the button to roll the attack"

- set up tokens to have hitpoints and AC bars on them (keep them hidden from players) - when you click on hitpoints bar on a token and write "-17" it will automatically decrease the hitpoints by 17 points, don't need to substract in your head every time

All of this allows me to run combat several times faster than I could possibly do physically, it adds up quickly.

[RugnirViking]

Roll20 even for what is presumably the best-supported game (DND 5e) has completely unuably broken UI. Something as simple as equipping a piece of armour is an excersise in trying 5 different things, let alone trying to wrangle magical items into the system or get the hp bar to be accruate which almost never works. It takes far longer to teach somebody to use the character sheet system than it does to teach them literally all of the rules of DND, and even then it consistently finds new ways to unexpectedly fuck up stats and bonuses at a rate of about 6 or 7 times per session. Overall, If I must run an online game, I just use pdf character sheets and just have players /roll d20s in chat and ignore all the roll20 functionality as its such a nightmare.

Overall, in trying to reduce the complexity of the game, they gave you a finnicky spreadsheet nightmare of half-baked solutions to problems no-one had.

[ajuc]

Well, it works pretty well for me, haven't had any serious problems DMing for 5 people 3 of which were complete newbies with d&d and roll20. Maybe because my players are mostly programmers. Or because I had to use roll20 because I don't have people to play with locally so I learnt both roll20 and d&d 5 at the same time.

> Something as simple as equipping a piece of armour is an excersise in trying 5 different things

You just drag&drop it from compendium to your inventory?