[wincy]

There was a big kerfuffle in the D&D community the other day about an artist using AI art tools to augment his drawing in one of the new books. Guy had his whole process documented and just used AI as a final postprocess step. I can’t help but notice how bland the art in D&D books looks vs what I’m seeing daily on AI art groups.

I’ll be glad when the dust settles as it’s really limiting what’s possible since Steam is also outright banning AI art tooling.

[yowzadave]

The reason AI-generated art looks better to you is because it is cribbing from better (human) artists. Maybe D&D should just hire better artists directly?

[wincy]

Frank Frazetta is a little busy being dead right now, so unfortunately he’s all booked up.

[zip1234]

Honestly, there are so many places where art absolutely is terrible. If AI generation can make higher quality art more accessible to more areas then it is a huge win.

[wincy]

Our little Dungeons and Dragons campaign has absolutely exploded in quality and storytelling because our DM has been utilizing Midjourney for character tokens for the bad guys. I spent an hour or two on each person in the game’s character portrait with astounding results. It has been like night and day.

There is a 0% chance I’d pay the price this would have been a couple years ago. I can’t even fathom how much this quality of art would cost, probably tens of thousands of dollars.

Before the DM would just hunt and peck around for online images that sorta matched what he was going for, mostly rudimentary pencil drawings with some color fills.

To me the dream is saying “Elmo is king of a Mad Max style castle, please write a story and generate art assets” and in front of you on the tabletop your Apple Vision Pro tiles out a whole dungeon, does voices, you can go in and inspect and interrogate the pieces and make tweaks to get it just right.

[RHSeeger]

> our DM has been utilizing Midjourney for character tokens for the bad guys

I don't think, in all my years of role playing, I've _ever_ seen an image of one of the NPCs in our stories; at least outside of the rare store-bought adventures. Or, at least that I can recall, an image of _anything_ in our campaigns. Everything was verbally described.

I wasn't even aware people generated pictures for home-grown adventures/campaigns.

[itishappy]

When I was playing (about a decade ago) we made heavy use of static images. A few people drew their characters, others pulled images from online, and our DM would always flash an image of whatever boss we were about to encounter. These were all intended to be rough approximations, and were typically shared with deviations, e.g. "my character looks like this guy, but he uses a staff instead of a longsword, and he has a lot more hair!" My girlfriend plays with some artist friends, and they regularly doodle their character's escapades.

Art is nice. Customized art is nicer. Also, it's interesting that (as you note) it's far from universal. My group would likely have enjoyed using AI art for our campaigns, but my girlfriend's groups have completely rejected it.

[RHSeeger]

That is pretty cool, thanks. I haven't been able to roleplay in a number of years but, if I can get back into it, I will certainly be making an image of my character :)