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The magic of "dungeons and dragons"


When I was a little kid in the 1980s, I was fascinated by the game Dungeons and Dragons"(Dungeons and Dragons, D&D). My older brother liked the game for a while, but then he obviously got tired of it, and he bequeathed me a scattered collection of boxes and books with instructions from the publisher of Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) The simplest to learn and bewitching was the bright red D&D Basic Set, richly decorated with a picture by Larry Elmore depicting a warrior with a shining sword, confronting a terrible dragon cowering on a pile of dishonestly riches. I was amazed by this small cardboard box and instruction books lying inside. D&D gave structure and inner consistency to imaginary games that I, like many other children, played anyway.

The D&D game has developed as part of a highly competitive culture of war games (" wargames ") with miniatures, and it can be played like a traditional game, setting a goal, the achievement of which measures the gain. In this case, as in many wargames from which it arose, one player is appointed by the judge (the “dungeon master”), and he is responsible for processing the actions performed by other players. In this mode, TSR regularly held tournaments at various exhibitions. The group won the adventurers, which was better than others to survive, having gone through all the tricks, traps and monsters of the dungeon, and collect more other jewelry.

However, the true magic of D&D and other role-playing games (RPGs) appears only when using the second version of the game, when the same players and the dungeon master (Dungeon Master, DM) meet periodically (for example, weekly) to play the same continuous game multiple sessions. According to the Wargheim roots, such a gradual game is called a campaign. Just as a military campaign consists of a sequence of movements and battles waged by one army, a role-playing campaign consists of repeated sorties into the same imaginary world. The game may have a long-term goal, having achieved which, the players “win”, but no one loses in the game. The main goal is not to follow a winning strategy, but to experience adventures in nonexistent places. The role of the DM as a judge and arbitrator is fading into the background,giving way to the role of the creator and simulator of the world.


- Invincible Overlord (1976), D&D,


Let me make a small digression and discuss fictional worlds in the literature. After all, it was the desire to recreate battles and adventures from their favorite fantasy works that made Dave Arneson and Gary Gygeks invent D&D. Naturally, Middle Earth by J.R. R. Tolkien is considered the gold standard of breadth of imagination in such literature. Tolkien for decades honed the outline and deepened the detail of the myths he created, trying to develop a fully English equivalent of the Scandinavian edd and Greek epics. He called the new world that appeared in his mind a sub-creation (within the framework of the main creation of God), or a secondary world.

When reading The Lord of the Rings, the reader is faced not only with the story, but with the whole imaginary world within which it unfolds. Middle-earth, of course, is not the first imaginary world in fiction. However, before Tolkien, such worlds were usually flat and inexpressive. They represented only a means for creating an allegory or satire, or a background for children's stories that did not pretend to be realistic - like the country of Oz Frank Baum with its four symmetrical lands, each of which is run by a local witch, and inhabits a nice little tribe in identical clothes and houses. At Tolkien, we encounter a place populated by richly developed kingdoms and people, each of whom has his own history and culture, his own myths and songs. His stories seem to be true traditions of places that never existed.



The creators of D&D immediately began by creating their own secondary worlds as venues for the adventures of players - Gary Gygeks designed Greyhawk, and Dave Arneson designed Blackmoor. With the growing popularity of games, other DMs also began to create their own worlds (often inspired by literature), or based their campaigns on published worlds. For example, the world of phenomenal popularity, Forgotten Realms , published by TSR in 1987, is based on the fictional world that Ed Greenwood invented from childhood. Immersion in a rich secondary world of this kind turns the D&D campaign from a fun game into a versatile literary story. Instead of just reading about the adventures of Frodo, Legolas, Aragorn and the rest, you can experience these adventures yourself by personally exploring the wonders of places like Middle-earth.

When playing D&D as part of a tournament, all participants understand that there is nothing else outside the predetermined scenario. You can’t get out of the dungeon and decide to go somewhere else. All that players can choose is a way to advance within the dungeon. The campaign also provides players with openness of actions within the secondary world of DM. Each player can create his own character, for which he will act out during the campaign, for several weeks, months or years. We call this opportunity openness.

Some traditional tables like Cluedo / Clue allowed players to enter certain roles, but there was very little openness in them, since the space for maneuver solutions was extremely limited. In a D&D campaign, a player can take any plausible action to the context of the world in which his character lives. Has your character met a mysterious stranger in a village square? You can exchange a couple of phrases, cut his wallet, get into a fight or try to please him. You can do everything you can come up with, and the DM remains to decide what results your actions will lead to and what consequences they may entail, influencing this village, the surrounding area or even the whole world.

And this secondary world, bathed in a luminiferous ether that permeates the minds of players and DM, seems to real players at a time when their characters are studying it, since it has internal integrity. The world is preserved and gradually changing, even when your characters are not in it. They can leave the village after an attack on a mysterious stranger, and when they return, they find that he turned the inhabitants against them, having lied with three boxes about their evil deeds. Or instead, they may find that a gang of orcs plundered the village and killed their beloved bartender. Within the company, players can create a trading empire, build a castle, establish a kingdom - and the world will react accordingly. Moreover, various parts of the world form a harmonious whole in time and space. If the villagers follow certain habits, then most likelyit is also followed by the inhabitants of the castle located down the river - or maybe not, if its inhabitants have recently conquered this region, like the Norman seniors commanding the Saxon peasants. A well-created and skillfully managed world, such as Middle-earth Tolkien, leaves a feeling of a living place, where the natural outlines of culture and politics have been developed for centuries, thanks to the stream of history flowing along the mainstream of geography.

Yes, this is where the dog is buried - the world must be well-created and skillfully managed. Tolkien, in the realization of his masterpiece, had two indisputable advantages over the poor DM, who took on the task of creating the world. First, he needed to draw details of the world along a single path. Despite decades of labor, at the time of his death, most of the regions of his world were nothing more than names on the map. The reader of The Lord of the Rings can visit Rivendell, Edoras, and Minas Tirith, but will never learn anything about Harlindon, Rune, or Anfalas, as well as about all those places that Tolkien knew no more than readers. His characters politely go around these un-mapped regions. Player characters are rarely so submissive. Secondly, Tolkien wrote and rewrote his work for years,I could take a break for a few minutes or hours to refer to previous chapters, maps, or other references before deciding what to do next. And even then he could return to a certain paragraph and reconsider his decision, many months or years later. DM is required to respond to the actions of the characters in real time, usually in a few seconds, or the game session will quickly bore the players. And both of these differences are related to the freedom that game characters have, and not literary ones.or a game session will quickly bore the players. And both of these differences are related to the freedom that game characters have, and not literary ones.or a game session will quickly bore the players. And both of these differences are related to the freedom that game characters have, and not literary ones.

The ability to simulate a consistent secondary world on the go in this mode is a rare combination of skills and work. According to the circumstances, the DM must work as a geographer, demographer, economist, physicist, etc. He strains the muscles of improvisation - how many different characters and appearances can be thought up for the owners of the taverns of each village through which the campaign passes? Not to mention all minstrels, mercenaries, villains, and so on? And after the facts about a place have been established, this load goes to memory - what was the name of that tavern in Elkenburg? Of course, meticulous recording helps here. Nevertheless, labor costs increase all the time when players accumulate a history of people they met and places visited.

There are few DMs capable of creating such credibility in the face of unlimited openness and freedom of players. Most slide down to the "rail" narratives, as they are scornfully called, to prepare events and places, in the manner of Tolkien, along a predetermined path, and to push the players along that path. The remaining campaign details may serve as Potemkin villages., a facade that can fall apart from a light touch. The lack of freedom of choice has a bad reputation due to such unsightly actions by DMs, such as trying to throw players more and more powerful monsters if they deviate from the intended path - or, as I recall, by building an invisible and irresistible force field between the players and the rest of the world . But in practice, usually this scheme works in the form of a soft social arrangement. Players know that the DM has spent many hours preparing a specific scenario, and they are following it for the benefit of all. One way or another, rail narrations alleviate the problem of creating a world on the fly, limiting the freedom of players to a certain set of actions.

However, even soft rails require a huge waste of DM preparation time and significant skills for proper implementation. Some DMs tend to style without preparation, to play without a pre-prepared world or script. But this also requires a certain set of skills - mostly improvisational - and a lot of experience. D&D can be a magical experience, however, it is difficult for a potential player to find a DM who has the time and the talent necessary for a complete immersion. Not to mention the search for like-minded players. Nothing spoils the fantasy saga like a buddy constantly releasing inappropriate jokes. Therefore, often the reality of D&D fades in comparison with what it could and should be.

Paper worlds


Given the complexity of the role of DM, it did not take long after the invention of D&D, when players and publishers began to look for ways to master the magic of this game without having to use a judge or even other players. That is, automate the DM. Wouldn't it be great to be able to immerse yourself in an open and consistent secondary world anytime, anywhere on your own - as an active character and not a passive reader? For a long time, the most popular and affordable way to find such a "mechanical DM" was paper schemes, or "game books."

In 1975, Ken Saint-Andre, a graduate of Arizona University who was then a little under thirty, fell in love with the D&D idea, but was disappointed with the complexity of its rules. Then he decided to publish one of the first alternative fantasy role-playing games, “Tunnels and Trolls” (T&T). He independently distributed the copies he printed at the university’s printing press until he found a publisher, a lone entrepreneur in Scottsdale, whose firm was called Flying Buffalo. Rick Loomis founded the company to manage the multi-user sessions of the game Nuclear Destruction he invented, which he had to play by mail with a monthly fee. He went into the publishing business, acquiring the rights to a card game (not related to this topic) Nuclear War. Loomis gladly sold the remaining copies of T &T for St. Andre, and when they ended, acquired a license to publish an additional print run made by Flying Buffalo.

The following spring, one of the T&T players, Steve McCallister, proposed the idea of ​​creating a solitary adventure in caves. He was inspired by books that were popular at that time, which could be played, choosing various answers to questions, and moving on to the results. Loomis liked the idea, and he wrote the first single-player role-playing game Buffalo Castle, published by him in May 1976.

Buffalo Castle consisted of 150 paragraphs (each determined by page number and letter), containing several short sentences with descriptions of what was happening and options for the players. For example: “You went into the sixth room. In the middle is a large fountain. If you wish, you can drink from it. If you drink, proceed to paragraph 8C. If you want to exit through the north door, proceed to 4C. If across the east, go to 16D. ” The player is given a choice of three doors through which you can enter the castle, from where he begins the game. The adventure used elements of T&T rules, especially battles, but it was forbidden to use magic to avoid the difficulties associated with it. The castle did not forgive mistakes, and most of the characters died, but a successful hero had a chance to escape from there with valuable good.

Buffalo Castle did not attract much attention, but later in the 1970s several books were published titled Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA), and over the next decades they were sold in hundreds of millions of copies (although CYOA's predecessors appeared in 1960 x, the available evidence suggests that Buffalo Castle was developed completely independently). Although Flying Buffalo continued to pursue solo adventures in the T&T world, it was not until 1982 that the D&D style rulebook entered the wider market. That year, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston decided to try to independently create a role-playing adventure according to the CYOA scheme. Jackson and Livingston were D&D fans, and their company Games Workshop was a distributor of the game in Europe for several years. But they did not try to publish their own stories on their own.Aiming at a wider market than the self-published press can cover, they sold the rights to Puffin Books. The Fighting Fantasy series they created combined storytelling, exploration, and a game similar to Buffalo Castle, but was published as self-contained books for the general reader.

The series was a resounding success, and by 1985 three million copies of books had been sold. A whole subgenre of game books has appeared, trying to emulate the sensations of role-playing games, mostly from D&D. Successful episodes include Wizards, Warriors, & You, GrailQuest, Lone Wolf, and Sorcery! (A complete list can be found at gamebooks.org). The CYOA books lacked elements of the game or a permanent world. You simply made choices that in a deterministic way led you through the garden of branching paths to one of the final results. In the books of Fighting Fantasy and their followers, D&D elements from Buffalo Castle were introduced: character statistics (health and strength); an accident that included fights using cubes; a set of items that could affect the combat capabilities of the character.



However, a new wave of solitary adventures paid much more attention to creating a rich secondary world that the player could study than was done at Buffalo Castle. For example, a player’s set of items in Fighting Fantasy could influence the plot development not only in battles - for example, if you had the right key, you could open a closed door, which led to the next paragraph. These new books were not thin works, but thick volumes containing 300-400 sections (two to three times more than in Buffalo Castle). Each paragraph had more text, which enhanced the feeling of immersion in the real environment. Here's how, for example, the underground space is described in The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first of the Fighting Fantasy series:
, . , . , , . , . , , - ? , (. 263) ( 353).

(: , )

The Lone Wolf series of books took advantage of the ideas from the popular D&D and developed them, allowing the player to lead one character through a continuous story stretching across dozens of books, and with it all the skills and objects acquired. The entire saga was set in the world of Magnamand, invented by author Joe Dever for his D&D games. The apotheosis of the development of game books describing the deep secondary world was the series “Fairy Lands” [Fabled Lands], authored by Dave Morris and Jamie Thomsna, published from 1995 to 1996, amid the decline in the trade in game books. As a result, the series ended prematurely, after the release of six volumes instead of the planned twelve.

Each volume of Fabled Lands was not a separate story, but a description of one of the regions of the fictional world, with its cities, villages, castles and wildlife that could be explored. The player could move from one book to another, moving between regions, taking a ship or even teleporting through the magic gate. In the series you can find many adventures and tasks, some of which are limited to one book, while others extend to the whole world. In addition, the player is free to ignore all this, and can simply stagger around the world and explore it. The keyword system allows the world to change in response to player actions. For example, in the first book, The War-Torn Kingdom, you can eliminate the candidate for the throne or help him get the crown (or ignore it altogether).Having completed one of the actions, you will receive certain keywords that hold your unions together in future interactions with any of the groups. This is not to mention the subsystems of the game, allowing the player to accept religion, buy houses, ships and engage in maritime trade. No one has yet come so close to creating on paper a world that grants such complete and unlimited freedom, comparable to playing in D&D.

And yet this world does not reach much for such freedom. At any point in the game book, a player is limited to two or three options. Even in the richest key points of the “Fairytale Lands”, for example, in large cities, more than half a dozen options are rarely found. This does not come close to listing all the possibilities that a fictional protagonist would have in such a situation. Recall the raving old man from the mountain of fiery summit. The player has only two options - to yell at him or attack. It’s easy to come up with many other directions in which the D&D campaign could diverge from this decision point. One could, for example, offer the old man clean clothes, try to immobilize him, move into another room and close the door. If you choose a conversation,then the book does not give you the opportunity to manage the conversation and influence its answers. Each time a person issues the same information. This meeting has no lasting effects. In the hands of DM, the old man could become an ally leading the characters through the dungeon, or you could track down his family and return him home. And if you decide to kill this man, his family might decide to hunt you down; if you pissed him off, he may decide to follow you and try to steal your treasure. Within a game book, freedom and openness are limited a little less than the most rail of all rail narrations.And if you decide to kill this man, his family might decide to hunt you down; if you pissed him off, he may decide to follow you and try to steal your treasure. Within a game book, freedom and openness are limited a little less than the most rail of all rail narrations.And if you decide to kill this man, his family might decide to hunt you down; if you pissed him off, he may decide to follow you and try to steal your treasure. Within a game book, freedom and openness are limited a little less than the most rail of all rail narrations.

Digital worlds


Thus, players began to turn to computers for DM automation. Personal computers began to enter the market in the late 1970s, and became part of the life of most middle-class households in the United States in the mid-1990s. The computer program was obviously capable of dynamically responding to player actions better than a static printed work. In theory, she could really simulate the secondary world, without any restrictions on paper flowcharts and without clumsy keywords or check-boxes.

The harbinger of these promises was one of the first computer games inspired by the D&D system: Adventure. Will Crowther, an engineer from Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), creator of the main software part for ARPANET, wrote this game for the BBN minicomputer, PDP-10, in the mid-1970s. There was no graphics in the game (at that time few computer terminals supported it), so all the interaction went through the text, just like in game books. Crowther wrote a parser for the game, accepting two-word teams as an “noun verb”. Thus, you could tell the computer in English what you would like to do, and he informed you about the consequences of your actions. However, this could not be called a digital DM dream come true. Yes, you could write anything. But most of the time the computer refused to understand you. For example, the game began with the following description:
YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF THE ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING.
YOU AROUND THE FOREST. A SMALL STREAM emerges from the building and disappears in a ditch.

The game accepted commands such as “ENTER THE BUILDING”, “DRINK THE WATER”, “GO TO THE SOUTH”, but did not accept commands like “CLICK ON THE TREE”, “SAIL”, “KNOW THE BUNNER”, “MOVE NIGHT”, etc.

Adventure was essentially a disguised block diagram that hid its branches and made the player guess about their existence. She spawned her own genre of computer games, adventure games. And although in some later games, especially Zork, which was helped by another member of Crowther's D&D campaign, more complex parsers appeared, none of them moved too far from the game books in terms of credibility. By the 1980s, the genre was almost completely detached from its D&D roots, concentrating mainly on riddles (which usually consisted of an unobvious combination of objects from the inventory with the environment), instead of research, character development, or heroic deeds.

The first computer RPGs with graphics appeared in the mid-1970s on the PLATO IV system, a mainframe from the University of Illinois, capable of supporting hundreds of graphic terminals. Soon after, similar games reached a wider audience in the first staff. Usually these were typical dungeon crawlers games - they used the lattice nature of underground corridors to simplify the problem of creating a screen image, and focused on battles, the lightest part of D&D that can be strictly programmed with algorithms.

Among the best of these early attempts was the game Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlordwritten by two students at Cornell University, Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead. Greenberg and Woodhead had access to the PLATO terminal in Cornell, and they borrowed a lot of ideas from previous games like Dungeon and Oubliette. Released on Apple II computers in 1981, Wizardry became a typical representative of one of the models of computer RPGs - a set of battles in an anonymous dungeon, interspersed with rest to restore strength and health. The whole interest of the game is related to resource management, mapping and battle tactics. There are no hints of a wider world, and the meaning and motivation of the player’s actions, apart from killing everything he sees, are rather vague. And even the state of the dungeon is usually not saved after the players return to the surface to buy equipment - it is re-filled with the same monsters and treasures,that they were there for the first time.

Another 1981 Apple II game took a different path, toward a multifaceted digital secondary world. The Ultima game was written by a teenager, a D&D fan from a Houston suburb named Richard Garriott. It became a digital reproduction of the world he invented for his D&D campaign, which he called Sosaria. The player can receive tasks from the kings, go deep into the dungeons, go into the cities to buy equipment, find out rumors when visiting taverns, save princesses, get a vehicle and even try to steal things from the residents. The whole narrative is held together by a common narrative arch - the task of finding four magic gems that will allow you to go back in time and defeat the evil wizard Mondane.

Ultima is sketchy and in some places loosely coupled - take, for example, a strange interlude in which a player gains control of a spaceship and fights with enemies that suspiciously resemble TIE Fighters. And it is extremely structured and symmetrical - all castles and cities are identical in structure, there are four continents in the world, each of which has two castles, one dungeon and one attraction. And yet this is an incredible achievement, a tiny imaginary world squeezed into two floppy disks by a 19-year-old student at the University of Texas.



With the development of the Ultima series, Garriott managed to build a company on the basis of its success, Sosaria turned into Britain, and in games there was even greater depth and variety - both in the richness of the world, and in the interactivity and openness of the gameplay. The culmination was the 1992 Ultima VII, created by a large team of authors, programmers and artists at Origin Systems in Austin, Texas. Origin Systems put a lot of effort into writing lyrics for the game to give all the characters in all parts of Britain a character and charm. The landscape is filled with a huge number of side quests, small puzzles that the player can solve regardless of overall progress: the missing husband was thrown into jail for stealing an apple, a thief pretending to be a monk, two brothers argue because of religious preferences.



While Garrett’s series was bogged down in a swamp of failure, which turned out to be Ultima IX, the mantle of a rich digital secondary world was picked up by two significant games of the late 1990s - Fallout and Baldur's Gate. These games tried to contain everything, and for the most part they were given it: detailed and satisfactory tactical battles; an open world to explore, with enemies and friends appearing depending on the player’s choices; parts of the story scattered throughout the game, naturally leading to a conclusion without a sense of rails; and, yes, of course the side quests. In these games you can plunge into a warm bathroom, wander there for many hours and still find delightful new surprises: new places to explore, new options, new characters.

And all this enthusiasm, unfortunately, costs the creators of these games a huge amount of time and money. In the D&D campaign, all the wealth of the world and its inhabitants is summoned for free in the imagination of players by DM stories. In Baldur's Gate, however, each player had to make every choice, every opportunity offered to him in the name of openness. The game is a detailed, lovingly illustrated and voiced block diagram. Every temple, every dungeon, every line of dialogue, every movement of the character, every side task exists thanks to the hard work of artists, writers and programmers.

Over the years, the cost of implementing such things grows very quickly, and the expectations of the visual and audio richness of games are constantly growing - from simple tiles in Ultima to hand-drawn landscapes of Baldur's Gate and beyond. As the lead designer of the latter said in a recent interview, explaining the cost of literary jewelry in the script:
Writing words on a page takes ten seconds, but because of all the resources invested in it - modeling, texturing, voice acting, music, everything else - these ten seconds turn into tens of thousands of dollars.

According to the same source, ninety man-years were spent on the game - despite the fact that players need about 60 hours to fully study the entire game.

As a result of this, as well as the niche nature of RPGs, games like Ultima were largely oblivious after the early 2000s, for the sake of more cost-effective genres. This is also why Fallout, Baldur's Gate and their sequels have never been surpassed by anyone. Since 2001, the genre was in hibernation, and only in 2012 on Kickstarter was a successful fundraising company to create Wasteland 2.

However, there was another possible approach to creating secondary worlds. After all, a computer can not only digest entered data. What if, instead of paying all these writers and artists, forcing a computer to build the world on its own?

Digital synthesis


It is quite easy to get a computer to generate an underground labyrinth. There is a whole book devoted to the generation of a maze with one line in the BASIC language: “10 PRINT CHR $ (205.5 + RND (1)) ;: GOTO 10” (2012). It’s not much harder to beat her with random monsters and treasures, the complexity and value of which gradually grows with a sequential descent to the next levels. Based on these facts, a whole genre, roguelike , that is, "rogue-like", was created in honor of the Rogue game1980 for Unix systems with free distribution. Its later versions, such as Hack, Moria, NetHack, and Angband, also spread to remote areas of the geek world in the 1980s. Although some games included graphics sets, by default they worked in text mode, drawing dungeons from ASCII characters, replacing the monsters with letters, ladders with trellises and the player with the @ symbol.


ASCII Dungeon at NetHack

The genre gained wider cultural popularity after the release in 1996 of Diablo, a game based on the idea of ​​procedural generation of dungeons and treasures, and adding to it a variety of visual and sound components, as well as a graphical interface. But the basis of all such games was the study of two-dimensional dungeons. They did not offer the player any other freedom than successive murders and collecting treasures, and no world was needed in a broader sense to study them.

What if we apply the basic concepts of roguelike dungeon generation to the whole world? This was the concept of the Elder Scrolls series of games, launched in 1994 with Arena, followed in 1996 by the more ambitious Daggerfall. Instead of generating new content on the fly as players explore the world, as most roguelike games do, the creators of Daggerfall generated the main adventure spots in High Rock and Hammerfell provinces on their computers, and then manually tweaked the results. In total, the game contains about four thousand dungeons and five thousand settlements (villages, small and large cities) that a player can visit on an area of ​​about 150,000 square meters. km

Despite the staggering numbers, most of this large territory remains motionless and lifeless in terms of gameplay. In more or less modern games like Ultima VII, Fallout or Baldur's Gate, it’s interesting to explore the world, because you never know which characters, stories, adventures or other surprises are waiting for you around every corner. In the world of Daggerfall, in addition to the small heaps of monsters that need to be killed, in the wild that separates the caves and cities, there is nothing to do and watch. Entering a new dungeon or a new city does not promise any enthusiasm, since they all look alike, differing only in a random assortment of monsters or shops. The tasks in the game are randomly generated based on several hundred templates, and direct players to a certain house in a certain city to find someone there,or in a particular dungeon to kill five of them there. Unlike the limited scale of roguelike games, Daggerfall gave players the whole world to exercise freedom, but failed to provide them with a sufficient number of interesting activities.


Map of one of 44 Daggerfall regions. Each point is a cave, temple, house or city.

Recently, the incredible growth in machine learning has provided new hope for those who dream of procedural role-playing games. A computer capable of delivering answers in a natural language in response to requests in a natural language, a crazy dream by the standards of only a decade ago, now seems like a new reality. Last year, Nick Walton, a student at Brigham Young University and a fan of D&D, realized that these new tools could be used to simulate DM. As a result, AI Dungeon appeared , created on the basis of the Open AI GPT-2 machine learning model.

GPT-2, trained on gigabytes of text, is surprisingly good at delivering meaningful text, predicting the next word that should follow a given list of incoming words. Walton tweaked the model by feeding her the scenarios of a huge number of adventure games. In this way, he created a mega-adventure capable of forking in an infinite number of directions. This parser is not just a beautiful wrapper for a flowchart. He, as a living DM, generates new reactions to every player action.

However, this openness has to make an unpleasant sacrifice - the weak consistency of AI Dungeon can only be compared with a dream or a hallucination. The game does not have a model of the world, on the basis of which it would be possible to build answers. This is a prism that refracts the player’s words in a text lens and returns the result back to the screen. The game without batting an eye will react to the player’s absurd actions that do not make sense in the context of adventures in the fantasy world, for example, “fly to Tahiti” or “write an essay on Dungeons and Dragons”. Like a river, the game does not allow you to enter the same place twice. Here is my attempt to play it as a wizard named Yokounu. Notice how impressive the text was until I tried to follow the trail back:
– , , Larion. . , , . . , , , .

; , .

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, - . , . , , , - .

>

, . .

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, . , , , .

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, . , . . , ÂŤÂť

[ , - - ]


Due to scaling limitations, models such as GPT-2 are able to take into account no more than several hundred previous words to build the next text. However, Google recently announced the creation of a new type of defense mechanism, which it calls a “reformer,” which can look much further into the past. Can this or other breakthrough breathe consistency into the phantasmagoria of AI Dungeon? Time will tell.

So far, attempts to wrap the magic of D&D in the cover of a book or write it to the computer’s electronic memory have failed miserably. Game books and computer games are available for games at any time of the day or night. They will always give you a consistent feeling, and the best of them - many hours of pleasure. They never burn out, never get tired and are not lazy. Their memory or imagination never fails. But without human intelligence, they are not able to offer true freedom without sacrificing consistency. Here, economic considerations play a role. There are no strict restrictions on the number of options that can be provided to a player in a computer RPG if you spend enough money and time - but in practice there are limitations, and they are quite strict. Or your actions in the secondary world created by the game are strictly limited by the way,provided by the creator, or the world will be something like a feverish delirium, endless present without past and future.

So for now, we have to work with the dungeon masters and their human weaknesses so that they are healthy.

What else to read


  • Shannon Appelcline, Designers & Dragons: The '70s (2014)
  • Jimmy Maher, The Digital Antiquarian (2011-present)
  • Jon Peterson, Playing at the World (2012)

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