Quote from: Corolinth on July 29, 2024, 10:16:12 AMI find that PDM sometimes enjoys the smell of his own farts too much, but this is not one of those videos. He makes a compelling case for WotC going full digital.

The comments section, both here and on his YouTube video, have a preponderance of old men yelling at clouds as well as young people yelling at capitalism.

WotC is a business. Businesses exist to make money.

I have grown to despise this statement, because it leaves out a critical point.

Businesses exist to make money by providing a good or service that people want.

QuoteThere are legitimate criticisms to raise about predatory monetization practices, but you can't fault the for trying to make a buck. The reality is D&D has been fully digital since 2000, but you couldn't make money that way back then. Most of the complaints about virtual tabletops are the exact same people making the exact same argument they lost 20 years ago about pdfs.

They are either going to do another half-assed attempt and crater, or at best be competing in a market with a metric fuckton of mobile games that do the whole "Pay X monee to get a shiny sparkle for your character!" thing much more cheaply and efficiently.

And either result means they are leaving the TTRPG market and thus are irrelevant to those of us who are consumers of such product. Except maybe to poke fun at their antics.

Quote from: HappyDaze on July 29, 2024, 01:14:03 AMAre they doing the thing where a DM can invite a certain number of non-paying players to access the game materials under the DM's (payed) account?

All evidence points to no. Wizard's is fully looking into AI DMs. They're all in on it. ChatGPT is apparently a passable DM from what some have said.. The moment Wizard's can get one functioning enough to run prewritten and programmed Adventures, they'll cut human DMs out entirely.

Quote from: Orphan81 on July 29, 2024, 04:48:12 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on July 29, 2024, 01:14:03 AMAre they doing the thing where a DM can invite a certain number of non-paying players to access the game materials under the DM's (payed) account?

All evidence points to no. Wizard's is fully looking into AI DMs. They're all in on it. ChatGPT is apparently a passable DM from what some have said.. The moment Wizard's can get one functioning enough to run prewritten and programmed Adventures, they'll cut human DMs out entirely.

They also said it was under monetized and complained that most players don't buy the books IIRC.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on July 29, 2024, 06:17:20 PM

Quote from: Orphan81 on July 29, 2024, 04:48:12 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on July 29, 2024, 01:14:03 AMAre they doing the thing where a DM can invite a certain number of non-paying players to access the game materials under the DM's (payed) account?

All evidence points to no. Wizard's is fully looking into AI DMs. They're all in on it. ChatGPT is apparently a passable DM from what some have said.. The moment Wizard's can get one functioning enough to run prewritten and programmed Adventures, they'll cut human DMs out entirely.

They also said it was under monetized and complained that most players don't buy the books IIRC.

Yup, so cutting out GMs completely and doing nothing but releasing new content for Players in the form of Microtransactions while an AI DM runs everything for them? That's the WotC Dream.

The reality is that they don't know what they have.  They don't know how it works.  They don't know why people like it.  They don't understand why people buy it and wouldn't buy it themselves.  It's a recipe for success if I've ever seen one.

Quote from: David Johansen on July 29, 2024, 10:57:52 PMThe reality is that they don't know what they have.  They don't know how it works.  They don't know why people like it.  They don't understand why people buy it and wouldn't buy it themselves.  It's a recipe for success if I've ever seen one.

They wouldn't buy it themselves?  Ha!!!  What a way of putting it.  Even they, don't want it....

Quote from: Ratman_tf on July 29, 2024, 11:06:17 AM

Quote from: Corolinth on July 29, 2024, 10:16:12 AMI find that PDM sometimes enjoys the smell of his own farts too much, but this is not one of those videos. He makes a compelling case for WotC going full digital.

The comments section, both here and on his YouTube video, have a preponderance of old men yelling at clouds as well as young people yelling at capitalism.

WotC is a business. Businesses exist to make money.

I have grown to despise this statement, because it leaves out a critical point.

Businesses exist to make money by providing a good or service that people want.

And it really gets our goat that people actually do want a virtual tabletop, because VTT is the Wrong Way To Play(tm). We just can't accept it, so it has to be a Bad Business Decision(tm) that will bankrupt the company.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on July 29, 2024, 11:06:17 AM

Quote from: Corolinth on July 29, 2024, 10:16:12 AMThere are legitimate criticisms to raise about predatory monetization practices, but you can't fault the for trying to make a buck. The reality is D&D has been fully digital since 2000, but you couldn't make money that way back then. Most of the complaints about virtual tabletops are the exact same people making the exact same argument they lost 20 years ago about pdfs.

They are either going to do another half-assed attempt and crater, or at best be competing in a market with a metric fuckton of mobile games that do the whole "Pay X monee to get a shiny sparkle for your character!" thing much more cheaply and efficiently.

And either result means they are leaving the TTRPG market and thus are irrelevant to those of us who are consumers of such product. Except maybe to poke fun at their antics.

I'm sure the current success of 5E and Pathfinder have absolutely nothing to do with the fully searchable online rules repositories that both games have. Nobody wants to play that way, after all. They want to spend time flipping through books to make characters and reference rules. They also want to measure distances on a table with a tape measure or a piece of string, they don't want a computer calculating that on the fly.

Paying money for a shiny sparkle thing for your character is Games Workshop's entire business model. It's also the business model for Reaper Miniatures. Oh, and also Hero Forge. Come to think of it, it's also the business model for all the dice makers who sell those colorful swirly dice instead of plain black numbers on white plastic. Shiny sparkle things is a pretty robust business model. As for mobile games, there's a lot of them. Enough to see that it's obviously more complicated than that, and the argument that WotC's VTT is going to fail because of mobile gaming just doesn't carry water.

If WotC goes tits-up, and it's possible they might, it's going to be because they pissed off the Marxists by doing a capitalism, while simultaneously pissing off everybody else with the woke virtue signaling they've been doing to distract the Marxists from their capitalism. I wouldn't count on the VTT being shit quality.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on July 29, 2024, 06:17:20 PM

Quote from: Orphan81 on July 29, 2024, 04:48:12 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on July 29, 2024, 01:14:03 AMAre they doing the thing where a DM can invite a certain number of non-paying players to access the game materials under the DM's (payed) account?

All evidence points to no. Wizard's is fully looking into AI DMs. They're all in on it. ChatGPT is apparently a passable DM from what some have said.. The moment Wizard's can get one functioning enough to run prewritten and programmed Adventures, they'll cut human DMs out entirely.

They also said it was under monetized and complained that most players don't buy the books IIRC.

This is almost certainly true.

My experience is entirely anecdotal, but as I think back to my in-person games over the past ten years, at least half of my players did not have books for any of the games we played.

100% of the people in my in-person groups who own gaming books also run games.

Quote from: Orphan81 on July 29, 2024, 04:48:12 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on July 29, 2024, 01:14:03 AMAre they doing the thing where a DM can invite a certain number of non-paying players to access the game materials under the DM's (payed) account?

All evidence points to no. Wizard's is fully looking into AI DMs. They're all in on it. ChatGPT is apparently a passable DM from what some have said.. The moment Wizard's can get one functioning enough to run prewritten and programmed Adventures, they'll cut human DMs out entirely.

WOTC is going to be spending an assload of cash in the digital sphere as training AI is neither fast nor cheap.

GenerativeAI+LLM's are only going to get better at speaking to humans based on the context we put in.  We are 3-5 years from having tournaments being solely AI run if there is a complete lack of humans to run the games.   The ways people will 'game' the system will be epic. Looking forward to it.

Is this a good thing? yes. The better a machine is in talking to people the better it will be for people to get into the hobby who are incapable of finding a DM to run a game due to a myriad of factors.

Does this mean the death of the hobby? hell no. People still play in person and conventions exist for a reason where tens of thousands of people go to get their game on.

As far back as 2011, if not earlier, there has been a goal of removing the DM from the equation. At least we didn't get the collectible 4.5E that Kierin Chase was pushing at the time. The pre-proto 5E days where wild. The IP almost got shelved.

Quote from: Corolinth on July 30, 2024, 12:36:02 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on July 29, 2024, 06:17:20 PM

Quote from: Orphan81 on July 29, 2024, 04:48:12 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on July 29, 2024, 01:14:03 AMAre they doing the thing where a DM can invite a certain number of non-paying players to access the game materials under the DM's (payed) account?

All evidence points to no. Wizard's is fully looking into AI DMs. They're all in on it. ChatGPT is apparently a passable DM from what some have said.. The moment Wizard's can get one functioning enough to run prewritten and programmed Adventures, they'll cut human DMs out entirely.

They also said it was under monetized and complained that most players don't buy the books IIRC.

This is almost certainly true.

My experience is entirely anecdotal, but as I think back to my in-person games over the past ten years, at least half of my players did not have books for any of the games we played.

100% of the people in my in-person groups who own gaming books also run games.

Not saying it isn't true, pointing out that they want to "better monetize" the players, from what I can see this means "buy" the parts of the books you need to play the character you want to play.

Of course you're not buying shit, you're giving them money on top of a subscription to their VTT.

I might be wrong, but I don't think I am. I'm betting they'll bleed the people dumb enough to subscribe to their walled garden with micro-transactions up the wazoo.

Quote from: Corolinth on July 30, 2024, 12:27:31 PMI'm sure the current success of 5E and Pathfinder have absolutely nothing to do with the fully searchable online rules repositories that both games have.

And you'd be correct (except you thought you were being sarcastic).  I run an after-school D&D 5e club with over 50 teenagers regularly attending.  None, and I repeat none use D&D Beyond, a VTT, or electronic resources.  It's books, paper, and dice.  Now, that doesn't mean that this is true for all groups, or even a majority of groups, but the game still has large appeal without any of those "improvements."  When the primary demographic (the cyber-addicted teens of today) is just fine without them, you can't ascribe the success of the game to them.

5e is successful due to the ruleset being simplified (5e is way simpler than 3e or 4e, though not as simple as 1e or 2e) while still having some extended options for the optimizer-type players.  It is successful because of the growth of nostalgia and nerd-chic in the larger culture (via Stranger Things and "Big Bang Theory").  And it is successful because video game RPGs (with video games being the largest form of entertainment today) have accustomed gamers to the conceits and gameplay of TTRPGs, enough that kids are willing to give TTRPGs a chance.  And, as a minor role, TTRPGs have always had a reputation as being accepting (contrary to what the woke hobby-tourists assert in their power plays) of the social outcasts, which is both a blessing and a curse (as the modern woke have adopted RPGs as some kind of therapy).

Of the reasons for 5e's success, the actual game itself is responsible for only one of them.  And electronic aids, while they help with the simplification, don't determine the level of simplification in the edition...

Quote from: THE_Leopold on July 30, 2024, 12:45:43 PMGenerativeAI+LLM's are only going to get better at speaking to humans based on the context we put in.  We are 3-5 years from having tournaments being solely AI run if there is a complete lack of humans to run the games.

We absolutely are not "3 to 5 years away" from this. I say this as a data scientist who regularly works with AI models, and who not only understands the technology, but keeps up with the science and methodology behind it.

Will we possibly see attempts made within that timeframe? Of course. People think these things are fucking magic and lack the understanding not only of how and what the machine is doing under the hood, but also of how the brain works and how laughably lacking current approaches to AI are in approximating neurological functions that would actually make an AI a passable DM. These attempts will either be (1) under incredibly controlled situations and scenarios that ensure the AI doesn't lose important information to context window size, or (2) will eventually out themselves as not tenable for long-term TTRPG play due to there actually being no causal reasoning happening.

In order for this to really happen and be tenable, we need a fundamental paradigm shift in the AI/ML space. Something on the level of transformers and attention, but geared towards either causal reckoning or some kind of long-term memory storage and retrieval system but in context of a model. Given the general tendencies of the techbros, however, I doubt such a thing will be forthcoming: everyone seems convinced that LLMs and stable diffusion are on the level of the holy grail, when they really, really aren't.

Quote from: Corolinth on July 30, 2024, 12:27:31 PM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on July 29, 2024, 11:06:17 AM

Quote from: Corolinth on July 29, 2024, 10:16:12 AMI find that PDM sometimes enjoys the smell of his own farts too much, but this is not one of those videos. He makes a compelling case for WotC going full digital.

The comments section, both here and on his YouTube video, have a preponderance of old men yelling at clouds as well as young people yelling at capitalism.

WotC is a business. Businesses exist to make money.

I have grown to despise this statement, because it leaves out a critical point.

Businesses exist to make money by providing a good or service that people want.

And it really gets our goat that people actually do want a virtual tabletop, because VTT is the Wrong Way To Play(tm). We just can't accept it, so it has to be a Bad Business Decision(tm) that will bankrupt the company.

While I personally am not interested in a VTT, I have no issues with one existing and even being successful. What I'm skeptical of is WOTC being able to make a "good" VTT that's successful and "good". So far their track record of online tools is that they generally suck.

Quote

Quote from: Ratman_tf on July 29, 2024, 11:06:17 AM

Quote from: Corolinth on July 29, 2024, 10:16:12 AMThere are legitimate criticisms to raise about predatory monetization practices, but you can't fault the for trying to make a buck. The reality is D&D has been fully digital since 2000, but you couldn't make money that way back then. Most of the complaints about virtual tabletops are the exact same people making the exact same argument they lost 20 years ago about pdfs.

They are either going to do another half-assed attempt and crater, or at best be competing in a market with a metric fuckton of mobile games that do the whole "Pay X monee to get a shiny sparkle for your character!" thing much more cheaply and efficiently.

And either result means they are leaving the TTRPG market and thus are irrelevant to those of us who are consumers of such product. Except maybe to poke fun at their antics.

I'm sure the current success of 5E and Pathfinder have absolutely nothing to do with the fully searchable online rules repositories that both games have. Nobody wants to play that way, after all. They want to spend time flipping through books to make characters and reference rules. They also want to measure distances on a table with a tape measure or a piece of string, they don't want a computer calculating that on the fly.

As a table top wargamer, I find physcial books easier to use, dice and measuring tools are more satisfying than digital. I love to roll dice and I like to collect tokens and templates to use in my tabletop games.
I find online RP/Wargaming to be very frustrating and difficult. The software is usually arcane and hard to use, and the format makes it difficult to communicate with other players. It's just not the same as being in the same room interacting with another person.

I understand that other players are fine with online tabletop gaming, it's just not for me. I suspect I'm not the only one.

QuotePaying money for a shiny sparkle thing for your character is Games Workshop's entire business model.

I rarely buy Games Workshop products because their FOMO business model means the product I'd like to purchase is usually sold out, and when it is available, it's hard to justify the price.

QuoteIt's also the business model for Reaper Miniatures. Oh, and also Hero Forge. Come to think of it, it's also the business model for all the dice makers who sell those colorful swirly dice instead of plain black numbers on white plastic. Shiny sparkle things is a pretty robust business model. As for mobile games, there's a lot of them. Enough to see that it's obviously more complicated than that, and the argument that WotC's VTT is going to fail because of mobile gaming just doesn't carry water.

If WotC goes tits-up, and it's possible they might, it's going to be because they pissed off the Marxists by doing a capitalism, while simultaneously pissing off everybody else with the woke virtue signaling they've been doing to distract the Marxists from their capitalism. I wouldn't count on the VTT being shit quality.

I would. I fully expect it to be shit. I don't know exactly how or to what extent, but speaking as a former software test engineer (STE 1) it will be amusing to watch.

Quote from: GnomeWorks on July 30, 2024, 04:18:24 PM

Quote from: THE_Leopold on July 30, 2024, 12:45:43 PMGenerativeAI+LLM's are only going to get better at speaking to humans based on the context we put in.  We are 3-5 years from having tournaments being solely AI run if there is a complete lack of humans to run the games.

We absolutely are not "3 to 5 years away" from this. I say this as a data scientist who regularly works with AI models, and who not only understands the technology, but keeps up with the science and methodology behind it.

Will we possibly see attempts made within that timeframe? Of course. People think these things are fucking magic and lack the understanding not only of how and what the machine is doing under the hood, but also of how the brain works and how laughably lacking current approaches to AI are in approximating neurological functions that would actually make an AI a passable DM. These attempts will either be (1) under incredibly controlled situations and scenarios that ensure the AI doesn't lose important information to context window size, or (2) will eventually out themselves as not tenable for long-term TTRPG play due to there actually being no causal reasoning happening.

In order for this to really happen and be tenable, we need a fundamental paradigm shift in the AI/ML space. Something on the level of transformers and attention, but geared towards either causal reckoning or some kind of long-term memory storage and retrieval system but in context of a model. Given the general tendencies of the techbros, however, I doubt such a thing will be forthcoming: everyone seems convinced that LLMs and stable diffusion are on the level of the holy grail, when they really, really aren't.

I think you and Leopold are overthinking this. That isn't meant as an insult by the way.

I don't believe Wizard's plans on having an AI DM that can respond to any input a player puts in or actions they want to take... Far, far from it.

I think instead they're more gunning for something that can adjudicate pre-written Adventures with a very limited set of options and responses.

The new crop of D&D players won't care... They'll log on with their weird non-human characters, roleplay with one another over text and then go through the Adventure provided for them.

I honestly believe the casual 5e fanbase will be perfectly okay with this. No they won't be able to engage in deep roleplay with NPCs, or make any kind of crazy descision you could with a living, breathing, thinking Dungeon Master..

But they'll get to play their special character, pay 2 win for the special skins and custom outfits and magic items... Go through the Adventure with the DM to "Level up" and then "RP" in a thinly disguised chatroom posing as the local 'tavern'.

Wizard's wants to create a slower version of World of Warcraft with dice rolls. That's what this is going to come down to.

They'll still have the option for Live DMs who can create custom Adventures, tilesets and terrain and all that... Don't get me wrong..

But the whole point of the AI DM will be to run you through an Adventure with Limited options so you can level up your character and ERP with the Transgender Kobald Artificer in the Tavern afterwards.