ChatGPT has been a lifeline for me as a GM with little spare time to prep and far too grand ambitions for the scale and scope of (D&D) campaign I want to run. I’m curious how other GMs have found ChatGPT and similar AI tools useful or helpful in running their own games. I’ll share my own workflow below as a comment, and I hope others find it useful. I’m especially interested in any ChatGPT prompts you have found worthwhile, and you can see some of my own prompts in the examples I’ll share shortly.
I’ve used chatGPT at the table as a suped up generator during games. I will usually tweak and change things it gives me to fit better with what i had planned, but it actually works pretty well, especially since you can feed it context and ask it to generate things that specifically fit with the current scenario
I’m fascinated to hear you actually use it during a session! Can you give an example of what that looks like? I can’t imagine it without majorly interrupting play personally, so I’d love to hear more about how you make that work
I use it as a generator during play. I will essentially feed it context and ask it to generate something for me. I used it mostly last when i ran my spelljammer game over the holiday season, so its been a bit, but usually it would look something like:
“Generate me 10 examples of elven captains in the royal elven navy suitable for a spelljammer campaign, include their level, class, personality, name, and physical description.”
I can get as specific as needed for whatever i’m looking for, such as “give me the names of 10 creatures that might reside within the inky blackness of space, but regularly visits the phlogiston in a spelljammer campaign”
That said, i’m a quick typer, so i can type something out like that while people are talking and bullshitting around the table without issues. Of the responses given back, i’ll usually choose one to be whatever i’m looking for. At the end of the day, its not really any more disruptive than looking through my notes for something i already have prepared.
I went ahead and went over and ran that same query example (the captains one) i mentioned above right now and got: