Hello everyone!
My name is Casey Baggz and I’m the Founder & CEO of Nurl a new app that uses advance algorithms to deconstruct the rules, player sheets (and everything else that makes TTRPGs hard for players and GMs) and presents it in a holistic and conversational way. Likewise, we also add in realtime notes & chat (similar to Notion and Slack/Discord) and combine it with an extension library so you can have all the tools you need in one magical place.
I’ve been working hard to make sure we ship in less than 10 weeks and so far have received a perfect-score feedback from all players/gms we have user tested with ranging from 13-50 year olds who have played anywhere from “being curious” to 20 year vets.
Today, the waitlist is officially open and if you join you will get access to the app before the general public. I’m currently a GM and started as a player and built Nurl because I have yet to find a good solution for a tool that helps streamline the game in an elegant way that works with IRL/hybrid sessions (i.e. it’s not a VTT).
As a game master, there is so much time and improve you need to have to deliver great sessions. As a player (new or experienced) character sheets and rules can be extremely overwhelming, intimidating, and confusing.
Today, I can confidently say that Nurl will help remove that burden and enhance your games so you can spend more time focusing on the story vs. planning.
If you are interested, you can join the waitlist at: https://nurl.website
So I’m very sceptical about AI in general so I appreciate that this isn’t a product aimed at me, but I’d figured I’d engage a bit.
My main question is… What do you think the main value add for the AI is? The main one I can see is being able to generate lore quickly, and then manually tweaking it to your liking. But you could use a general purpose genAI to do that.
For managing character sheets, you have the problem of accuracy. GenAI chatbots are just bullshitting machines and are programmed to be convincing, not correct. How are you going to prevent your chatbot from saying wrong things? How are you going to get players to trust it?
Most rules conflicts in ttrpgs are due to people having different interpretations of the rules. Is your bot going to be just another voice in the argument as to whether you can split a jump over two turns?
What advantage does a chatbot bring over a dedicated system specific wizard? Sure they need specifically programmed for each new system, but then they work perfectly and can display fancy user interfaces.
Since you are using genAI, how ethically and legally sourced is your training data? Are things we type going to be used to train the bot? You have a summary feature to summarise sessions, how does that work if players use voice chat to run their games? Will voice chat we use when interacting with the platform be recorded?
A fun little challenging question you need to figure out sooner rather than later: Will NSFW stuff such as porn and bdsm be allowed in the platform? :P
And a more practical question: How much does the subscription cost? If it’s “free”, what’s your monetisation strategy?
Lastly… Stop throwing the word “proprietary” around so much. It comes across as super clingy.
I just want to thank you SW first and foremost for this post and all the questions you have to which I’m delighted to engage. 😊 I wish more people in our community were open to having a safe discussion about this topic.
I’m going to attempt to answer all of your questions, but they may be out of order to hopefully give a better context.
To start, without giving away our IP, I’m happy to say that Nurl does not use GPT - we in fact use a more advanced approach which creates our engine that is made up of different parts to accomplish X thing successfully. This is why the app provides value outside of general purpose AI - it is so much more than just a simple chatbot (i.e. we deconstruct rule and so much more).
Because of this, Nuro has yet to have an issue with accuracy for any feature because we are consistently training our models to prevent it. Nuro is also the engine that is exposed only to support and enhance the games for both the players and GM and not as a “meta-GM”. This meaning that Nuro will not be another voice in the argument to over throw a GM or anything like that. I and my group also use the app along with about 100 other people who opted into our Beta Prototype to validate some assumptions - the MVP is the next step on that.
Around eithics and legality, we also have guidelines and a legal council protecting these things. For the most part, training does not occur with user interaction but in other ways under the hood that we control. The only exception is if a user will update their accessibility settings that will make games better in ways there has never existed before. For example, if you are a person with Neurological disabilities, you can update a setting that is relative to your option which will alter how Nuro specifically communicates and displays the UI to you. Thus, Nurl makes TTRPGs more accessible and inclusive than ever before (which I’m really excited about).
We also plan to add a set of features that are relative to groups that use voice chat if they want to opt into them (also excited about these). Regarding NSFW, it is against our Terms and Conditions to upload or abuse Nurl in any way regarding this material to which we will block, remove, report, and take legal action if needed when the Terms have been violated.
Cost is still being determined but it will more than likely not be a subscription. Rather, a usage based plan that matches current standards in the industry. This is a little more complicated because maybe the GM uses Nurl more than Player X. In that scenario, Player X shouldn’t be charged a consistent fee because they are using it less. This is also something I’m very passionate about regarding fairness in billing.
Lastly, I appreciate the feedback on the word “proprietary” - note taken.
I hope I was able to answer all your questions with as much detail as I can legally give without giving away our IP? If you feel that I have not, please forgive me. Once again, I really appreciate this conversation and hope Nurl can be a beacon of hope around how to use advanced technology to give the community tools they deserve vs. abusing our creators.
Is it an AMA ?
Is it yet another VTT ? How does it compare to other VTT ? Why use this one rather than roll-20/Let’s role/Foundry ?
Do you need to program a rule-set or is it a LLM reading a rule-book and turning it into a dynamic application ?
How does it deal with “story NPC” rather than just rules and combat (Remembering who wants want and who has which information ? ) Similar question for lore, which in some games/campaign can be intimidating
How much room does it let to the GM ? Fudging the dice, changing a map/monster on the fly and all the stuff that GM do
Great question! It has a AMA feature - but it’s not an AMA. It’s more so like a “group hub” for your games if you will? It’s also not a VTT - that problem has been solved already.
Nurl aims to support and enhance game sessions for people who still love to play IRL/hybrid game sessions. Having said that, you don’t need a rule-set because our proprietary engine Nuro™️ manages all that on your behalf. Basically, using the app should allow you to just focus on the story or playing the game vs. managing the details. As a GM, the last thing I want to do is waste more time “doing stuff” vs. telling the story. The app has helped me go from taking 3 hours to plan my sessions down to 15 minutes (very nice).
We are building the engine to do some really cool things regarding NPCs and custom lore that you can learn more in our blog posts (see both the chat and notes). So, with all that context, it is meant to empower both the GM and Players so changing or learning about anything on the fly has no limits (I can validate that as a GM who does it pretty much in every game session…except fudging dice - if the players can’t fudge, I choose not to fudge which makes a more interesting and engaging story IMO).
I hope that answered all your questions? Please let me know if it didn’t and what I can do to be more helpful!
Why do you think rules lookup is not part of the holistic experience?
Thank you so much for this question Obituary! From my perspective it’s not so much about looking up rules not being holistic - rather a blocker to a game session and potentially to the game itself (i.e. some rules are very abstract and require X level of experience…which even then is not reliable). Thus, Nurl instead helps to try and streamline that experience when it needs to happen, doing so in a way that a 13 year old can understand. Of course, it’s opt in, so you don’t have to use that feature - but speaking from experience (I’m a GM with a hybrid group of 6 players. All are new except one who has been playing for 20 years), it has been an invaluable resource in our group.
The holistic nature being more around character sheets and other tools you need to play a game.
I disagree with your take and that approach in general. However, I wish you luck. Hope this works out for you even if it’s not for me or my ilk.
FYI on your careers page (https://nurl.website/careers) Technical Cofounder is abbreviated as CTO in the parens.
Are these paid positions?
Hello! Yes, I am looking for a Co-Founder who will be the functioning CTO, similar to myself being the Founder & CEO. These are not paid positions yet (equity only) but we are close to getting funding - so they will be soon. Since it’s just me, trying to stay ahead of the curve for anyone qualified and ready.
How hard is it to add new systems? I’m intrigued at how the campaign organization looks like, but currently playing beamsaber, a forged in the dark game.
Great question! The app is game agnostic out of the box and supports any game in the mainstream. We do support Beam Saber out of the box today. If it is OK with you, I would love to learn more about your expectations of campaign organization since that is relative per GM? Would you be open to setting up 30min for a chat about it and possible user testing of the app features? 100% OK if you are uncomfortable with that.
I don’t need 30 minutes, I use two Trello boards, one for me, one shared with players, the player one is factions and important names, the gm one is hooks (planned or spoken out loud)->session ideas->session notes, and a catch-all that is a list of names when I need one.
I also use azgaar’s map generator. For the world map: https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/
And I occasionally feed all that into chatgpt to generate me some dialog better than I can manage. “Generate me a mission briefing for a mission where the squad needs to…”. (I don’t speak military well)
For a forged in the dark game, I’d love to see easy to use character and/or mission specific devil’s bargain generators, and a way to store what I have, possibly in a better format.
Mostly, I feel like I’m a pretty blank slate.
Oh, interesting! I could definitely see a feature like a Trello board being useful in Nurl for GMs? We already have the other stuff which means the app could “automagically” connect everything for you to create a seamless game session experience. I really appreciate and value that insight and will add it to our backlog.
If you are interested, check out our Group Chat Features which I feel like are relative to this convo. Our Notes Features might also be interesting to you?
