I’ve been a GM for a while now.

Has it been ten years since I ran my first session? If not, it must be close.

I still love it. And if I had players in my post code, I’d love to gather around a real table with a Perspex board, some markers and a handful of minis.

But I use virtual tabletops, which is fine. In fact, the technology is pretty good.

The world has changed over that time, with more changes coming hard and fast from the future. After a decade-ish of running games, I want to see what else is possible. This series will be about my experiments with the future of D&D.

Here’s what I’m playing with.

3D

A little while ago, I bought TaleSpire. I played with it, left it alone and then came back to it again. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a 3D virtual tabletop program.

Disclosure: I paid for my copy and haven’t received anything for talking about it. Nor do I know any of the developers working on it. These are my honest reflections. Also, it’s still in early access, so my comments on some of the specifics will age quickly.

It’s really great at creating 3D environments. After learning the quirks of the interface, it’s quick and easy to cobble together a village, dungeon or cavern. You can populate it with nice trinkets and add cool weather effects.

Creating fog of war is a pain. As for character support, it effectively doesn’t exist at this stage. You can give players control over tokens and assign stats to that token, but there’s no character sheets yet. I couldn’t even find a section where the GM can take notes, but I may have overlooked it.

There’s a modding community, which is great - but what I really want is a library of resources. Not models of chairs but entire, ready-to-run taverns. I assume that’s coming soon too. Oh, and an auto-randomiser would be nice - something that puts down random relevant trinkets and textures in a room.

Overall, it’s impressive now and should get even better soon.

There are trade offs though. TaleSpire is impressively fast for what it is, but it’s still slower than tools for making 2D battlemaps. It’s harder to gloss over details - I can scribble a rectangle on a blank screen and tell players it’s a fantastical library, but that’s harder to do with a rich 3D environment. Less is left to the imagination, for better and worse.

A priority for me is to create great 3D maps quickly and easily. Right now, I can make decent maps slowly. We’ll see how we go.

AI

Let’s talk about chatbots.

Using ChatGPT-4 as a GM is like getting whiplash, given how all over the place the experience is.

It’s awful at designing puzzles and running games.

It’s mediocre-to-decent at creating encounters.

But it’s excellent at creating elements for you to stick into your campaign. It’s not hard to come up with a prompt that turns a chatbot into your GM co-pilot - here’s what I’ve used:

Hello ChatGPT, I want to use you as a resource for while I'm GMing Dungeons and Dragons (5e) games. What I'm thinking is I give you a category of something and you give me randomised variants of those things. For example, for enemies, you'd give me each character's name, distinctive appearance, slight stat modifier, relationships with the other characters and something distinct the players find only after defeating them. For a tavern, you'd give me the name of the tavern, the people inside and someone unique about it. Do you understand?

Then all I have to do is give it a prompt like “3 merchants, 1 wolf” and it gives me names, personalities and descriptions for each of those, including how they relate to each other.

It even came up with a conspiracy that makes for a great plot hook.

Improvising is an important GM skill, so I wouldn’t rely on this all the time. But it’s great for when you want to populate your world with real NPCs and your players are asking about the merchant’s life story. I sometimes struggle to think of trinkets - now, I can enlist ChatGPT’s help for that. Sometimes you need a co-pilot to take some of the tasks off your plate so you can focus on the other details.

It’s no different to running a pre-made module - you’re still expected to do a lot of the work, but it does make things easier.

Tighter action

Like I said, TaleSpire doesn’t have much support for characters - yet. The best tool I’ve come across for that is the Roll20 character sheet.

Automated calculations, single-click rolling, character creation tools - it’s a smooth experience. Plus you can create macros to automate all the boring bits and lore lookups.

Having both TaleSpire and Roll20 open at once, without them talking to each other, isn’t a smooth experience though. Wait, did I say “both”? I’d need Discord or Skype open too since neither of those does voice chat well.

Better storytelling

Giving players a 3D world to explore creates new opportunities to tell stories.

TaleSpire has some cinematic tools, allowing the GM to create cutscenes. It has weather effects, dynamic lighting, plus some other things I haven’t explore yet.

All this is superfluous, in a way. Books can use text alone to create gripping stories. Still, this adds new tools to my belt.

Next week, I’ll talk about why I’ve chosen to drag Princes of the Apocalypse into the future.