On the use of AI in our TTRPG Projects
TLDR; I used a locally hosted AI engine, seeded with my years of original digital content, to collate and clarify, not write.
Game Masters in my group have been compiling RPG home brew materials since the early 1990’s. We have notebooks, jump drives and binders full of notes and half-baked ideas for nearly every RPG system we ever played. After a gaming career of over 40 years there is wheat and there is chaff. A few of our game masters have passed into the beyond and what is left of their legacies are now just fading memories of great campaigns.
For clarity, I have been part of the IT industry since 1997. Web design, computer technician, network administration, freelance and salary. Tech is part of my everyday workflow. I’m well aware of the impact AI is having on the world.
AI is not creative; it’s an echo chamber of compiled data, sifted through an algorithm based on a user’s prompt.
That said, in an attempt to organize my decades of digital TTRPG resources into some semblance of order and functional formatting, I leveraged a locally hosted LLM to collate, organize and formalize most of my original materials. This local LLM has no access to external resources, only my data. The result transformed a data wasteland into a properly indexed and interconnected summary of my entire game mastering career. It was astonishing. What started as a thought exercise rekindled forgotten projects and ideas.
As a human being with limited time and ever dwindling mental bandwidth, this tool generated a formal structure of information that’s been gathering dust for decades. The resulting archive provides a resource from which I can actually create something based on the years of my life spent generating unique ideas and concepts with no clear path to a purpose.
AI is a tool just like any other software package. It’s the surge of large-scale integration with every part of modern life that’s highlighted the pitfalls and become the problem.