How Generative AI Will Destroy Tabletop RPGs And What It Has to Do With Beetles

Gestaltist’s Hot Take of the Year

In Australia, male jewel beetles don’t want to mate with females because glass bottles are so much more enticing. A morbidly obese woman bites into an oversized burger and fries that will slowly kill her. Our bodies evolved to look for carbohydrates and fat, and it has so much of both… A lonely man finds it hard to bond with women because they are more complicated and frustrating than his daily dosage of porn. I lose sleep because I doom-scroll on social media.

What do these unsettling images have to do with RPGs? Or AI for that matter? They are examples of supernormal stimuli (or superstimuli), i.e., “exaggerated versions of stimuli to which there is an existing response tendency, or any stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus for which it evolved.” Supernormal stimuli hack our brains and keep them captive. They are a marketer’s wet dreams. From addictive food to social media to plastic surgery to television, they ensure that money keeps flowing, and we keep consuming.

Photo by sahil muhammed on Unsplash

Now consider how generative AI is fine-tuned. It takes our reactions to its outputs into consideration, and next time around, it prioritizes the ones that proved the most attractive. With every conversation, the various chatbots become not more truthful or more useful – but more appealing. The AI-generated images become not more thought-provoking or more evocative but more oversaturated, symmetrical and garish. AI can be a powerful and useful tool but by its very nature, it is becoming increasingly addictive with each iteration.

I will indulge myself today to act as the voice of one crying in the wilderness: AIs will irrevocably change tabletop RPGs, and we run a real risk of the hobby as we know it disappearing.

To understand why, let’s first think about the key parts of an RPG session. There is logistics: we need to agree on a time and a place. There is a social component: we need some like-minded friends to play pretend with. There is a linguistic part: we describe and play roles. There is a sensory part: we imagine fictional images and sounds, sometimes with the help of miniatures or drawings, sometimes with “theater of the mind.” There is the narrative part: weaving a coherent fiction out of the events of the session. Finally, there is the game part: learning and applying rules, adjudicating unforeseen circumstances, etc.

Each of these activities is indispensable to RPGs, and each of them requires effort. Scheduling sessions is a known nightmare, arguably worse than any villain we will encounter during play. Playing with others, as any human activity, carries the risk of conflicts, misunderstandings, and mismatched expectations. Enacting a role, describing and imagining fictional scenarios – all of that takes work. Generative AI promises to free us from that effort. And therein lies the problem.

A few situations I’ve already encountered:

• a player writing a Midjourney prompt on their phone mid-session to show what their character looks like because it’s easier than trying to describe them;

• a GM feeding ChatGPT prompts to help with improvisation when PCs get off the rails and they need to improvise;

• a GM training an AI on their campaign-world data and letting it generate random events, faction activities, etc. during the session;

• me generating NPC images as parts of prep to show to players: again because it’s easier than describing them or scraping the web for existing images.

On the surface, none of these are bad, right? They save us time and let us focus on the fun part. They make the session easier. The thing is, though… Limits and friction is how we grow as people. We are not made for utopia. Without discomfort, without challenge, we falter and collapse like Calhoun’s rats.

RPGs are amazing because of the hard parts, not in spite of them. They teach us how to find time for our passions, how to resolve conflicts, how to be imaginative, and how to share our imagination with others. If we let AI (or other modern technology) do all the work for us, we will have effectively optimized the fun out of RPGs, as we are prone to do.

What makes me a bit pessimistic is that AI becomes more alluring with every iteration. A few steps further down that road, and we will have AI gamemasters. Wouldn’t it be great to have the perfect GM available any time we want? A GM who will run exactly what you want, when you want, and how you want? And perhaps we will also have AI players for those of us who prefer to run games. No more arguing over which system to choose, when to meet, and if that modifier applies in that situation. No more pesky scheduling problems. RPGs solved. RPGs as yet another addictive, soulless subscription.

What I am trying to say is: embrace the inefficiency, the awkwardness, the humanity of RPGs. Embrace the human counter-revolution. It will make you better at navigating social situations, more creative, better with language, etc. Don’t let our hobby¹ become yet another soulless fast food.

1. Of course I am not trying to condemn the use of AI point blank. There are studies that show that using ChatGPT can help your creativity in certain scenarios. The point is to remain in the driver seat. Relying on ChatGPT too much damages critical thinking and makes us passive consumers of information pulp at a previously unimaginable level.