As with everything produced and brought to market by a (huge) company: the will ruin their product in the end (and might have done so already).
But that’s not so terrible. 5e is pretty much an open game with a free license and there is a bunch of Indie RPGs out there and people are still playing (clones of) older editions of DND (I woupd advise anyone who hasn’t heard about that to find out about it).
My only concern really is their IP. I love the Realms, Eberron, etc. They’ve been ruining pretty much everything lately I mean Just look at spelljammer.
Oh yeah, I understand, that could be problem.
But they didn’t produce a lot of content for Eberron and Spelljammer for quiet some time, did they? One could say, that that part of their IP has been shitty for some time already.
I just hope the hobby as whole grows and at the same time more people learn about other ttrpg stuff out there. That new Eberrons and new Spelljammers come to be.
Looks like there are no plans for AI in their VTT:
Update 2/08: Hasbro’s representation has sent us a statement about the usage of AI in future games: “We’re very excited about the partnership with Xplored, but want to clarify that this partnership is centered around future applications within board games and not the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying game or its upcoming virtual tabletop.”
Their VTT seems primed for microtranactional garbage though, and Foundry is amazing, so I don’t think I’ll touch it.
owner of Hasbro afaik doesn’t even like D&D and has never played it
It’s a publicly traded company. It’s owned by shareholders. You may be thinking of the CEO.
My only fear would be that this turns dnd more into a walled garden.
I have no issue with AI in tabletop roleplaying. Being able to create an NPC and just define its position and what it’s motivations are could lead to some really organic interesting gameplay.
I totally disagree with how that articles author lumps in AI with NFTs too. AI is supplemental. It’s just a tool to further expand on existing technology like search engine optimization. NFTs don’t provide anything like that. They are just gimmicks.
AI discourse has way too much “Throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” especially from a lot of people who have no idea what they’re talking about. AI, as a thing, is not a perfect system. It’s not a magic panacea that will cure all. There are legitimate concerns about how much it infringes on creative spaces and how it may put people out of work. There are also legitimate concerns about the AI training data scraping web-hosted content indiscriminately without permission. However, these are not the same as AI just being “bad”.
Do I think a D&D campaign led by a ChatGPT-like DM would be “good”? Probably not as it stands. I’ve played a lot with ChatGPT and its limitations are pretty obvious. Could it get better in the future? Probably. Is it an interesting possible way to get to play D&D if you can’t get a group together? I mean, it’s gotta be better than nothing, right? But the real interesting prospect to me is machine-learning powered tools for the DM. A System that’s trained on WotC-owned resources that lets you just choose a paintbrush that’s labeled “cave” and draw out a series of tunnels and have it automatically populate with crystals and mushrooms and visual points of interest, which lets you sketch out a good-looking map in minutes. Then, as your party is in the cave, the system knows what type of “biome” you used so it has a button to let you generate a random encounter, which it takes from your character levels and where your players are. There’s a lot of ways that “smart” tools could take a lot of work off the DM’s shoulders that would be great. I don’t know if they’re in the pipeline, but the point is that AI isn’t a boogeyman that’s just out to steal jobs and IP.
