I’ve been wondering why the quality and ease of making stuff with AI has not resulting in a creative explosion. In particular with just a hefty dose of prompt-craft, you can get great D&D stuff.

I’m guessing part of the reason is that the incumbent gate-keepers hate AI. They, rightly, see it as a threat to how much they get paid. I could see that they also find it simply offensive, like someone taking a big shit on their desk.

Pooping aside, the money-loss is supply and demand thing: if it’s difficult to produce creative content, there’s less of it, and when’s there’s demand, and the price goes up. People make money.

As a consumer of D&D content, I benefit from creating my own content. Indeed, creating your own content is a huge page of D&D. I make plenty of “by hand,” but even more “by AI.”

Getting great content out of AIs is difficult. It takes a lot of work and rework. Just imagine walking up to a smart person on the street and saying “make me an adventure” and expecting it to be anywhere near good.

In the hands of experts, though, I think you could get great content. And, you could probably get more content.

I also wonder how many more creative people there could be if AI was more widely used, less feared, and less shamed.

For example, maybe some can’t draw at all, but they have interesting ideas and “editing” skills for art. Or someone else can’t structure and write clearly, nor maintain attention enough to write, but they have interesting ideas for adventures.

In those cases, they need an apprentice.

D&D all alone

Solo roleplaying is an example I’ve only explored a little. I get OK success with using AIs as DMs for solo play. They still aren’t creative. You have to feed it ideas and even direction. You’ll never get something like Rime of the Frostmaiden out of an AI…even if you feed it Rime of the Frostmaiden!

I’ve tried to make choose your own adventure solo adventures. The results here are not great.

In contrast, back to humans, I really like Paul Bimler’s solo adventures. They a lot of fun. It’s obvious that making them is a lot of work.

His first, major adventure came out in 2017. He also published several mini-adventures and toolkit books. There’s one set in Eberron that I own, but haven’t looked at. I’m not into electricity D&D. Menace of the Icy Spire deserves mention - it’s not in his main story line, it’s short, but great.

Here’s the major adventures:

I like these adventures so much that I’m waiting to play the new one until I really have time to enjoy it.

Other than the overall fun, what makes these adventures, perhaps, the best solo adventures that exist, is that they’re in an ongoing series and go beyond level 1 characters. There are many other solo adventures, but most are much shorter, not too well done, and are only for level 1 or level 2 characters.¹

Now, I do not want to put this on Paul Bimler - I have no problems here. To put out seven of those is a lot of work that I and many others appreciate.

But, I am about to use the above timeline as an example. An example of how to create more even fun and joy.

What if you could use AI to speed up that process. Instead of waiting over 1,000 days for the new adventure, you could do one a month?

The robots are not proficent

I’ve tried having Claude and ChatGPT (via Claude Code and Codex) write choose your own adventures, and they’re not great. They’re too simple. But, working with the AI as if it were an apprentice feels promising. You can have the AI sort out a baseline of, say, ten to 50 paths, and its tiny descriptions. Then you can go through and make it better. And then cycle again and again. You could have it dump them into a Twine file.

And for pictures and maps, you can give it specific styles and have it generate all sorts of pictures. Many people’s work use the free clipart at DMS Guild (and elsewhere), which is super-duper. But, you do start to see the same ones over and over. Getting AI to make custom stuff seems…funner for me, the adventurer?

Pricing

You can go back to supply and demand and say that these solo adventures could be priced better. If they are so great and there is such demand, they should be priced more like Wizards of the Coast books: $40 to $50 a piece.

At that rate, accounting for the drop sales from people who’d either skip them or put in more effort (and moral adjusting) to pirating them,² maybe they’d bring in more revenue and authors would be insensitive to work on them more.

I have a feeling, though, that the “rational market” has settled on the price people will pay. There seems to be a cult of price optimization for independent authors and it feels like they’re incredibly empirical.

They could also setup a Patreon, buy me coffee, whatever.

Sure! Let’s do it all of it!

Finding what’s moral

There must be some moral way to use AI generated ideas, text, and images to make more D&D content. It doesn’t seem like we’ve figured it out yet.

In the meantime, us individuals are left to our own devices. And maybe that’s what is morally correct now. You can use all this AI stuff that you want, so long as you keep it to yourself…? (That seems odd too.)