In my experience my players are excited about the rules and how their characters work - but not all of them learn well from “just reading the rules”, like it literally does not stick. Just telling them to read the rules isn’t going to do anything but make them feel shitty about the game.
Talk to your players about how to help them remember or have easy access to these rules. Make sure you don’t get too accusatory, you do want to play with these people after all.
I would never see it as a replacement, but if you are having a lot of fun with it, why does it matter? Do what brings you joy.
The social aspect for me is WAY too big a part of RPGs in general. LLMs don’t fulfill that at all for me. It is just a robot that knows what words goes in what order, there is no back an forth or creative creation between people with different life experiences or ideas of what “cool” or “interesting” is. Getting to chat with my friends and share in their creative space is so awesome. I am an online only player these days because it is the only way I can find time and connect with friends across borders - I don’t feel online detracts from the experience, sure it is different than in person, but once you have a good group it’s just a good time with friends.
Personally I have used LLMs as part of my GM prep. Mostly just to fill in things I don’t really care about (like a minor detail of colours of unimportant objects a module left out) or to bounce ideas off, and to do a BUNCH of text formatting for me. It is a great tool to kickstart the process but I find I always have to sit down and actually do the work myself in the end.
I can see how being alone in a new place where you don’t speak the language can very easily lead to an over reliance on good LLMs to take up some of that social space you might be used to. ChatGPT is an amazing thing, but we need to be aware for how and why we use it. Our monkey brains are easy to trick.
So this is the question I tend to ask, if nothing else to learn something about your tool. Why should it use it over more established competitors? I am specifically thinking something like Roll20 and FoundryVTT, the former being easily accessible and free with SRD content at your fingertips, and Foundry just being, well, Foundry. Hell even Owlbear Rodeo for a generic and easily accessible tabletop. For campaign management text programs like Notion.so and full on world managers like World Anvil are providing massively powerful tools too.
What it is Dungeon Maker provides that is either missing from these other options and is so useful that losing out on all the other stuff in them is worth the switch, or what does Dungeon Maker do so much better than the others that it is worth switching?
Not trying to be a jerk about it, it looks like you have a solid base, just curious about your ideas on these things.
It’s… Good fun? Solid reviews and well thought out opinions. I don’t always 100% agree with him. I enjoy all the goofs in between, and having “the gang” available for some (if exaggerated) examples is very helpful when trying to make a point, and Jack is a good tool to break up the monotony of just one person talking.
I’ve recommended his videos on various occasions so, I guess I think it is good.
One of the rare channels on YT where I have actually “rung the bell”.
I mean yeah it is a language model that is trained on things other people write and learn what the next word should be from that (and some blackbox stuff). It’s fun to play around with for sure, but we as user need to be better at understand what the tech actually is rather than just pretend it is a Sci-fi AI… Because holy shit it is not, all that AI stuff is marketing and tech people trying to make us think it is just like in that movie we like or whatever… Why I try and be so hard about LLM as the term rather than AI.