Hasbro CEO says all his mates are using AI for their D&D games, which is apparently 'a clear signal that we need to be embracing it'
Hasbro CEO says all his mates are using AI for their D&D games, which is apparently 'a clear signal that we need to be embracing it'
"We will deploy [AI] significantly and liberally internally."
Before you stands the merchant. He has 7 fingers on one hand and 6 on the other. Arranged haphazardly on his stall are 5 iterations of the same sword, each being less functional and more poorly designed than the last.
"Would you care to buy one of my daggers?" he asks you."
"These are swords," you say.
"I'm sorry. Upon further inspection it seems that these are swords. I apologise for any factual errors, I strive for accuracy in my statements however due to problems with interpreting questions and generating responses occasionally I may make statements that are inaccurate. I appreciate your patience."
"But I didn't ask you a question."
"You're right. I apologise for the misunderstanding. Occasionally errors will be made due to issues with generating responses but I strive to be as accurate as possible. I appreciate your patience."
You walk away from the merchant feeling irritated and unsatisfied as you shake your head in disgust.
D&D is the most tedious time consuming bang your head on a wall game to to play. The only way I play is modding D in BG3. Even then I can only tolerate the dice rolling RNG and convulouted talent trees in bursts.
It's just an app isn't it? Nothing really intelligent about it. They're just calling apps AI now as a marketing term like "The Cloud" when it's just a bunch of remote distributed computing and servers.
What exactly is he suggesting using AI for? A busy, thankless, unpaid, DM using AI to flesh out the details of a campaign is a good use of ai. But what is he - the CEO of Hasbro - going to do with AI?
WotC desperately wants to get customers comfortable with paying for AI generated images. They could effectively gut the expensive art departments. A major use for AI would be for Hasbro's card games. They already pay like shit. If the option to make "art" for nothing becomes available, they'll do it.
Gut the art departments, arguably some of what very little value actually remains in WotC outside of their clawing corporate avarice. Great idea great idea
But what is he - the CEO of Hasbro - going to do with AI?
He will cut down the cost of paying writers by having the main stories of D&D pushed out by the new Mechanical Turks.
IIRC what they're really angling for is getting out of publishing books to begin with and instead selling AI GMs as a service who just play what may as well be calvinball with the players based on a secret ruleset if any at all. Edit: to add onto this, IIRC the reason 5e lacked the massive amount of splatbooks they relied on in earlier editions was because they really wanted to shift towards selling digital services and wanted to get away from things like "people playing the game having a copy of the rules" in favor of them just like, buying an NPC or an item or some shit for a virtual tabletop, because they really want to be a shitty microtransaction-filled MMO but without all the "investing resources into actually making and running that sort of thing" part.
So basically they're trying to be AIDungeon even though that failed miserably because people only wanted it for porn and also the concept was untenable as a serious thing and also still is completely untenable.
In other words they should go for it, put all their eggs in that incredibly stupid basket, and stop making RPGs at all. I am saying this because I want what's best for them, obviously, and not because I want to see D&D finally come to an end and make way for other, better systems. Definitely.
Talentless rich asshole has talentless rich friends, more at 11
Not even going to try to justify my hate. Butlerian Jihad time.
"D&D character art" is one of the main personal use cases for image generation
Literally the only use-case for it. Even then, I feel disgusting using it cause of what it is.
Yeah it's pretty good for "close enough" stuff but every stupid image I could make wastes so much energy that I prefer to just do an image search and steal some real human-made images. From an art theft perspective it may as well be the same thing anyway, and if it's just for a silly game between me and my pals who gives a shit.
Problem is I'm playing a changing. I can't get it to work for shit. It only works for the core ancestries / races
ceo
friends
Isn't this the same asshole who said "Now I get recognized at cocktail parties!" when Hasbro stock shot up during quarantine?
It is nice that the fading but lingering "you're just afraid of the future if you don't like the treat printers and don't cheer on their use everywhere corpos see fit to use them" smugposting has gone down here since a year ago.
There's still a few hardliners, but they're not here yet and I hope they stay under their rock.
We really are living in a nihilistic, late capitalist, meaningless slog of hell
Fuck WotC. Embrace the ORC. PF2e is for the people.
PF2e does everything 5e wants to do, but better, unionized, not hell bent on destroying the medium, and with many more diverse options of play.
All your CEO tier executive "mates" are using it because they're all bazinga brains trying to support it because they see it as a way to make more money.
They're not using it organically because it's actually good. Their incentive to use it is coming from the earning potential they see in it if they can convince audiences to adopt it.
he's a CEO, he doesn't have mates. he has golf acquaintances
Why be a DM if you're too creatively bankrupt to improvise a simple adventure?
So that the ForeverGM can take a break.
I already preferred Paizo's writing over Hasbro/WOTC, and now D&D is going to be increasingly derivative "oops! All Underdark!" IP cliches in tighter and tighter recursive loops of repetition. Yeah pass.
Paizo writes better books in general. I saw a copy of the new 2024 rules, so I flipped through, but was frustrated they basically did the same layout as the 2014 books.
Glad I switched to Pathfinder and other games
Fuck Hasbro and WoTC
Ah, yes, just what I want, a group of 8 rats my level 1 party is struggling to take down suddenly get hallucinated into a Balrog and Terrasque.
I can understand for maybe punching something up a little, using it to help generate some NPCs or something like that, but anything more than that is just a no from me.
Half the fun of being a DM is improvising NPC's
Like Skonkus the Goblin Bard, who runs around singing songs about biting people
And then he does