New Dungeon Master - AI pitfalls
Hello
I have been a DM for 1 year now.
When I started I was not superconfident and I asked AI to help.
I wanted to make a post about my experience as there are many problems AI caused me at the beginning.
One shot
As a first time DM with first time players I wanted to try a one off campaign. I asked AI to recommemd one shots and it did give me some decent suggestions. I am not opposed to that use of it but asking a forum would get the same advice with more personal recomendatiins and advice on the modules being recommended.
Having chosen A Very Potent Brew, I wanted to feed into the LMOP. I went to AI again and here I asked it to help generate a hook between the one shot and the campaign. It's suggestion now makes me cringe. It told me to send a letter to all the players saying come to Neverwinter because there are bad fey. The fairies are not part of the plot for either the one shot or the LMOP so this AI invention did not set my players up for the game I wanted to play.
This caused problems with the campaign becuse when i did introduce the starter quest for LMOP, (twice) the players declined as they had to help investigatr the bad fey.
Not learning my lesson, I asked AI again and it told me to create a 4 episode fey arc then do the LMOP quest. Session 1 was go to Mount Hotenow. By session 11 they had still not left mount hotenow and I was really struggling to know what to do as a gm. I had already sent Gundrum Rockseeker again to point to LMOP and again been blocked.
Having read wikis since I know that the plot hooks AI was feeding me were just rip offs from a dnd video game.
In terms of encounter building, AI had no idea how to ballance combat. They were all either super easy or dedly and I was gaining false confidence in how to measure that by asking AI.
I read a lot about fey to try and make sense of what to do from here. I noticed that AI knew basically nothing about eearlier editions of d&d and often even if I asked specific questions about earlier lore it would deny it existed or lie and make stuff up. But while AIs story telling made me lost, the books filled me with ideas and inspiration.
Luckily this is where I turned to another DM for help and he helped me to structure the homebrew campaign and learn how to ballance combat.
Once I had a structure the players started to have more fun.
Even for things like random name generators - it has recommended Elaria three times and Moonshadow 3 times.
Similarly for maps - the gridlines are not consistently sized squares so cant be aligned on a vtt and often it has no idea how to do the top down battle map view for certain objects. There was an existing map I wanted to decorate for fey fest but it wasnt even able to do that without randomly adding extra buildings.
The text descriotions AI gives are ok at first but very quickly it becomes obvious that it is an AI voice. It also insists on repeting stuff (e.g. if the player tells me what they said thrn AI will repete that back as if everyone has dementia) or randomly changing the time so the sun is rising and setting and midday randomly during the conversation
There are a few uses it is ok for. Asking something specific like owls in mythology when I decided to make a parliment of owls pointed me towards figures I could reearch.
I understand that AI can look like a good tool when starting out but often the time it saves, you just have to spend later fixing the problems it created. Nothing beats human advice, the dnd setting books and your own imagination.
I am not against AI in principle but AI is not good at being a DM.