How do you feel about AI artwork used in your campaign?
I’m involved with a couple or PbP games that use it to help keep people involved and I rather enjoy it.
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about AI art being used in manuals. I’m talking about art being generated for use in a specific campaign.
Thoughts?
I’ve created a showcase for my group using Midjourney so that they can see what it’s capable of. When we start our new campaign - in the next month or so - I’m going to spin up several variations of each character for our players to pick, based on the descriptions they provide (I’m going to try and post some examples of what I’ve achieved so far here, lets see what happens).
Frankly they’re over the moon about the idea :)
Human wizard
Human druid
Human barbarian
Elf rogue
Elf sorcerer
Dwarf fighterOoh, these look great! I tried using midjourney, does it require a subscription at the moment? The free ones I’ve been playing with have been decent but these look way better.
Yes it does, but it’s a pretty small amount - I subbed to the $10 tier for a month to put together test images for the group and then stopped my subscription, and I’ll do the same when I ‘create’ these characters - I don’t need access to that kind of tech all the time.
If you’ve planned out a campaign I’m sure you could generate all the images that you need for that fee and then un-sub once you’re done.
I don’t have any drawing skills so it really made my life easier
To be honest, prompt wrangling is too time consuming for me, its much more simple to grab an image from Pinterest and call it a day.
This.
I’ve used an AI art generator for a few things. Usually I’ll try Google images first and if that fails I’ll try to make something with AI. Sometimes I get something serviceable and sometimes I have to go “screw it, we’re doing theater of the mind.”
Overall it’s useful but it’s not as easy as I think some people think it is. Getting the AI to give you what’s in your head is surprisingly difficult.
We use the Bing Creator a lot to create art of creatures in the game. I also use it to generate art of weapons and other magic items. It made it a lot easier to “find” art for creatures that are not so popular or for custom creatures.
Any dm who wants to put in the work to get the AI artwork is appreciated by me. I’m happy for any imagery honestly, but custom stuff is awesome
Agreed. Our DM made the op pic. I really enjoy it.
Generally speaking, I think it’s the ideal use case for AI art. You wouldn’t likely otherwise be buying art assets, and most likely just be finding whatever comes up under a Google search anyway. Meanwhile you can dial in to a clearer representation of what you want to depict from the art without necessarily having to “make do” with “oh, it’s like this but imagine he’s an elf instead…”
the DM of one of the campaigns i am playing right now (one-shot) uses AI art to sometimes illustrate something for the players. For example, there was a massive tree in the middle of a city in one part and he had an AI draw it for us. I think its pretty cool.
I like to use generated AI art for the world that I built for my personal group because it looks good and helps me convey the settings better, but if I were to ever publish any part of the world (as unlikely as that might be…), I’d hire human artists to art it up.
I think it’s great resource for deepening your home made campaigns, but cheapens publish material. I’d use it in my campaigns but if I ever wanted to throw it on Kickstarter I wouldn’t feel comfortable without original work by Organic Intelligence.
I’ve not had much luck with AI artwork in any of my campaigns. Maybe it’s because I’m using DALL-E and not some of the others. I am using ChatGPT (3.5 and 4) to generate content for my campaigns, though. When someone asks for a name of an NPC, I ask it for a name, description, and two sentence personality. It does great at on the spot NPC generation. I’ve also used it to write up a bounty notice - I just gave it the group offering the bounty’s name, the “main” baddie of the group being hunted, and their general location. Boom - instant side quest.
At the beginning of each session read a short recap of the previous session, in the style of an old radio or tv adventire show, and at the end I end with questions like “will the parry manage to defeat the blah blah blah…?” Or “will Gorlax manage to sneak into the blah blah…?”. Then i go “let’s find out now, on The Pirates of the Southern Isles!!!” and I hit the music.
If I have time and inclination I like to pile these questions with as much alliteration as possible. It always goes down well. People love alliteration.
I just tried getting ChatGPT to do it for me and holy sandwiches it’s going to save me so much time! I just started my prompts with “rewrite the following sentence using a lot of alliteration:”. I did tweak the result slightly and I have to say “try again” twice, but I’m very happy with the results and potential for saved time and energy!
Some examples:
Will Moonie, the mysterious mirthful maverick, miraculously manage to maneuver from the murky mists of history, or must he muster the mettle to confront and conquer his captivating, clouded past?
Will Ada, our audacious adventurer, ardently appease the daunting and diabolical Dark Lord Demogorgon, and deftly derail the devious and dread-filled designs of the dastardly demon Orcus?
Shall the stranded sojourners sink and be swallowed by the sinister and suffocating shroud of this sprawling, serpentine jungle, or shall they skillfully circumvent the clutches of confusion and successfully steer their steps to safety?
I’ve gotten really into it recently, it’s a neat little supplement and I just enjoy the process. Having a visual base to work from helps me a lot with inspiration too. Absolutely think that it’s not necessary, just a preference
I don’t like it at all but what matters is that your own group thinks 💁🏻♀️
We do stuff that most groups hate (like a super fiddly inventory & resource management).I love it.
I was excited about Stable Diffusion in the first place, but it’s really added something to our game, at least for me. My group are generally very visual people, so I employ a lot of splash screens and art inserts in our VTT. In the past I would just find something online with image search that was close enough to what I had in mind and modify it as best I could. I’m a decent compositor and editor, but I can’t draw or paint from scratch worth shit.
Now I can generate and build a piece of art that depicts exactly what I imagine. The only people who are going to see it are my players, and anyone who looks at my post if I decide to post it on Reddit (or well, Lemmy now).
I know there’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding the tech right now, but having used it quite a bit I really do believe that human artists are not going to become obsolete. When things settle out I think this tech is going to be a powerful tool for artists to use.
No problem for personal use as it’s that or ms paint for me!
