ChatGPT has been a lifeline for me as a GM with little spare time to prep and far too grand ambitions for the scale and scope of (D&D) campaign I want to run. I’m curious how other GMs have found ChatGPT and similar AI tools useful or helpful in running their own games. I’ll share my own workflow below as a comment, and I hope others find it useful. I’m especially interested in any ChatGPT prompts you have found worthwhile, and you can see some of my own prompts in the examples I’ll share shortly.
I’ve only used it once, so far. My players were in a place that was supposed to have prayers to an apocalyptic world-devouring entity written in secret text that could be discovered by the players.
I knew my players were likely to find it, so I asked ChatGPT to write out the text of these dark apocalyptic psalms. It did a great job, and when my players discovered the text it was appropriately verbose and creepy, instead of me just saying “you find prayers to the World Devourer”.
I have found it useful for handouts as well. I usually need to do a few rounds of editing and back and forth to get details and tone/voice just right, but it’s often still easier than writing it from scratch myself. It’s also nice for writing something yourself and then having it rewrite it in another voice e.g. “rephrase this letter like a victorian dandee wrote it”