Keep Your AI Out of My TTRPG

If you're uneasy about AI in this hobby, you're not alone.

In August 2023, D&D fans noticed something off in the art for a new sourcebook: melted-looking blades, hands with too many fingers, the fingerprints of an AI image generator smeared over what was supposed to be original illustration in Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants. Wizards of the Coast pulled the art and updated its artist guidelines to ban AI from the process. Five months later they did it again, this time an AI-generated steampunk backdrop in official Magic: The Gathering marketing. Denied it first. Then, a few days later, admitted, "we made a mistake."

May 2024, Wizards makes it official: no generative AI in finished art or text. Three weeks after that, they post a job listing for a "Principal AI Engineer" to build systems for "intelligent generation of text dialog, audio, art assets, NPC behaviors, and real time bot frameworks." The company's answer, when people pointed out the obvious: the ban only covers tabletop stuff. Video games don't count, apparently.

Meanwhile there's a whole small industry of apps now promising to run your game for you. Type a prompt, get a game master, get a campaign, get NPCs that talk back.

If this makes you sad, that's fair. A hobby built on people making things together is getting sold products and tools that replace their active creativity. Keep AI out of your TTRPG, but don't lump every use of that word into one bucket. Let's talk about it.

The Fun Was Never the Output

Ask anyone why they play a tabletop RPG instead of just reading a novel and the answer is never "the writing's better." The fun of this hobby stems from the act of collaborative storytelling and strategy. The story doesn't exist until the table makes it exist, together in the moment. A published adventure is a skeleton. A GM fumbling through a villain's monologue, badly, in the moment, means more to the people at that table than a perfectly written one handed down from somewhere else, because the bad one is theirs.

Heavy AI campaign prep tends to backfire for a dumber, more mechanical reason too. Give a language model one prompt and it'll happily generate a hundred pages of lore, a dozen NPCs, a twist ending, before your coffee's cold. It feels like a gift, but often it turns into a trap. You can't actually hold a hundred pages of lore you didn't write in your head, so you spend the session digging through your own notes instead of playing. Then, you've already pre-decided so much of the story that there's nothing left for anyone at the table to decide. A collaborative adventure quietly turns into an interactive novel where the GM already knows the ending.

Outsourcing campaign prep drives tables away from the heart of tabletop gaming. It removes the reason anyone sat down in the first place.

The Word "AI" Is Doing Too Much Work

Here's the problem with "no AI in my TTRPG" as a blanket rule: you probably already use some. Spellcheck is AI. Search is AI. Nobody's picking on any of that, because nobody thinks it threatens anything.

The larger issue isn't which technology is and is not AI. It's that the same technology does completely different jobs depending on what you ask of it. The kind of model that can write a villain's monologue can also summarize the one your GM actually fumbled through last night. An image model that churns out token art can also clean up a blurry photo of a map someone drew by hand. Ask a chatbot for "a dungeon" and it hands you a finished adventure. Ask it what you set up three sessions ago and forgot, and it hands you your own story back.

So "is this AI?" is the wrong question. Almost everything is, or soon will be. The better question is what job you've handed it.

Fiction vs. the Record

Start testing these tools out yourself. Do they decide what happens in the story, or do they work off something the table already made?

Some uses touch the fiction itself: what a character says, what the ruins look like, how the plot resolves. That's authorship, and it's the part you signed up to do yourself, badly, with your friends.

Other uses only touch what the table already made: a transcript of who said what, a cleaner copy of the map someone drew, a reminder of the promise the party forgot three sessions ago. The creative work there is already done, by people. The tool is just looking after it.

If you unplug the tool and your game falls apart, it was doing your creative work. If you just have more chores, it was helping. That's the test.

When the Tool Writes

The clearest examples are AI game masters. These are apps that build the world, run the NPCs, and narrate as you play. Plenty of them are well made. What they automate, though, is the thing a table usually does together. Prep is where a GM decides what kind of world they want, so a tool that does the prep also does the deciding.

There's a fair answer to this, and it usually comes from forever GMs: "I've run every game for years. I just want to be a player for once." That's a real want, and an AI GM might scratch it. Playing that way is closer to solo play, which has a long history of its own, from oracle tables to games like Ironsworn. Nothing wrong with it. It's just a different thing from a group making a story together, and it can't stand in for one. If what you miss is being a player at a table, the better fix is usually another person behind the screen. Try trading off running games, or share one world between several GMs.

AI art for portraits and battlemaps sits in a similar spot. The results often look fine. Typing a prompt just isn't the same act as drawing it yourself or commissioning someone who does.

Wizards of the Coast's own split, banning AI from tabletop while hiring to build it for video games, shows how hard this line is to hold. Whatever you make of that, even a company comfortable with AI elsewhere felt the table was where to draw the line.

When the Tool Helps

On the other side are tools that help you transcribe a session so you're not relying on memory, summarize fifteen sessions into something skimmable before you run the sixteenth, or track which NPC said what, so nobody has to remember three months later whether it was the merchant or the guard captain who lied. None of it invents anything. No dialogue, no plot beat, no art. It just remembers, better than a GM with a day job ever could.

Some people object to this too, and their reasons are fair ones: how the models were trained, what they cost to run, where your table's recordings end up. Those are worth asking of any tool you bring to the table. They're a different question from the one this essay is about, though. A transcript doesn't decide anything in your story. It only exists because your table already played it.

Where Even This Test Gets Messy

I'll readily admit that AI use is not a clean line everywhere. Ask an AI for three plot hooks, grab one, twist it, make it yours. Is that authorship? I think it depends on what happens next. Argue with it and rebuild it until it's yours, and you were just handed a spark, the way any writing prompt would. Drop it in unchanged and you're running someone else's draft. What decides it is whether a human's judgment was the last thing to touch it before the table saw it.

Scale matters too. Generating a hundred-page setting bible in one sitting replaces the fun of building a world together. Generating a shop's inventory on the spot, when the party wanders somewhere you didn't prep, is closer to rolling on a random table, and random tables are a core part of this hobby. So the line was never "no generated content, ever." It's whether the table would have wanted to make the thing themselves.

And there's a version of this that isn't generation at all, even when it's touching the fiction. Asking an AI to critique your prose instead of write it. To point out where your worldbuilding contradicts itself instead of fixing it for you. Or asking how you could run a better game. It gets fuzzier the more you think about it.

Aim Better

Keep your AI out of your TTRPG. Still true. But your table gets to decide where that line sits, based on what you actually enjoy.

Paizo pledged, years back, not to use AI-generated creative work "of any kind," so buying their stuff means buying something a human actually made. Chaosium banned it from their community content program over what it does to the artists who depend on the alternative. Kobold Press said it about as plain as it gets: "making your game your own is the heart of the RPG hobby." None of that is anti-technology. It's the same line this whole piece has been drawing, just in a publisher's words instead of mine.

So: no one gets to decide what happens in the story except the people who showed up to make it happen. Every business and every customer gets to choose where to draw the line and it's okay for your line to be different from someone else's. AI isn't going away. It's too useful. Let's define that use together as a community rather than jumping toward immediate negativity.

Keep your AI out of your TTRPG. Just aim it right.