jtmoulia journal

Dad's Birthday '23 & Covid

Posted on Nov 24, 2023

Today is Dad’s birthday and the fam is all up in Tahoe! The wrinkle is CEO has covid and I’m exposed (tho tested negative last night), so will have to keep outside / distanced / masked. So it goes; I have a gas fire pit and can layer up to handle the 35. Will also apologize to the Marty’s for the mess caused.

First, I have to covid test… annd tested positive. Fuck. Now I’m headed home with CEO to quarantine.

LLM Datastore + GM

Driving back brainstorming how an LLM RPG might actually be fun. I believe that it needs be able to:

  1. pre-game
  2. track stats / items / etc & perform rolls
  3. tell a solid story over multiple sessions
  4. provide visualizations without breaking the flow (load-times)
  5. teach the player how to play

The session 0

  1. explain the rules to the player
  2. help create the world and the characters
  3. set the scene and provide exposition to develop it
  4. store information in structured database?

Tracking Stats / Items / Rolling

Off the cuff, I’d like a state machine that the LLM can interact with. This would provide hard rules re interactions with the world, data storage, and potentially visualizations.

The LLM itself could interact with the world by issuing commands to the

What’s Solid Multi-Session Storytelling

As CEO asked, what might we consider to be solid storytelling?

  1. a set of themes that the story explores
  2. detailed, recurring NPC’s
  3. player agency to affect the story
  4. story also limits player choices to provide challenges
  5. beautiful descriptions, places, characters, images

CEO had the idea of “sequential story data”. Basically, have the story pre-laid as a list / tree / etc and an index specifying where the player is at along that story. The LLM would be responsible for keeping the player on the track

What are Good Visualizations?

  1. a consistent style, ideally paired uniquely with the story
  2. consistent imagery and themes

How Might we Teach the Player How to Play?

  1. the LLM provides player guidance, perhaps based on the “difficulty”
    • the first time something happens announce it’s happening, why it’s happening
  2. map-like images / ascii visualizations
  3. tutorial scenario / character setup