AI assisted roleplaying games

There has been a recent increase in interest surrounding table-top roleplaying games (TTRPGs) by the AI research community. This has been motivated by increased use of AI applications such as ChatGPT to support players and organisers of these games in tasks such as character creation, information retrieval for specific rules and supporting/replacing the Game Masters (GMs) who organise these games. However, such applications have faced critique for generating algorithmic and stale content which detracts from the game experience. A persistent problem with TTRPGs is also the lack of availability of players and GMs especially for new players which forms a hard barrier to entry. The PhD project will design and deploy AI agents that can tackle the problem of playing/organising TTRPGs in collaboration with human players, in situations where there is a shortage of players/GMs. The research will also investigate how to develop AI agents which can devise creative solutions to problems in the dynamic, open-ended environments of TTRPGs.

The project will initially aim to design AI RPG players that can progress through a series of tasks in which they have to come up with creative solutions to the problems presented. It will draw on preliminary research from the field of computational narrative intelligence, which has proposed some methods for modelling AI agents that can progress through a TTRPG environment or an analogous text adventure environment. This will be combined with growing research on intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning agents, to model how AI agents balance their own goals and motivations with those of other agents (human or AI) to play TTRPGs in a collaborative, engaging and creative manner. This will involve breaking down TTRPG "campaigns" into sub-tasks such as: combat, puzzle solving and open-ended/goal-oriented dialogue scenarios, and tackling each of these in turn, initially with AI agents only, followed by human-AI studies.

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