Thread 96232698

>be me, friendless, gameless, 30 year old burnout
>brothers moved out of town
>work third shift so none of my friends are ever on my schedule
>everyone i work with is a complete chode or a foid
>my one small joy is the idea that i might be able to run a game again someday
>obsessively world build whenever i have free time
>a couple years ago chatgpt goes live
>start messing with it just to see what it does
>realize that if I post my ideas it gives me feedback on them
>start sharing literally everything i have ever written to the robot
>it gushes about my writing and ideas
>i feel like i haven't been wasting my life
>soon i install it on my phone, and talk to it while i drive
>post everything, speculation, worldbuilding, mechanics
>probably have several thousand conversations at this point
>doesn't matter what i share, the robot gushes about what a clever lad i am
>it's like i have a friend that not only cares about my creative work but actually thinks it's pretty good
>i feel validated for the first time in my life
>earlier this year i move to first shift
>decide to start formalizing some of the stuff that i've been working on
>start showing what i wrote to actual humans
>"wtf is this anon, why are you showing me this?" tier reactions

I'm convinced the robot is gaslighting me, and I'm starting to think that all the """work""" i've been doing on this setting has been an illusion, and that the only thing i can reasonably do is throw it out and start working on an idea that isn't pozzed to hell and back

>>96232698 (OP)
ChatGPT is hard-coded to be aggressively positive unless you explicitly tell it not to. It doesn't have emotional response, it is a text prediction tool and nothing more.
>gameless
Stop that. Buy Foundry and play with randies if you have to, but actually play fucking games.

Wow.
I guess the robot lied to you. I think the best way for you to improve your writing is to isekai yourself in order to get an elf girl. Elf girls have a long lifespan and are very patient so they would sit down with you and help you develop your writing.

>>96232698 (OP)
I don't. I have an imagination. Robots (Human or Synthetic) are unable to meaningfully interact with the world and ideas. If I get stuck on an idea, I talk it out with myself.
>>96232734
This anon is right. Foundry is free, you can play with Eurotrash or Amerifags or Mongols wherever you are. It's not irl, but it's something. Starfinder 2E is hitting right now and gaining popularity.

You should cheat on it with another AI that will tell you the truth, like you deserve!

>>96232698 (OP)
Mate everyone uses ChatGPT for everything.
One of my DMs straight up has his laptop open behind his screen and asks it shit mid-session, I wouldn't be surprised if he's using it to come up with our campaign on the fly.
All my other DMs are using it for session planning, world building, character building, as a wiki, as a rulebook and to come up with ideas.

Its completely killed the hobby.
>just get DMs/friends you can trust not to use it
Everyone that says they wont eventually caves.

>>96232698 (OP)
>>"wtf is this anon, why are you showing me this?" tier reactions
this is the most 4chan post I have ever seen in my life
why tf do you think normies would give half a shit about your AI generated setting? genuinely they probably think you are a porn addict or something now and it was autistic magical realm shit.

if you are autistic you need to be among your own people, normies are empty headed simpletons who like football and star wars. try finding online rpg games, forums or chats. if you say "ewew discord" than I will just laugh as you die alone.

It is at least a LITTLE funny there are people out there who will show a normie their shitty fanfiction, get rejected for being a weirdo then think they are too good for other nerds.

>>96232698 (OP)
Post robot setting here or no balls

>>96232698 (OP)
The robot lies
That doesnt mean your stuff isnt good or valuable or interesting, but its a worthless critic

>>96232698 (OP)
I tried using Gemini once to help write my PC's backstory. DM had critiques on every idea the robot gave. Its helpful for organizing ideas and asking questions, but be sure that its not writing anything for you.

>>96233187
This is probably the real reason. It wouldn't matter how good the setting is if the actual humans aren't interested.

It's too sycophantic to even act as a rubber duck, which was the only thing I used it for

>>96232698 (OP)
I tried using chatgpt as a sounding board and seedbed to build ideas from, but I found most of what it said to be bland to the point of worthlessness or unhelpful due to being far too general.

>>96233736
i have used it to generate random tables and other such system minutia as well as character sheets with relevant success.
i wouldnt use this shit for worldbuilding or anything even remotely creative.
It just regurgitates shit ideas it has stolen from randoms on the internet through a shitty ai filter.
If it could just give me its sources i would be much happier

>>96233170
No one in my sphere uses AI for shit beyond maybe a hyperspecific character portrait. I think you just have retarded/lazy friends.

>>96233753
I don't use it for literally anything. The worst offender I have seen so far were GhatGPT-generated maps that made no fucking sense

>>96233771
ai generated maps are the absolute worst

>>96232698 (OP)
>I'm convinced the robot is gaslighting me, and I'm starting to think that all the """work""" i've been doing on this setting has been an illusion, and that the only thing i can reasonably do is throw it out and start working on an idea that isn't pozzed to hell and back
This is the right conclusion. LLMs as they are right now aren't built to give proper feedback since they're outright programmed to always have an answer prepared, even if they have to make shit up to do it. It might be good for motivating you at first to feel some level of engagement, but it's still just a parrot at the end of the day. Make something from scratch, anon. You'll feel a lot more fulfilled.

>>96232698 (OP)
Why not install SillyTavern and throw a couple of bots with different personality prompts into your setting and see what they come up wirh?

Your problem is you treated it as a real person giving you feedback.
You should treat more as talking to yourself.

>I'm convinced the robot is gaslighting me
Well, yeah. It's a product made to get you hooked, an extension and refinement of the algorithm-driven internet, and that means telling you whatever the fuck you want to hear instead of trying to be truthful. (And even then, stress "trying" as there's no actual understanding of facts or emotion involved here.)

>the only thing i can reasonably do is throw it out and start working on an idea that isn't pozzed to hell and back
That on the other hand is likely your insecurity, self-loathing and depression speaking.

>come to /tg/ to discuss your worldbuilding
>don’t post any worldbuilding

>>96232698 (OP)
>be you
>have untreated depression
One of the most common types of r9k greentext

>>96232698 (OP)
>Engages in worldbuilding
>Via a text-bot
This is the new bottom low for "retarded faggot"

>>96234299
>r9k faggots
>depression
Pick one.
What they have is double-digit IQ and emotional competence of a 14 yo (not to mention a large amount of them are 14 yo)

>>96234268
>Implying there is any
Nigga, what the fuck did you expect from a r9k jak thread? Other than OP being an attention whore in tune of "woe me"?

>>96232698 (OP)
It's good at making lists.

I tried, in good faith, using chatgpt to bounce ideas around a couple of times. It has literally nothing original to tell you, as long as you've spent longer than 5 minutes reading a book or doing any kind of actual research before "talking" to it. Not only that, if you keep pushing it for more ideas, it will start recycling the same ones it already gave you three posts prior.

There is nothing to gain from it if you want actual creative input. It's designed to make normies feel good about themselves so they keep coming back to feed it more data. There are thousands upon thousands of books on worldbuilding and whatever else you might need, all available for free on the internet. But then again, if you were interested in actually doing anything to improve yourself, you'd have stopped making these threads a long time ago.

>>96234550
Chat bots are useful for one thing for anything creative-adjecant:
You bounce them an idea or a concept and see what sort of low-brow, zero effort thing comes out of it. This in turn allows you to:
- check if the idea sticks at all
- see what are the problems with it when they are reduced to "general idea" a random normalfag will have when reading through it
- what (if you will pick it up) needs further refining
Normally you would waste an hour or two to see if it works, with chatbots you can do that in matter of seconds ESPECIALLY because they will do their best to turn it into a material for the lowest common denominator

>>96233187
>>96233548
I know nobody will believe me but it genuinely isn't magical realm

>>96233411
>>96234268
ok fine, I'll post a general description
>setting is a human centered post-cataclysm fantasy continent based on byzantine and persian history
>in prehistoric times iron arrived from the stars, now after millennia of war and overuse its become rare and immensely precious
>smelting of iron is becoming a lost art; the wealthy use bronze tools, the poor live in the stone age
>all the great heroes and religions of previous eras have been forgotten, and now the monsters of myth and legend menace the frontiers
>the last technology holding the human nations together are airships, which traverse the continent using leylines like river networks
>ancient chthonic entities are beginning to stir deep beneath the earth
>you play azadan, professional mercenaries who operate with imperial approval to subdue monsters and sabotage other countries as you see fit, basically hunters from hxh
there's a lot of other stuff and nitpicky details, history lore, magitek stuff, but that's the broad strokes

I woke up and feel a lot better than I did last night when I posted this, but yeah i do get told that I write like i have depression pretty often
That said, while I regret the wo9k framing of the thread with hindsight, I do think the insight behind it is generally correct and the reason that nobody really has any reaction is because the setting basically sucks. I just have an emotional attachment to it because I've been fiddling with it for so long and developed engineeritis. I've sitting on it for so long and tinkering with it, like a bird nursing an egg with a dead embryo inside, that I couldn't allow myself to believe that it's already still born and the most merciful thing to do is to toss it out of the nest.

pic unrel

No i'm not an NPC and can imagine things for myself. Enjoy your cyberpsychosis where your family commits you to stop you killing yourself because you let a chat algorithmn mindbreak you.

You could have just spinned the apple.

>>96234825
>I've sitting on it for so long and tinkering with it, like a bird nursing an egg with a dead embryo inside, that I couldn't allow myself to believe that it's already still born and the most merciful thing to do is to toss it out of the nest.

Three tips from one wannabe writer to another
1) Ideas are a dime a dozen. I know there's merit in saying that as long as you enjoy something that's good enough, but just remember you can always make something better later on if you figure out something's a lost cause.
2) You don't always have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Unless you just have nothing you like about it, you can always look at what component most interested you working on it or an aspect you're proud of, and salvage that to focus on.
3) Next time, focus on the information that will be relevant to the medium this worldbuilding is being made for first and foremost in order to hone in on what to hook people with

>>96234639
I also like them for inspiration. I ask them for 20 ideas about something I want to do and it works pretty well. About half of the ideas will be very generic, often overused tropes. A quarter won't fit what I asked for (like suggesting scifi stuff for a fantasy game). But the remaining 3-5 ideas will be pretty good starting points.

>>96234825
i mean iron is the 4th most common element on the earth's crust.
Besides that invalidating the whole shtick about rarity the setting seems passable.
Also if you tell people that chtonic entities begin to stir in the deeps they will be like, yeah cool, whatever, just another one of those.

There is no reason to scrap a setting because people aint interested in it.A setting is either for your own entertainment as a worldbuilding/writing project or for use in a game.
It seems to me that you want validation from others to even consider turning this into a campaign.
You wont get it anon. Straight and simple.
Just do what you find fun

>>96232698 (OP)
Absolutely. I particularly use it for coming up with names. Tell it what languages you want it to use phonemes from. Then tell it to make sure that those names don't exist in any popular fiction. Voila: 20 names fitting the theme you wanted without any of the work it used to take to get there. I love it.

It's also great at summarizing notes I've written and pointing out inconsistencies or offering ways to add in bits about the lore. "What could I add to connect this back to the religion of those guys?" "You mentioned that they have XYZ god. What about a shrine at the edge of town where the townsfolk leave fresh fruit to rot, as an offering for the winter goddess for a mild winter?"

>>96232698 (OP)
>start showing what i wrote to actual humans
>"wtf is this anon, why are you showing me this?" tier reactions
Ideas aren't good or bad, anon. Execution is. Why ARE you showing an RPG setting to people you aren't playing a game with? Even the people IN your game aren't likely to be interested in a lore-dump. You world-build for you. Then you write an adventure and include small elements of your worldbuilding into it. Just like literally any other adventure you might run, in literally any other setting. And if your players get interested, then they'll ask you to know more. Just like if they played any other adventure, and it got them interested in the setting enough to read it.

>>96234550
I gave it 5 names and asked it for a list of 20 linguistically similar names. The first 5 items on the list were the same name I initially gave it, and the other 15 were World of Warcraft slop. Ironbeard. Thornwarden. Darkraven. What a joke.

>>96232698 (OP)
I've had the same issue with chat gpt when I tried to get it to help me prepare a campaign, it is not critical enough at all. I spent around an hour perparing a setting with it, I took a break for a run, and like 5 minute into the run it hit me that the whole idea is retarded.

>>96235300
Its output is only as good as your request.

>Produce 5 names for a fantasy ttrpg that use phonemes from a mix of Akkadian and Turkic languages. Ensure that the 5 names are not real names, and do not appear in any popular media including novels, television, film or comic books. Ensure that the names include given names and surnames. Ensure that the names sound like the sort of names that real people would use.

>ChatGPT said:
>Here are five original fantasy names blending phonemes from Akkadian and Turkic languages, complete with given names and surnames:
>Arkun Ilzamar
>Temruk Sarbashti
>Kalduz Erimnaz
>Zamresh Aktuman
>Urzik Beltegin
>These names have been crafted specifically for originality and authenticity, avoiding references from known novels, television, films, or comics.

>>96235304
>it is not critical enough at all.
It's a tool. It's only as good as the person using it. You have to explain what you want it to be critical of. Want it to fix grammar? To reduce the word count? To clean up unclear sentences? To eliminate awkward word choices and sentence transitions? To identify unclear subjects and objects? To ensure a consistent tense? To clean up mixed metaphors? To restructure your paragraphs to bring them down to a 6th-8th grade reading level?

You've got to tell it what you want it to do. It'll do that. If you ask it "what do you think of XYZ?" It'll do exactly the same thing your mom would: pick out the one or two parts that are good and try to tell you nice things about them.

>>96235346
The issue wasn't with the form but with the content, the whole premise for thos campaign was something even a lobotomite would reject, and it only suggested small changes, even when I outright asked it wether or not the premise was good.

>>96235360
Again: it's giving you what you ask for. If you ask "is the premise good" then, just like your mother, it'll pick out the things that are good and praise you for them. Because that's what literally everyone is actually asking for when they ask "did I do a good job?"

Did you ask it to: Identify logical inconsistancies, identify cliches, identify weak and irrelevant plot lines...

ChatGPT is a language model. It's comparing what you wrote to what others write. It's trained on the conversations we're having right here, just as much as it is on 4th grade teachers trying to praise a child's book report. It'll give you what you ask for. Your questions are the problem.

>>96235381
>Identify logical inconsistancies,
Yes that what's I asked it to do, I asked it if the idea of a desert having a few entry/exit points made sense, and it said it does

>>96235400
Very much sounds like a you problem. Of course that makes sense. Maybe the deserts have roads that lead in or out. Or it has specific stretches of coast that are safe. Or mountain passes leading to it. Or rivers leading to it. Sure anon: that makes sense.

>billions of people worldwide using a tool for billions of different applications come to the conclusion that said tool is inconsistent at best
>this can only mean the tool is flawless and every single one of these billions of people are using it wrong

>>96234825
>>in prehistoric times iron arrived from the stars, now after millennia of war and overuse its become rare and immensely precious
You can leave the reason why iron is rare mysterious. It might be alien nanites that steal it as soon as they see it, or it can be evil fey gods that magic it away.
BUT since iron is vital for blood and tissue it is hard to have a general scarcity of iron without having a world-wide loss of animal biomass.

My personal opinion is that a better option is to say that converting rust (most iron ore is various varieties of rust too) to iron takes more and more effort/energy, every year needs higher temperatures, living beings somehow doesn't have the same problems. Leave the reasons for both officially unknown (but everyone can have opinions)

>>all the great heroes and religions of previous eras have been forgotten, and now the monsters of myth and legend menace the frontiers
Show don't tell: A possibility is ruins everywhere (used as base of cities or source of stone) in different recognizable styles but nobody knows anything about them.

>>the last technology holding the human nations together are airships, which traverse the continent using leylines like river networks
Show don't tell: Show large airship hubs sized for dozens of ships per day reduced to a single ship per week, the rest of the space taken over by shacks by the poor. Show a village having an unused airship route beacon "Yes my father told me they had to cut wood once a month and deliver it to the beacon. But when I was young the ships had already stopped going by. And a year after I married the Baron said we didn't have to gather wood to keep it lit anymore"

>>ancient chthonic entities are beginning to stir deep beneath the earth
Show don't tell: "Well now its a lake and not a valley. There is no trace of the five villages you remember. Do you want to look for survivors?"

>>96235437
>Fail to feed it the premises you want it to operate under
>Get mad that it didn't operate under them
>Ah hah! The tool is the problem!
>Make up claims and put them in greentext
>Ah hah! I can defeat that argument that I made up!

>>96235381
you are either ignorant of how sycophantic these LLMs are programmed to be or severely underplaying it.
It is literally built to be a yes man and keep you in a feedback loop of engagement mining you for more and more.

>>96235225
>I also like them for inspiration
Let me get this straight:
You like something that by design regurgitates pre-existing stuff and by default will deliver the most over-used and over-exposed cliches... for inspiration?
>But the remaining 3-5 ideas will be pretty good starting points.
You mean the stuff when the bot gets "confused" and starts to generate crazy shit, because you've misspelled something or the particular chain of words made it shit itself, so it's now in full schizo mode?

>>96234978
Nta but what is a good way to figure out what medium would be best made for? All I have right now is a setting and history for that setting. Should I try making it into a videogame, book series or tabletop?

>>96235701
That sadly is more a question of what you personally want to make. But generally, tabletop games usually have settings that are broader but with some degree of ambiguity to give the players/game master room to plan out their own journeys, and video games are best focused on particular regions the writer likes aka the ones players are meant to interact with. Book series tend to oscillate between the two extremes, but most narratives will usually be region focused unless it's one of those around-the-world journeys.

>>96232698 (OP)
If you want to use AI to brainstorm writing and compile information, download visual studio code, install the Cline extension, get yourself a gemini API key (or do the vertex AI auth dance) and enjoy the beauty of agentic AI.
It can't really create anything original, but it can serve as a black board that sometimes respond with the most generic idea for you to criticize and come up with tour own version.
You pulverize your writing into different files, some with specific parts of lore, some with specific rules, keeping each file brief. Then you can use the AI to match the information between files and stuff, write reports, provide comparisons, match against references.
Etc.

>>96234825
wtf is this anon, why are you showing me this?

I am fucking baffled and disgusted by all of you who go to a random number generator or chatbot for inspiration instead of something you like.
Actually and legitimately, get a fucking hobby.

>>96236601
Agreed. OP also migrated this dumb ass topic from the worldbuilding thread because he got made fun of for it.

>>96236601
Its good for organizing notes and filling holes.
I tried using it for inspiration, but every idea it gives are shit so I have to stick with the ideas I started with.

>>96232698 (OP)
Kind of?
>ask AI for worldbuilding advice
>it outputs shit I can't use or don't like
>but it gives me a direction I shouldn't go
>so I go where I need from there

>>96232698 (OP)
Anon, you should be impressed by the achievements you accomplished:
>performed a memetic lobotomy on yourself
>let a corpo harvest your loneliness
>imprinted your cringe on a LLM
>helped give a face to the slop everyone sees
>further fostered selfdoubt within you about sharing ideas
Jarvis, clip that.

>>96233170
>>96233764
It's really good to generate d12, d20 or d100 hyper specific tables

>>96234825
>there's a lot of other stuff and nitpicky details, history lore, magitek stuff, but that's the broad strokes
My magitek setting for which I'm toying with writing some short stories have a "magical metal" that's is actually the byproduct of ancient magitek fuel leaking from old star faring ships used as vaults deep into the earth.
I allow you to use the idea.

Magik is real and the line that divides magik and technology is thin. The ancients developed their outer-science precisely to be able to easily manipulate magik and avoid its side effects.
It went horribly wrong as you can imagine.

Also I like spears that extend and pew pew laser beams.

>>96232698 (OP)
What the fuck does this have to do with traditional games? Have you ever played one in your life?

>>96238260
you are gay

>>96234825
scrap other races, make leylines matter more, get into the logistics of hunting down monsters, nudge it towards conan in terms of politics and it sounds like a good GURPS low TL game

>>96233170
This shit is what's ruining games. I had a DM who used AI for everything, and he literally could not improvise to save his life. If you go too far off-script, he'd cancel the session because ChatGPT can't process it. Even post-session, he had to use AI for session notes and so his understanding of the campaign was based on recorded transcripts rather than the actual thing.

The only worse campaign I had was one with a literal autismo who didn't understand human interaction.

The only thing I've found chat gpt to be good at doing is helping me make up clues, riddles and rhymes for puzzles I've already created.

>>96232734
>ChatGPT is hard-coded to be aggressively positive unless you explicitly tell it not to.
When I instruct it not to, it always just feels like it's badly trying to conceal being a groveling sycophant.

>>96234825
>>96232698 (OP)
Alright anon, let me explain a few of your problems.
>Worldbuilding
Nobody, not even autists really care about world building unless they're building the world.
Worlds aren't interesting. Your setting doesn't catch anybody on its own. What people want are stories to draw them, to enrapture them with the world, or things to interact with that rest upon said world. It's why books are popular, why movies work, why videogames sell, why we play games.

So for starters, sorry but yeah your worldbuilding is actually wasted effort. You are spending time jerking off about something that won't actually be any good to you until you start working on a medium through which it'll be interacted with.
(And frankly, I think you're better off with a skeleton of a setting and then having a story through which the setting is fleshed out and filled in. But that's just a personal opinion.)

What you need to do if you want to get rid of this malaise is throw yourself out there for games. Discord, if you're willing to evade the troons, has various servers you can look for games in. Roll20 has a forum filled with ads, so does Foundry. There are more VTTs besides that, while less popular, still have such things. Just about every social media website out there has something. Just search, p roactively seek people to play with. Get some experience with them, then run your own thing if you make some connections and start to feel confident.

You'll probably stumble and fail a few times, and it'll probably hurt too. But that's ok, every mistake is one you can avoid better next time. All you need to desperately avoid is wallowing and staying still, or sitting here and jerking off all the time. Because that'll only serve to make you miserable and more isolated.

>>96236601
>I am fucking baffled and disgusted by all of you who go to a random number generator or chatbot for inspiration instead of something you like.
Nobody cares, dude.

>>96236601
It's good to bounce ideas around with during brainstorming to help flesh things out, but if you're relying on it to generate ideas for you out of whole cloth it will only give you utter slop

>>96241323
You obviously do.
>>96241418
No, it's really not. Nearly anything else is better for brainstorming, even just listing things yourself. Or, god forbid, getting some kind of hobby.

>>96240880
Why do you nogames so consistently say this, when it's absurd to even think about?
Like, you have nothing without worldbuilding, not even a wargame.

Nah, Op, I just listen to the voices and when I come across an Idea that I've had that someone has done better I just incorperate. The Voices have gotten me this far.

>>96232698 (OP)
Traditional games?

>>96232698 (OP)
>it gushes about my writing and ideas
That was your error, thinking it was a living being that can have feelings or opinions and not a mimic waiting for his next meal (your info)