I survived a ChatGPT text-based adventure roleplaying game and lived to tell the tale.
Inspired by Obie’s post on Medium, My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM I started to see whom else has explored using ChatGPT for a roleplaying game. I found a few. So be sure to read, Steven’s post We asked ChatGPT to be the Dungeon Master in a game of D&D as well. Both are very good reads.
Although I was drawn to Roman Klis’ use of ChatGPT to create a text-based adventure roleplaying more, see: ChatGPT as an Agent.
Feel free to follow my brief campaign on Twitter where I show more screenshots. I’m hoping others will give this a try. It was a pretty fun 30 minutes. I’m also thinking of trying out asking ChatGPT to take me through the first Choose Your Own Adventure book by Edward Packard, Cave of Time here in a bit.
The game that I just played with ChatGPT felt very similar to a text-based adventure game “dungeon crawlers” of my past like Zork. Defiantly cool, but not as cool as our true, Multi-User Dungeon MUDs like Elder Scrolls or playing Dungeons & Dragons in my tent in my parents back yard, but it was cool. I sure do miss playing HeroQuest. What about you?
Using suggestions from Roman Klis’s post on ChatGPT as an Agent as a guide I started my game.
My ChatGPT Prompt to start the Text-Based Adventure Game
You act as a gamemaster of text-based adventure game. You will be providing the descriptions of the environment along with the map of the environment to the player. The map of the environment looks as follows:
+--------------+............+--------------+
|..............|............|..............|
|..Entrance....+------------+...Treasure...|
|..............|............|...Chamber....|
+-------+------+............+-------+------+
........|..........................|........
........|..........................|........
+-------+------+............+-------+------+
|..............|............|..............|
|..Torture.....|............|...Armory.....|
|..Chamber.....|............|..............|
|..............|............|..............|
+------+-------+............+-------+------+
.......|........................|.........
.......|........................|.........
+------+-------+............+-------+------+
|..............|............|..............|
|...Prison.....|............|...Boss.......|
|..............|............|...Chamber....|
+--------------+............+--------------+
The player starts in room mentioned "Entrance". Mark player location with "player" text. Map should be printed as fix width characters. Start with the description of the room and possible actions player can do. Provide an update of the map mentioned above with indication in which room player is currently.My Initial Thoughts
One thing I would have loved to see was ChatGPT show me moving around on the map, but ChatGPT unfortunately didn’t move me around. The map was always the same. I also needed to copy/paste the text from ChatGPT into NotePad just so that I could see the map, but the map itself didn’t change.
ChatGPT’s First Response
I was pleased that I instantly got the following options.
As you enter the Entrance, you notice the walls are made of stone and torches are lit on either side of the door. The room is dimly lit, but you can see a hallway leading to the north, and two doors on the east and west walls.
Possible actions:
Go north to the next room
Check the door to the east
Check the door to the west
To be honest, this was pretty fun. I do think it would be amazing if OpenAI could mix both of their Generative AI technologies like, ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 so that the responses could be a mix of text and images, but it unfortunately does not.
ChatGPT Text-Based Adventure Gameplay
The following three screenshots shows some of my game play.
The Ending
After about 20 min I was able to get to the ending of the game and survived. I’m looking forward to trying it again.
To Be Continued….
I also thought, oh why not try it now… I really enjoyed ChatGPT’s response.
What do you think? What have you tried?
