bcovertigo

The campaigns my players consistently voice as their favorites are ones where I created an overarching plot, and then incorporated their backstories as significant and impactful portions of that plot. Being the sole input for character motivations for a story (as with a book) makes it easier to end up with a coherent vision and story, but more difficult because of the amount of content you’re responsible for. Conversely a good DM can offload work to players and end up with a result that everyone is personally invested in.

I will say though that some DMs end up writing thousands of pages over the course of years spent in an ongoing campaign and might cry at your characterization.

It’s definitely POSSIBLE to run a campaign without ever writing a page, but good luck when your characters get attached to an NPC you forgot about if improvisation isn’t your forte.

It’s valid to point out that we have difficulty defining knowledge, but the output from these machines are inconsistent at a conceptual level, and you can easily get them to contradict themselves in the spirit of being helpful.

If someone told you that a wheel can be made entirely of gas do you have confidence that they have a firm grasp of a wheel’s purpose? Tool use is a pretty widely agreed upon marker of intelligence and so not grasping the purpose of a thing that they can describe at great length and exhaustive detail, while also making boldly incorrect claims on occassion should raise an eyebrow.