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Collaborating Authors

 Sullivan, Anne


Tabletop Roleplaying Games as Procedural Content Generators

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) and procedural content generators can both be understood as systems of rules for producing content. In this paper, we argue that TTRPG design can usefully be viewed as procedural content generator design. We present several case studies linking key concepts from PCG research -- including possibility spaces, expressive range analysis, and generative pipelines -- to key concepts in TTRPG design. We then discuss the implications of these relationships and suggest directions for future work uniting research in TTRPGs and PCG.


Social Play in Non-Player Character Dialog

AAAI Conferences

Non-player characters in games generally lack believability and deep interactivity. The AI system Comme il Faut begins to tackle this by modeling social state and behaviors for game characters. The player initiates social exchanges and the dialog and outcome are generated and displayed in their entirety. In this paper we present a model called social prac-tices to extend Comme il Faut. Social practices increase the playability of social play by modeling social interactions at a more granular level and adding interactivity at each stage. This model also moves away from dialog trees to a more modular form of authoring to support the additional com-plexity.


A Step Towards the Future of Role-Playing Games: The SpyFeet Mobile RPG Project

AAAI Conferences

Meaningful choice has often been identified as a key component in a player's engagement with an interactive narrative, but branching stories require tremendous amounts of hand-authored content, in amounts that increase exponentially rather than linearly as more choice points are added. Previous approaches to reducing authorial burden for computer RPGs have relied on creating better tools to manage existing unwieldy structures of quests and dialogue trees. We hypothesize that reducing authorial burden and increasing agency are two sides of the same coin, requiring specific advancements in two related areas of design and technology research: (1) dynamic story management architecture that represents story events abstractly and allows story elements to be selected and re-ordered in response to player choices, and (2) dynamic dialogue generation to allow a single story event to be revealed differently by different characters and in the context of dynamic relationships between those characters and the player. This paper describes SpyFeet, a playable prototype of a storytellingsystem designed to test this hypothesis.