AI Will Kill 5E

But not in the way you think.

There has been a lot of noise regarding AI in D&D, and I have seen the light. I used AI as a hobby when it was new, but I have since realized its threat to the traditional art market. The potential for a generation of artists to give up on their craft is a genuine concern. We want a marketplace for people's works and art to be art - not a product of an endless, corporate-censored mix-and-match machine that can't draw hands or profiles. The risk of losing the human touch in art is a sobering thought.

But AI itself will kill 5E. It won't be the AI inside the game; it will be the AI outside of it, casting a shadow over its future. And "killing 5E" doesn't mean "gone forever for everyone" just - not in the central cultural relevance and back to being a niche game, as it was.

5E has positioned itself as a "pen and paper MMO" - that only relies on the input of a live DM to provide what a machine can't. I have seen this over the years as the character options in all the various versions of 5E seem to be less and less with each new edition, as the designers dictate to you "what you should play" and "how you should play it."

Having reviewed many 5E character designs recently, I can say GURPS beats 5E any day in building the characters I can imagine. My problem with 5E is my imagination is more extensive than that game, and I am tired of "paying for options I already have in other games." 5E takes it all away and sells you each option back, one at a time.

Now, they are desperately trying to add AI to a system and hack together a static virtual tabletop, expecting people to read to get fulfillment and move around stiff figures purchased with microtransactions. The map will be static, present, and need to be purchased. The system likely still needs a DM to initiate and "run the AI." This is not a system designed to work together; it is a patched system trying to force AI into a human-to-human interaction model, it will come off like a chatbot trying to run a game. It's a disappointing direction for 5E.

5E is an MMO. It is also an inferior MMO, and it takes much longer to "get in and play." World of Warcraft still has them beat; I can be in and in a group adventure in 10 minutes in that game, with that "instant playing with others" checkbox ticked.

No, it is not "roleplaying or D&D" at all.

But add AI to an MMO?

Allow for dynamic scenario, mission, story, character, and zone creation? The MMO has the assets, animations, voice acting, art, delivery channels, existing customers, scale of operations, and framework to make this experience happen much more straightforwardly than D&D on a static tabletop. The lines will be blurred between traditional static quests and dynamic ones. People will not know what prewritten content is and what AI is, and it won't matter.

In an MMO, I don't have to "buy 3D maps and figures." I am not stuck with "what I own" for content generation. The paywall levels here are too high for players to get over, and the expense of generating all this 3d content is too high for a company delivering static assets. I have been in this industry, I know. It is brutal when you consider the costs of support and paying 3d artists for their work, along with the time needed to get one character or map out the door. Wizards of the Coast is not a 3D modeling company, and it does not have the artist community or sales market to feed such a ravenous customer base.

The MMO has a built-in market, delivery system, beta-test framework, community, content, models, and support for rapid delivery of AI-generated content. They can start small and work towards the larger scales. AI is in a few missions here and there; test and scale it up. Tabletop game AI models and play experiences need to be built from scratch.

The AI will pull people with similar interests together as it grows beyond story generation and moves into matchmaking. The MMO company has more data than Wizards on player preferences and behavior. AI relies on data, and character sheets and session logs on D&D Beyond are not enough data for a "meta AI" to begin to shape group and guild experiences.

Once MMO makers start adopting AI for dynamic online experiences, the mass market will follow.

The MMO will be indistinguishable from a DM-curated experience.

D&D will be seen as "a static tabletop plus an AI chatbot."

That is when 5E dies.