AI and ChatGPT have been all the rage lately, and I've was properly putting off jumping on any bandwagons
until I fell into asking ChatGPT help me learn Five Parsecs From Home by running a game for me - and it did
a pretty good job. 5PFH is about the level of difficulty I want out of a game these days, which then led me
to wonder if it could be co-opted into the GI Joe game I always wanted to play. With a lot of AI help, that
answer came to be "mostly".
While also serving as an into to how to write AI prompts, using ChatGPT could act as rule writer, rule reviewer,
playtester, adn editor. With the caveat that AI is wrong and leaves out details a lot of the time, so I also
have to look close and know what I'm supposed to be talking about and where I'm supposed to be going.
Going down that path, somewhere between the 3rd and 4th pass, things stayed on track enough to make a playable version
of that very simplistic GI Joe game I wanted.
In that simplistic GI Joe came the basics of a faction (meta) system for 5PFH. Some factional tweaks
here and there that can be used in both the minis-based combat as well as the overarching story driven
meta game that really managed to suck me in. While a lot of the fun of GI Joe, and the toys, is the vehicles
and playsets along with the figures, the core of any good minis game is the people. From that, I stuck with
people-stats as much as I could. That's also where AI was helpful - go make up stats for GI Joe and Cobra.
Yeah, that's close enough to play with - now make up the same for the Dreadnoks.
That would lead me to seeing what AI could do - or really, access. I was suprised I was getting copywritten/IP
generated content actually using GI Joe and Cobra names. Can I pull in non-toy-line groups? How about the comic
book Danger Girl? Yes. The TV show Leverage? Also, yes. Now AI really was letting me carried away, and soon I
had more than enough factional stats to play with.
After spending 2 years on Zombie Mall and learning what all goes into making a new game, I knew I don't want to do
that again. New rules take lots of logical thought and even more testing. The joy of a game expansion is that if done
right, 95% of the rules already exist and are working. You just have to make sure not to break the other
5%. While my factional structure of extra stats for effective bonuses and random campaign, mission, and
stuff generators didn't add much complication to that 5%, there was one extra part I wanted in there that would lead
to fill that 5% and take 75% of the time to create and repeatedly double check. I wanted each faction to
be able to have bases, like GI Joe's The Pit, and anyone could attack that base. But I wanted those battles to
be meta-story friendly. Instead of drawn out, miniature-focused combat, I wanted to be able to resolve an attack on
a base in a die roll. ChatGPT decided it would be 3 die rolls per side, though. And with that, a mini-game of
Faction Base Combat was created.
And then tested over and over. And to be honest, I'm still not sure how right things are.
Instead of 2 (Zombie Mall) years, I now have what I think are playable rules expanions after a mere 2 months. These
have only been playtested by me and AI, and weirdly that's been part of the fun for me. The PDFs are a lot of text and
charts. There's no maps or fun graphics in there. Even then, there's 275 pages of PDF. Granted, a good chunk of it is
repeated boilerplate and little differences in stat details between the 7 factions, but that's still a lot of pages. Download
and have fun, remembering that real human playthroughs aren't in the high numbers. And if you're from Hasbro, ignore all
the character names. And the Terror Drome
In the 1st pass of this, AI made a new game it titled "Ultimate Espionage" which seemed really neat, until I discovered important rules had been omitted (like
where the target number you roll your To Hit against comes from). Getting some of those ideas into this branch of expansions would be fun.
I was also trying to make light-hearted story driven missions featuring settings like Fantasy Island and The Love
Boat, but I could never get them to work quite right.
Changing the factions to work with other games might be a route I go. 7TV is a game I say I don't like (I've never played it). I should like it.
I want to like it. The backstory of how I like to play works perfectly with 7TV. But every time I look at the rules something happens and I revert
to "I don't like it." Walking Dead All Out War has been my favored game for a couple of years, so converting factions for that game and seeing
how close it meshes to the existing PvP/Faction rules in that game would be interesting.
The one route I doubt I'll go, but is extremely interesting, would be to see if I could get rid of all the IP protected content and
actually publish this stuff under Modiphius' World Builder program.