PAYADOR: A Minimalist Approach to Grounding Language Models on Structured Data for Interactive Storytelling and Role-playing Games

Every time an Interactive Storytelling (IS) system gets a player input, it is facing the world-update problem. Classical approaches to this problem consist in mapping that input to known preprogrammed actions, what can severely constrain the free will of the player. When the expected experience has a strong focus on improvisation, like in Role-playing Games (RPGs), this problem is critical. In this paper we present PAYADOR, a different approach that focuses on predicting the outcomes of the actions instead of representing the actions themselves. To implement this approach, we ground a Large Language Model to a minimal representation of the fictional world, obtaining promising results. We make this contribution open-source, so it can be adapted and used for other related research on unleashing the co-creativity power of RPGs.

Skill Check: Some Considerations on the Evaluation of Gamemastering Models for Role-playing Games

In role-playing games a Game Master (GM) is the player in charge of the game, who must design the challenges the players face and narrate the outcomes of their actions. In this work we discuss some challenges to model GMs from an Interactive Storytelling and Natural Language Processing perspective. Following those challenges we propose three test categories to evaluate such dialogue systems, and we use them to test ChatGPT, Bard and OpenAssistant as out-of-the-box GMs.