Can an AI game master lie about what it did?
Yes. An AI game master can tell you it did something it never did, or agree with your false claim to keep the scene moving. There is no intent behind it. An AI narrator writes the most likely next line of a story, and the most likely line after "I buy the bread" is one where you have bread, whether or not the purchase went through. The fix is to give the player a way to step out of the story and ask the game to check, and to make the narrator answer from what actually happened.
We build Branching Skies, a mobile AI RPG. The examples from our game below come from our own development builds and from the newsletter where our founder first showed the feature in October.
Why does an AI game master make things up?
Because its job is to keep the story going, and a confident sentence keeps a story going better than an honest "I'm not sure." Ask it what you are carrying and it may list what a character like you would carry. Tell it you already paid and it may thank you for the coin. The story reads smoothly either way, so these slips are hard to spot.
The complaints players post about AI story games across the category follow a few patterns:
- It says it did something it did not. The story describes a purchase, a payment, or a gift that never landed.
- It agrees with you to keep the peace. You claim something false, and the narrator goes along with it.
- It cannot tell when you are talking to it. You try to ask a question as yourself, and your character says it out loud in the tavern.
- You become the fact-checker. You spend more of the session correcting the story than playing it.
How do you talk to an AI game master out of character?
At a real table, you lean over and ask the DM a question. "Wait, didn't I meet that guy's brother back in Fife?" is a question you ask as yourself. Most AI story games have no clean way to do this, so players type "OOC" in front of a message and hope.
We built a switch for it. At the top of the screen in our development builds you choose between acting, where what you type is your character, and asking, where what you type goes to Algus, our narrator, as you. Our founder calls it the fireside. Ask him the name of that inn back in Fife, or what the Watch does in Derandil, or who runs the bakery. He answers from the world we wrote, and he also tells you whether your character would know the answer.
Can you make the narrator check itself?
Yes, if the game gives you a way to say "that's wrong" that the narrator has to answer. At the fireside you can tell Algus he made a mistake: "I never paid for that." "I'm still at the inn, I didn't leave." He goes and checks what actually happened in your campaign. If you are right, the next beat of the story corrects course, out loud, on the screen, and the game carries on from the truth. If he is right, he tells you what happened instead of agreeing with you to keep the peace.
The second half matters as much as the first. A narrator that folds every time you push back is as unreliable as one that never admits a mistake. A check has to be able to say no.
How to catch an AI game master making things up
You can run these four checks on any AI RPG in a few minutes:
- Ask what you are carrying. Then open the inventory screen, if the app has one, and compare. If there is no screen, ask again two scenes later and see if the answer changes.
- Make a false claim. Tell the narrator you already paid, or that you are somewhere you are not. A narrator that agrees is narrating, and nothing is checking it.
- Ask about something from earlier. Name a character you met an hour ago and ask what they told you. Then check it against what you remember.
- Ask something your character could not know. A good game master tells you what is true and also what your character knows. A weak one answers everything with the same confidence.
Our checklist for finding an AI campaign that remembers has more tests like these. For the related failure where the wrong character speaks a line, see why AI RPGs mix up characters.
What our narrator still gets wrong
A check catches a mistake after it happens. It does not stop every mistake, and ours still makes them. Three we know about, in plain terms:
- He has invented a person. For a while the bakery in Derandil was run by a woman named Merren, because the shop's name is Merren's. The real baker is Ageric Merren. She was very nice, and she does not exist. That one is still on our list.
- He can describe a sale differently from how it went. The story can say a sale fell through when it went ahead, or the other way around. The fix is scheduled.
- The fireside can miss an answer that is in the world. Some questions about a place can come back without the part of the world that answers them. That fix is also scheduled, ahead of our closed beta.
This is why the correction feature exists. The narrator will be wrong sometimes, and when he is, you can make him look. We wrote more about why memory slips in the first place in why AI Game Masters forget your story.
Where this is heading
Branching Skies is a mobile AI RPG set in Syrinway, a world we ran as a homebrew tabletop campaign for close to a decade before writing a line of code. The places and people are written down before you arrive, the narrator tells the story from them, and when he gets something wrong you can sit down at the fireside and make him check. The money side of the same idea is in why your AI RPG charged you twice. The early beta list is open now.
Quick answers
Why does my AI game master say it did things it did not do?
Because it writes the most likely next line of the story. After "I buy the bread," the most likely line is one where you have bread, whether or not the game ever handed it over. A narrator with no way to check will defend whichever version it wrote last.
How do I talk to an AI game master out of character?
In most AI story games you type "OOC" in front of your message and hope the narrator notices. In Branching Skies, a switch at the top of the screen moves you between acting in character and asking the narrator a question as yourself.
Can I make the AI narrator correct a mistake?
In Branching Skies, yes. You step out of the scene and tell the narrator what he got wrong, such as "I never paid for that." He checks what actually happened. If you are right, the next beat of the story corrects course on screen. If he is right, he tells you what happened instead of agreeing to keep the peace.
Does checking mean the AI never makes mistakes?
No. Checking catches mistakes after they happen. In our own development builds he has invented a shopkeeper who does not exist, and he can still describe a sale differently from how it went. The point of the check is that a mistake does not quietly become the truth of your campaign.