Model-Based Testing for Dungeons & Dragons
loskutoff.com79 points by Firfi 3 days ago
79 points by Firfi 3 days ago
Converting DnD rules and edge cases was always a bit of fun and became my "hello world" as I was learning stuff.
Years back, I worked at a company where the agreement required them to review any personal application that I created for a year or so after I left. I was super happy to send them iterations of my DM'ing tools - written for Java (micro edition), WinCE, Palm, and any other mobile gadgets I could get my hands on.
Around the 4th application I sent, the pharmaceutical company released me from the non-compete clause. I've always wondered if they were required to try and run the applications.
You should sell those as a suite of tools for people in similar situations. The Palm one in particular should make for fun.
Someone please explain the grapple leapfrog example and why that "exploit" is interesting. If my players tried that, I'd happily let them use their full turns to do some crazy trapeze act across the battlefield.
And then I'd remind them that they could have just dashed normally.
Moreover, how do the new rules close the "exploit"? You can still move 30ft while carrying someone. (60/2 - 30 vs 60 - 30*2) How is that difference meaningful in this case?
(Also, wouldn't you need something like rogue's dash-as-a-bonus -action to grapple and dash on the same turn?)
The article is pretty interesting overall but this example mystifies me. Am I missing something obvious?
Yeah, both players were either rogues or tabaxi (although feline swiftness isn’t dashing)
This is also directly why I don’t like D&D. It is way too combat focused and video gamey. If your combat system is so complex that people find (or even feel that they need to find) “exploits” in it then your system probably sucks. So many class features are purely combat focused completely ignoring the actual roleplaying part of role playing games.
Also the “counter chaining” feels odd to me, is this something that actually happens? Like people waste spellslots counterspelling a counterspell?
From my limited experience, many players and DMs seem to get things backwards in exactly the way you're describing. They take the rulebook as the starting point or the "controls" for the game and since combat is the most detailed they tend to focus on that to the exclusion of other parts of the game. I've always viewed the rules as a way of settling disputes or uncertainty instead, so you start from the role playing and only resort to rules when you need fair adjudication or clarification on complicated situations. i.e. don't give me quotes from the rulebook, tell me what your character does and we'll work it out as part of the story.
One of my biggest issues with playing DND is that I never fully understood the rules. I'd play with people who had been playing for years, and they didn't explain things very well, and that made it hard to play. Hopefully, this will help with that.
There are other RPGs with light rules that are WAY more fun than D&D. I've been playing "Blades in the Dark" recently, where the players run heists in a victorian ghost industrial city. It's an absolute delight.
D&D is better as a video game. Try Baldur's gate. It has the side benefit of teaching you the rules if you ever want to jump in to a local game
> I never fully understood the rules
I played from the early 80s through early 90s. Mostly AD&D 1e but earlier on the red/blue boxes and later on 2e.
Recently I've taken to reading r/adnd for nostalgia reasons. One thing become abundantly clear real fast, no one I ever played with ever truly understood the rules. Even the "rules lawyers" among us. And I played with a large variety of people from different friend groups, to different game shops, and even some smaller cons.
We understood the key details for the parts we actually used, but we weren't intentionally avoiding the rest, we just didn't understand that they existed. There's just so much minutia in those rule books.
This also makes me chuckle when I see newer players come into r/adnd as part of the OSR movement. Because they *do* seem to assume that all of these rules were commonly applied. But my anecdata would say otherwise. I originally assumed that these newcomers to the old rules would be playing a game I found alien as they'd be bringing in newer sensibilities, but instead I suspect I'd find it alien as they're more likely to be sticklers for the full ruleset!
This is one of the biggest issues with DnD in general. It's also one of the reasons behind the simplicity of the Shadowdark[1] RPG.
Shadowdark does not only have much simpler (and fewer) rules, there's also a lot less world building. This encourages the DM and the players to create their own fantasies, rather than adhering to the races described in the (MASSIVE) DnD manual.
Agreed. I'm onboarding a couple of new players and see the issues again and again. I'm dropping the overall proficiency score as it just confuses things. skills and abilities just take awhile to become secondhand though.
You could consider playing Shadowdark with new players instead. It's much more friendly to new players.
Proficiency scores are HUGE and extremely important, especially for classes like rogue, bard, etc who rely on them so much - especially for non-combat roleplaying ability or reflex actions.
Watch a few different popular gaming sessions on YouTube. Tons to choose from.
It's probably way different than you expect (and will be different between DMs).
I have a couple players that aggressively press for edge cases all the time. I encourage it, as it gives me the chance to push back with "ok, that's fine on flat ground but your in thick underbrush," which seems to be more immersive and encourages more roleplaying. Fun stuff.
If you need formal verification for your D&D group that meets once a week, you have problems that LLMs will never solve for you.
Dungeons & Dragons rules are a spec spanning thousands of pages, not formalized, but thoroughly tested by the community. Moving them to a formal specification language (Quint) was an obvious next step. It worked and proved to also be a great LLM self-checker.
Fantastic, I'd been daydreaming about doing similar for a while!
Do I understand correctly that the Quint code is not needed 'at runtime', that it's there for model-based testing of the XState implementation?
As someone who is trying to re-create the Pokémon system, I am running into similar issues. There many things going on a single "turn", especially with abilities that can pretty much change any of the game rules.
This is so cool, I'll definitely be playing with in over the weekend. I meant to put Quint and D&D together in some similar ideas before but never found the time, so I love to see this coming alive from someone else <3
I think this is fantastic. I recently started playing DnD with a local group and can’t wait to dive into this to better understand the mechanics.
The "Grapple Leapfrog" is like the peasant railgun, and I think the "real" solution would be a recognition that order of conflict resolution in real time is not the same as ordering linear activities in game time.
Maybe the content is great, but the AI writing style is really grating with its staccato sentences and faux-"profoundness". Can't bear it any more, stopped reading.
"You’re not checking logic. You’re checking shape.". Ugh.
This and subheading like “the problem” “The feature space” bother me for reasons I can’t fully explain.
It feels like the laziest possible section separator and generally would be better with an extra space divider or something.
It’s so prevalent in AI writing.
I'm worse than you: the quotes are what drive me insane:
> . “HP never exceeds max”
I think it's because its such a braindead thing to fix that when I see them, it's clear the "author" hasn't even read their own "work".
Like, you're not even trying to hide it at the laziest level possible. Blegh.
(See how you can tell a human wrote that?)
Tangent, but.. It must’ve picked up the faux profoundness on LinkedIn. Those posts I find truly unreadable. It half seriously makes me think anyone being able to post anything was a bad move.
The way things are headed, people with the ability to write on their own are going to be the hottest job in the 2030s.
You think there will still be writing jobs for human beings at all by then?
AI will be so normalized across culture that any raw, unfiltered human expression will read as gross and unprofessional by most people.
Maybe for resume cover letters and LinkedIn posts but I haven't met anyone with half decent taste who prefers AI writing, even well prompted, to skillful human writing. I'm not a stranger to using AI for writing tasks by any means but it's only ever a starting point that gets heavily rewritten by both myself and the model.
I don't understand how "exploits" and "edge cases" can exist in a narrative-driven game where the DM can always just say "cut the shit" if they don't like what the players are doing. Or let it happen for rule of cool. At the end of the day the rules are whatever the DM says they are, and don't have to be rules as written.
Even combat can have a narrative element (and it should, to be fun.) There are rules yes but the game isn't supposed to be this rigid.
Great
Shit like this results from a severe misunderstanding of what's enjoyable in a table-top RPG. It's not a fucking video game.
Agreed, people should only enjoy the features of it that I enjoy the way I like to enjoy them. Enjoying it the wrong way is at best stupid, possibly even evil.
"I fixed the stupidly complicated tabletop game with an even more complicated piece of software! Now you can be confused and not have to look at human faces while you furiously type away at the computer in order to prove to the DM that the ridiculous loophole that you found in the rules is actually logically consistent"
Yet another specification language! And it also has a new sibling for distributed protocols: https://quint-lang.org/choreo
Any opinions on this one for software development?