Generating stories using role-playing games and simulated human-like conversational dynamics

Abstract

Tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) have a well-tested history of making possible the improvisation of a story through the players' interactions. Adapting these human dynamics and game setting and mechanics could represent a new and fertile approach to computational story generation. In this paper we introduce a story generation system that recreates the player interaction sequence that takes place in a tabletop role-playing game (essentially a human storyteller and a player character conversation). We then process these interactions to render a story following the rules and using the knowledge base from a popular RPG. Finally, we control parameters present in the narrative RPG ruleset to tweak the resulting story, such as the presence of mental, physical and social challenges, as well as the amount of protagonism that each player has.