The Business: We Already Have A Proof Of Concept For Tabletop LLM Production

Told you that holdouts lose.

It feels like just yesterday I was giggling at ChatGPT's goofy attempts to make Magic card mechanics. Now ChatGPT can design a 110-page RPG from scratch and playtest it with simulated players. How long until it can just one-shot a 1,500-page rule set like ACKS? https://t.co/359tqRlarS pic.twitter.com/dxFmOt5Yjh

— Alexander Macris (@archon) April 23, 2026

You can read what got generated here.

We can bring harnesses and apps and models together another way as well. I asked Codex to create an entirely new tabletop roleplaying game, basically its own version of Dungeons and Dragons in a fantasy world of its own invention, full of all of the tables and rules you need to play. I also asked it to simulate players experiencing the game and revise the rules based on what it found.

The article where this process gets explained is here.

I'm not going to say that the game is good. Nor am I going to say that it's worth engaging. What this is, however, is PROOF OF CONCEPT.

From Idea to Product in minutes; this is what Wizards of the Coast will use to maintain dominance over the commercial side of the hobby, both for any in-house work and especially to oversee any third party works going forward- it is trivially easy to take the licensor's manuscript, filter it through the Brand Fit filter as a rewrite, and then do some spot-checks before letting it go live on Beyond.

That linked paper comments on what needs to be considered.

In addition to being technically neat, there is a lot to like about the actual content. The setting is interesting and novel, and the rules appear to make sense, drawing on existing game patterns while adding unique elements. However, a closer inspection also reveals the jagged frontier of AI ability is not entirely gone. Every generation of AI models has struggled with actually building long-form fiction. If you are a frequent reader of AI writing you see the same problems here: a love of the uncanny; overly complex ideas that do not fully pay off; weird metaphors (“weather and architecture are the same argument at different speeds”); too many ornate sentences (“the holy things that surface when a sea forgets it was once a road,” is cool once, an entire book of that is exhausting); dialogue where every character speaks in the same clipped tone; and the name “Mara.” So, even amongst all the amazing technical progress, there are still rough edges.

Holdouts are going to lose hard and fast now that it's shown that a professional-quality product can be made by one man in the fraction of the time it formerly did. Remember that Revealed Preferences are Revealed; people only care about the result, not about how that came about- claims to the contrary are not supported by the action that matters. This will lift the floor of what is considered Acceptable Output in all hobby publications, commercial or hobbyist, because the means to do so are now in the hands of common men who need only to learn how to use their words to make the machine do as they will.

This is not just about Tabletop. This is about all forms of media production. The folks crying about it are already being rooked by those that use the tools, making "detectors" and "bans" as useless as broken condoms. There's a reason that Vox Day and Jon Del Arroz can turn shitposts into full product releases within a week, soon a weekend, and have an entire trilogy of novels in digital and print up on Amazon within a month and make serious bank doing so- they know the tools and can strike while the iron is hot to profit on a meme wave while it's relevant. (If you know how Vox writes, that's massive.)

The last refuge for the holdouts is on Prestige Release Formats: high-cost, high-expense hardcover productions with lots of addons (appendices, annotations, etc.) where a single copy is at least $100 and likely some multiple of that. Anything that can be done On Demand just had its pricing crater as a consequence of how fast and easy it is to produce the content that those formats hold and deliver to the end user.

Which means that the already-waning commercial viability of the hobby just got nuked. GOOD.