Recently I started thinking about playing D&D as a kid. In middle school I could commit countless hours to D&D. I remember spending an entire sleepover with my friends just rolling up characters. My brother and I could play every afternoon if we wanted. Our adventures tended toward endless dungeon crawls with lots of fudged combat rolls, obscene amounts of quasi-random treasure, and relatively little role-playing.

As an adult, the thought of this kind of gaming is not terribly fulfilling. Now when I DM, I want to create rich worlds with complex characters, challenging puzzles, and varied strategic combat. I regularly run sessions for 5 or 6 players that run for 3 to 4 hours. I have two young kids, a demanding day job, and am trying to build a business. To run the kind of game that I find rewarding, I need to make the most of every minute I spend both preparing and playing.

Let’s face it, running a modern game of D&D isn’t easy. The DM is required to be creative and improvisational, make on-the-spot adjudications based on memorized knowledge of a complex ruleset, while also performing mental math, tracking dozens of moving pieces, and maintaining detailed notes. Between sessions the DM is expected to develop creative content that is challenging and rewarding while connecting the backstories of multiple players to some overarching plot, and at the same time coordinating players’ schedules to determine when to play. These demands are inherently asymmetric between DM and Players. This is the challenge that the Tabyltop team refers to as DM Burden.

DM Burden is a problem for a number of reasons. I know that personally, the administrative aspects of running the game significantly reduce the mental bandwidth I have for being creative. I’d like to be able to track everyone’s hit points and conditions while managing a multi-round strategy for the baddies and also creatively narrating combat, but my brain can’t effectively juggle all of them. I also know that things fall through the cracks all the time. There is almost no question that having a co-DM responsible for the minutiae would make me a better Dungeon Master.

There is also the very real condition of DM Burnout. DM’s describe this as anything from writer’s block to full-on anxiety attack. There’s lots of great content out there on DM burnout and how to prevent it, including a recent video from Dungeon Dudes and an older one from Matt Mercer. DM Burnout is often passing, affecting just a few session, but it is sometimes a campaign-killer. There is little doubt that DM burden is at the core.

DM Burden is an even bigger issue for new DMs. I hear all the time from people that want to play D&D but can’t find a group. When I suggest they learn to be a DM they look at me like I’ve got two heads. Even for experienced players, making the leap to DMing is very intimidating. And as an experienced DM already running two campaigns, the time required to start a third to bring in new players is is an unfortunate non-starter. I believe that D&D has a DM problem: a shortage of willing DMs is a bottleneck to the number of players and number of games being played.

Lets Make It Easier

Reducing burden on the DM is one of the most important goals for Tabyltop. In fact, it directly informs two of the three pillars of Tabyltop (more on that in an upcoming post). My personal experience looking for “a better way” led me down this path in the first place. But what can be done to ease the DM burden when the game itself is so inherently complex and creatively demanding?

We are currently either testing or planning a variety of features directly related to easing DM Burden. We start by offloading simple administrative tracking to Tablyltop. This is similar to many other VTTs, however we have taken steps to put the most commonly needed tracking features at the DM’s fingertips. We are also hyper-focussed on D&D 5e at the moment (support for other systems coming later), which means the UI has all the tools you need and none that you don’t. Tabyltop handles the burden of tracking conditions, hit points, recurring or environmental effects, and much more. Tabyltop then places quick reference for key rules right where they’re needed. Never again will you have to search to remember the difference between Grappled and Restrained.

Next we’re layering in transcription. Using a speaker-independent automatic speech recognition system, Tabyltop is able to make a complete transcript of your session. Our model is trained on D&D, RPG, and fantasy terminology, and can be further trained with custom vocabulary from your campaign including character names, places, items, and lore. Each sessions’s transcript is annotated with character names and timestamp. Intelligent search puts key information close at hand, whether it was from last week’s session or last year’s.

Transcription gets really interesting when used in real-time. Within a few seconds of uttering a phrase, Tabyltop knows what was said, can place it into context of the game session and active map. Our plan is to tie transcribed phrases into the various tracking systems, suggesting changes to conditions and hit points, and also into the quick reference system, offering one-click lookup of game rules or campaign lore. In addition, the transcription will feed into our notetaking system, allowing phrases spoken either publicly or privately to be added to DM or player campaign notes. Ultimately, we expect this may evolve into a full virtual digital assistant like Siri or Alexa for tabletop RPG gaming.

There’s a lot more to come with regards to addressing DM Burden. We envision scheduling and communication tools to help coordinate your gaming group. We also intend to make it easy to pull in content from great services like dScryb and World Anvil. We even intend to leverage our knowledge of AI to add interactive creative prompts and content generators.

With Tabyltop, we hope to make game preparation faster and easier, and to make gameplay more streamlined and rewarding, for novice and seasoned Dungeon Masters alike. By doing so, we expect to allow DMs to focus more of their energy on great storytelling and reduce the incidence of DM Burnout. I hope you’ll join us on our journey to enhance tabletop RPG gameplay. See you at the Tabyl.