A Dungeon Master as a long-horizon agent
Like others, I’ve tried to play solo RPGs and adventure games directly with ChatGPT / Gemini / Claude via their chat UI. While LLM chat applications can convincingly create a world setting, narrate a scenario and interact over a modest number of turns with the user, they tend to eventually descend into problems with self-consistency, rambling storylines, hallucination and the correctness of the rule mechanics governing the game. This led me to start thinking about what it would take to create some coherent approximation of a Dungeon Master (DM) in agent form.
Tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) such as Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) model many of the state management, task decomposition, workflow organization and context engineering challenges that long-horizon agents face. We’ll explore the connection between the challenges of long-horizon agent engineering and D&D DMing in this post, grounded in a demonstration DM agent we built as a testbed for a skill-based agent platform we’ve been developing at ReadyLoop.ai.