Using ChatGPT or Claude as your DM vs. as an oracle

If you’ve tried to play a solo tabletop RPG with a large language model, you’ve probably used it one of two ways without ever naming the choice. You either handed the AI the whole campaign — “you’re the dungeon master, take it from here” — or you used it to answer one question at a time while you stayed in the driver’s seat.

Those are very different games. One of them tends to fall apart around the third scene. The other is the way solo roleplayers have been playing for years, just with a faster oracle. Here’s how to tell them apart and when to reach for each.

The DM approach: hand over the whole story

The instinct is reasonable. Modern models write beautifully, improvise quickly, and never get tired. So you say “be my DM,” describe your character, and start typing.

For the first ten minutes it’s magic. Then the cracks show:

It always says yes. Ask a model whether the locked door opens, whether the guard believes your lie, whether the dying NPC has one last secret — and it will usually find a way to give you what the scene seems to want. There are no stakes when the world quietly rearranges itself to be agreeable.
It forgets, then overcorrects. Drop a detail twenty messages ago and it may vanish, or it may suddenly become the entire plot. Continuity is a suggestion.
It has no spine. A good DM sometimes tells you no, and it gets worse. An eager assistant rarely does, because nothing outside the conversation is pushing back.

The deeper problem is that you stop being surprised for reasons you can trust. When the twist comes, you can’t tell whether the story earned it or the model just felt like being dramatic. That uncertainty is quietly corrosive to a solo game, where you are the only audience and the only authority. If the AI can bend the world whenever it likes, the world stops feeling real.

The oracle approach: keep the wheel, ask the dice

Solo tabletop players solved this problem a long time ago, and the tool is the oracle.

An oracle is a set of dice-driven tables that answer open questions in the story. Is the ferryman still at his post? You decide how likely it is, you roll, and the dice answer — yes, no, or one of the charged in-betweens like yes, but and no, and. The randomness is transparent and auditable. You can see exactly why the story turned, because you watched the die land.

In this approach the AI isn’t the author. It’s the scribe and the interpreter:

You narrate, frame the question, and decide what’s at stake.
The dice decide the raw outcome — honestly, with a published tabletop pedigree behind the odds.
The AI takes that result and writes it into vivid prose, surfaces a complication, and hands the moment back to you.

The twists still surprise you — more than they did when the model was just being agreeable — but now they surprise you for reasons you can see. The dice tell the truth, even when the story doesn’t want them to. And because the structure comes from the oracle rather than the model’s memory, the game holds together over a long campaign instead of dissolving into vibes.

This is the heart of the Ironsworn and Mythic GME traditions that solo RPGs are built on, and it’s why “honest dice, not AI whims” is the whole point.

When to use which

To be fair to the DM approach: it has its place.

Reach for full AI narration when you want a low-effort, lean-back experience — a bedtime story you star in, a quick bit of fiction, a setting you’re just exploring with no intention of keeping it. If you don’t need the world to push back, letting the model run is fine.

Reach for the oracle when you want a game: real stakes, outcomes you didn’t choose, and a campaign that remembers itself and earns its surprises. If you want to finish with a story you trust — one where the hard turns happened because the dice said so — the oracle is the way.

Most experienced solo players live almost entirely in the second mode, and dip into the first only when they want to coast.

You don’t have to wire this up yourself

You can absolutely run the oracle approach by hand: keep a few tables open in a tab, roll your own dice, and paste the results into a chat with an instruction to narrate. Plenty of people do, and it works.

It’s also exactly what Soliloquest is built to do for you. The oracle is built in, the rolls are real and visible, and the AI Storyteller’s job is to interpret the dice and write the result down as prose — a journal you keep, not a chat log you lose. You stay in the narrator’s chair; the dice keep everyone honest; and you can hand over as much or as little of the telling as you want.

Either way, the lesson is the same: don’t ask the AI to be your dungeon master. Ask it to read the dice.

New to solo play? Start with Styles of Play and Omens & Entropy, or just start a campaign — new accounts get free credits, no card required.