AI has completely revolutionized how I play RPGs

Crossposting this here because I thought you guys might appreciate it.

When ChatGPT and other open source LLMs first came out, there was a lot of speculation as to how these technologies could change gaming. I recall there being posts and comments about when we could have AI powered NPCs. Nvidia showcased ACE back in 2024, which was an NPC powered by a cloud LLM server. Fast forward to today, and there's a lot of doom and gloom around AI, rightfully so in the case of pretty much every closed source company. But on the bright side, open weight LLMs have advanced so much to the point where they are really good if you know exactly how to use them.

Case in point: Skyrim. Skyrim afaik was one of the first test beds for integrating LLMs into video game NPCs thanks to its moddable nature and versatile fantasy setting. The first mod to come out was Mantella. While it was fairly barebones, it was a good proof-of-concept for how LLMs could be used to power conversations with NPCs. Then came the Herika mod, which was an individual NPC named Herika who was powered by an LLM. It expanded the abilities of the LLMs by allowing it to see NPC actions, dialogue, world events, etc, making the AIs smarter with more context. The devs of Herika then expanded the functionality to all NPCs and renamed the mod "AI Follower Framework" before then changing the name again to "CHIM" (a reference to some metaphysical shenanigans in The Elder Scrolls lore). I played with CHIM a lot before then migrating over to another LLM mod called SkyrimNet. It does much of the same thing as CHIM, but in my opinion its UI and controls are a lot more user friendly.

Having finished creating a 500+ mods custom modlist built specifically for LLM gameplay and then playing with SkyrimNet for the last ~40 hours, I don't think I can ever play RPGs normally again. The amount of emergent storytelling that can be told with this tool is astounding IF you know its limitations and how to use it properly. Before using LLMs, I used to download a litany of quest mods and custom follower mods to get new experiences in Skyrim. Unfortunately, the quality of such mods can be hit or miss. The Rigmor Series of mods adds a new NPC named Rigmor who has her own backstory and a very in depth quest, but the writing strips away pretty much all character agency. The Interesting NPCs mod is another big one that adds a lot of characters with depth, but holy moly those NPCs get very soap-boxy and overly philosophical. SkyrimNet has been the perfect solution for this at least for me.

With SkyrimNet, no longer do I have to download a morbillion NPC and quest mods. This singular mod allows me to create NPC personalities and actually role play with them. (Crazy, I know. Roleplaying in a Role Playing Game). If you're creative, willing to tinker with the system, and willing to accept a little jank, you can roleplay your own entire questlines.

For example, in the vanilla Skyrim game, there's an NPC named Ranmir who's depressed because he thinks his wife Isabelle left him. When you investigate her disappearance, you find her dead in a cave. You then report her death to Ranmir, he gets the closure he wants, and then that's the end of the game.

But for my character, I'm roleplaying as a Necromancer, and I had just recently obtained the Dead Thrall spell from the College of Winterhold. So instead of just letting Isabelle's corpse go to waste, I decided to turn her into a Dead Thrall, and I powered her intelligence using an LLM. In TES, necromancy is theororized to work by conjuring a daedra from Oblivion and placing its soul into the corpse of a mortal. For this RP, I made a backstory for the summoned daedra and named her Volla. This Volla was weak, timid, fearful, but filled with wanderlust for Tamriel. Having found possession of a new body in Isabelle, she journeyed alongside my necromancer and became a powerful warrior in her own right. However, the weakness of her will allowed the original mind of Isabelle to begin taking control of Isabelle's body again, threatening to erase Volla from Tamriel. But Volla's possession of Isabelle's body also threatened to erase Isabelle. Through a lot of RP and character development, Volla and Isabelle learned to coexist, eventually merging into one persona that is both and neither Volla nor Isabelle. Without getting further into my bad fanfiction, this entire questline was produced emergently with the use of an LLM in real time gameplay.

This is just one of many examples I've had in my playthrough so far, and I imagine that there are many, many more to come.

So, those are the pros, now here are the cons. The default parameters for SkyrimNet, CHIM, and LLMs mean that you have to handhold the AI a lot if you have a set story and character arc that you want to go through for a story. The LLM can't read your mind after all and will often default to generic storytelling. My story with Isabelle and Volla never would've happened if I hadn't directly injected character actions and dialogue into the prompt. The LLM really only produces what your creativity can imagine. It won't be super creative on its own.

If you want good quality and fast NPC responses, prepare to subscribe to OpenRouter or another LLM service. I avoid using closed weight models like ChatGPT or Gemini for their pricing and my overall distaste with their business models. I've been using two open weight models for my RP: Google Gemma 4 31B for NPC dialogue and Deepseek V3.2 0324 for function calling. You might be able to run Gemma 4 31B on a high end workstation GPU, like an Nvidia RTX Pro 6000, at high speeds, but you certainly won't be able to run Deepseek V3.2. At 685 billion parameters, you would need a dedicated datacenter in your home to run it locally. As a result, the most financially sensible option is to just charge up an OpenRouter account with a few dollars and connect SkyrimNet to your OpenRouter token. Then you have to connect SkyrimNet to a Text-To-Speech engine, which isn't all that hard to run if you have an extra Nvidia-powered device laying around (an old 8GB VRAM gaming laptop in my case). Responses have been really fast and haven't hindered RP at all, but this set up can either require huge compute or require a subscription service.

Finally, you really have to have a tinkerer's mindset to have a good experience right now. If you're the kind of person who dabbles in Linux command line shenanigans or enjoys compiling obscure software from GitHub repos, you won't have any problems modding Skyrim for use with LLMs. But for 99% of gamers, this kind of set up is very, very technical, and it certainly won't be for you. At least not yet.

As the quality of smaller, local LLMs improves and the technology gets better, I can see SkyrimNet become more and more seamless for casual users. It's my hope that this kind of technology finds use in games that prioritize emergent storytelling. I can understand why most gamers would avoid this kind of technology in favor of hand-crafted, artisanal storytelling like those found in narrative-heavy games like Kingdom Come Deliverance, Cyberpunk, or God of War. But if you want to tell your own stories and have AI produce the special moments with NPC dialogue, then this tech is right for you.

I already have 3000 hours in Skyrim over the past 10 years. 200 from vanilla and 2800 from modded. I intended originally to sustain my next couple hundred hours of gameplay just with the banger mods that are released on a monthly basis. But now with LLM integration, I can see myself playing Skyrim basically forever, even well past TES 6 unless a similar mod comes out for that.

It's my hope that games that prioritize emergent storytelling make use of this technology to extend their lifespans. And if that doesn't happen, I hope that they at least open up their games to modding so that the community can implement it like the cracked Skyrim modding scene.