CharGen is a free tool you can use right in your browser to whip up D&D-style character portraits, monsters, and battle maps in no time. Plus, it can help you create complete taverns and shops packed with items and backstories!
Impressive? Yes, but also controversial as CharGen embraces generative AI and a good portion of the tabletop RPG community loathes the technology.
Chris Cocks, the one-time boss at Wizards of the Coast, who was promoted to the top position at Hasbro is most certainly not one of those haters. The ultimate head of D&D is on the record with his desire to use AI significantly within Hasbro and all his gamer friends are using it for D&D.
We know that WotC failed to get a digital version of D&D running and ended up buying D&D Beyond for $146 million, refused to buy a VTT, tried to develop Sigil, and that failed within weeks. So, perhaps Wizards of the Coast are on the market for AI startups like CharGen.
I spoke to Nikita Vorontsov, the creator of CharGe,n and the topic came up.
AI in TTRPGs: An interview with Nikita Vorontsov
What did you do to build CharGen and how much did you do yourself?
I’m a Software Engineer by trade, but CharGen really started as just a way to let friends make AI art of their own characters because they would ask me (after I made my own), to do so since prompting can be so confusing. It then sort of spiralled from there during evenings and weekends. I had my brother help with scaffolding the main frontend, while I caught up with the tech and how to make changes myself. It’s now slowly evolved into this super useful tool.
What can CharGen do that ChatGPT or Gemini cannot?
I feel like ChatGPT and Gemini are great in the sense they provide answers, easy back and forths, and image generation, but they are mainly just a block of text, or you need to have a spreadsheet of specific terms you’re looking for in terms of image gen (for specific races or monsters you may be trying to show).
More than that, they’re also not the easiest to navigate and search by. Which block of text random chat contains the tavern that I generated, and what block of text contains the menu and price?
CharGen simplifies things for you. For example image generation, there’s precreated placeholders for things like races, classes, occupations, as well as specific themes, art styles that makes things easier. This combined with the ability to sort images into folders by encounter, or character, or setting means you can access relevant characters, npcs, monsters much easier if your party decides to go back to that settings from 3 sessions ago randomly.
As for things like Tavern, Shop, etc., generators, again it’s the formatting, but ease of generation. I don’t have to search by blocks of text or constantly ctrl fs through various conversations. You can see the shop, the items, the shopkeeper, price of everything easily accessible and immediate for you.
It’s kind of like the difference between Assembly Code and Java in a visually appealing IDE.
Some tabletop RPG fans hate generative AI with a passion. Have you encountered hostility and aggression from the community?
I definitely have, especially so around the “pure” TTRPG sphere with Reddit, Tiktok, Twitter. Weirdly Bluesky not as much. Aggression mainly feels misguided and tarring everything under the same brush. I find things slowly turn to either 0 or 100, there’s no grey area that I’ve encountered with AI.
Those who dislike AI point at big tech companies who are getting richer after pointing their content harvesters, sometimes regardless of T&Cs or robots.txt, so frequently it felt like a Denial of Service attack. All this to put artists and content creators out of a job. Presumably, you have a different take?
I think that it’s a case of people feeling finally personally hurt by something, specifically, art or content creation. I’m sure when the Model T came out, a lot of horse traders felt personally offended. However the world moves on and something this big is a force you can’t really move.
I also find it incredibly hypocritical when artists feel personally offended that AI supposedly steals art, but then will have absolutely no issue telling the person to go to Google and download art from Google images, which surely, is the same?
You can argue art was “used” without permission, but then you need to define what usage is. If I see an artwork on Google, print it out, and use it as direct inspiration for my own piece heavily relying on it, is that also illegal usage, or is it different because a computer did it?
It’s tricky because where is the fine line imo.
At the end of the day, AI is here to stay, and people would be better off learning how to use to to augment their own drawing, or whatever their use case.
What problem does CharGen solve?
The main issue CharGen fixes imo is the time drain for DMs and players when it comes to session prep. It lets you quickly generate character portraits, NPCs, taverns, shops, loot (and soon to have more). All this instead of trying to remember complicated AI prompts, spending hours on Photoshop, or commissioning expensive artists. CharGen simplifies prep with easy-to-use generators and neat organisation tools, so (similar to above) you don’t need to search for where in a wall of text was your prep. It also means you can focus more on the game itself, rather than worrying last minute because players decided to visit some random tavern you never planned for (and I can actually attest to this happening far too much).
Chris Cocks, the boss at Hasbro and owner of Wizards of the Coast, is not shy about being very interested in generative AI. Chris thinks AI will transform D&D for the better. Wish do you think WotC do and go next with AI?
Hah, they could buy out CharGen, that would be fun. Realistically though I’d say it’s tricky because there’s so many different places to go with this. Obviousl,y you wouldn’t want artists to be replaced, but what about image models trained BY artists on THEIR OWN artwork to be able to quicker produce art for books. That way you aren’t actually cutting staff, but able to shop books quicker. Id love some more advancements to Descent into Avernus (for example). Or perhaps some 1-man campaigns with a properly trained AI DM that works. Id love to see something like that for instances where nobody wants to DM because of whatever reasons.
I’m impressed at the thoroughness of your referral scheme. Where did you learn about this technique?
I was thinking about affiliate codes, gclids for tracking, and how they are used for things like tracking purchases and just thought why not try this for CharGen for referrals.
Auto add the referral code as a query Param and ingest similarly to a gclids, suddenly you can track where people signed up through (eg what person) but can also easier reward people for sharing!
Thanks to Nikita for the interview.
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Please note: Images provided by CharGen. They are generative AI and used in this post to demonstrate what CharGen can and cannot do.
