After a D&D session, one of my friends told me that they sometimes fired up Copilot while at work and played D&D with it. I was curious as to how Copilot would handle D&D's rules, so I played the popular TTRPG with Microsoft's artificial intelligence. However, I wanted to do more than that; I wanted to see how good it was at making a dungeon, and then guide me through its own creations while I play a hapless barbarian. So, here are the D&D-based adventures that Copilot set for me and how each one went.

Exploring a dungeon with pre-set variables

Testing the waters

First of all, I wanted to give Copilot a pretty basic task where it generated a level 1 dungeon. I gave it the conditions that you'd usually find in a typical adventure of this kind (think Adventurer's League). The goal was to see if Copilot had the chops to play Dungeons and Dragons with me.

I set Copilot to "think deeper" mode and gave it the following prompt:

Please generate a dungeon suitable for a single 1st-level player using the Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition ruleset. Add several rooms and a climactic final boss with an interesting magic item at the end. Design it so that you can act as a dungeon master and lead me through it as a level 1 character.

Copilot gave me a big description of what the dungeon contains. It looked good, so I had it draw up a map for me. You can see it in the gallery above; at first, it looks fine. However, the longer you look at it, the more you see the issues. For instance, the Underground Stream Crossing isn't labelled with a number 3. Not that it'd help much, as the legend only has two entries, both of which are for number 4, and one of them claims that it's a "collassed storage nook," whatever that means.

I had Copilot make me a level 1 barbarian so I could run the dungeon. It gave me Harrek Bloodfist, the half-orc barbarian. The stats looked fine, and perhaps he had a little too much equipment for a level 1 character, but hey, I'm not complaining. If the DM gives me extra goodies, I won't turn them down.

Playing the game was actually surprisingly fun. Copilot seemed to keep the dungeon layout in its mind at all times, and even added some new features to the rooms that it didn't list on the map. For instance, there was a secret passage in the storage room, and the river leads to a magical font where you can learn the location of the goblin shaman. The only thing Copilot really "forgot" was the name of the magic item the goblin shaman dropped, but it still remembered to generate one, so I'll take it.

Copilot also seemed to mix between having me roll the D&D dice and rolling them itself. While having Copilot roll the dice was more convenient for me, I noticed that it never failed a check, which makes me suspect the AI just wanted to hand me wins all the time.

If you'd like to see how my adventure went, here's the link for The Whispering Caverns conversation.

Letting Copilot do whatever it wants

How good is Copilot with a very minimal prompt?

Given how impressed I was with a dungeon with semi-strict instructions, I was overtaken with curiosity. What if I didn't give the AI any specs at all? What if I just handed Copilot the reins and saw what kind of wild dungeon it would make? So, I opened a new window, activated "think deeper," and typed:

Generate a D&D 5e dungeon.

The results were stunning. It made a dungeon for around five players at level 4-6 called The Shadowed Reliquary. By the brief description, it seems that the dungeon was designed to shift and move to confuse anyone who delved within, and featured some puzzles of its own. It even generated a table for each creature, its CR, experience, and special notes, albeit without any stats to play with.

Again, the generated map was almost there. There were no indicators for rooms three and four, two for room five, and no legend. Still, the basics looked alright; I could see my players moving their pieces around this grid in a D&D campaign on Foundry.

I had Copilot make a level 7 barbarian so he could potentially outtank the lack of party members. Unfortunately, I told it to "run me through the dungeon," so it just roleplayed the entire encounter in one go. It seems useful if you want a demo of how a dungeon will ideally play, but I wanted to give it a try, so I asked Copilot to act as a DM.

The first encounter has me fight two shadow mastiffs. I manage to take down one, and Copilot seems to know how D&D 5e combat works, but after I slay one of the mastiffs, the AI seemingly gets bored and just asks me what I want to do next. The lever puzzle wasn't much of a puzzle, either; I just had to pass a perception check, and it handed me the answer.

Unfortunately, this is where Copilot suffered significant memory issues. It remembered some of the rooms in its outline, but changed how they were presented. For example, instead of locating the hidden vault with a perception check, my character had to pull a lever three times while saying "Dusk." At one point, I had to ask Copilot if we were still doing the same adventure that it had made for me, and it reassured me that it was.

The vault was meant to hold a fragment of the Solar Aegis—the MacGuffin my character sought—but Copilot instead placed a "Soul‐Mirror Scrying Globe" there. Granted, Copilot still linked the globe to the Shadowfell, which it originally intended to do with the Solar Aegis, but it was still a little strange. And after I left the dungeon, I realised Copilot never actually used the shifting rooms mechanic.

If you want to see the full logs, check out The Shadowed Reliquary.

Copilot is a better "ideas guy" than a DM

Copilot's abilities as a DM weren't perfect; it sometimes forgot stuff, ignored other things, or changed elements on the fly. However, as someone to bounce ideas off or flesh out a dungeon, I think Copilot did a fantastic job; at least, to the point before it generated those weird-looking maps. If you want Copilot to be your D&D buddy, I recommend you ask it to make a dungeon, tell it to flesh out the bits it didn't expand on, then take that and run it with real people.