By Zach Smith
Pittsboro, NC – Gene Galin from the Chatham Journal asked me to show him Quest Mouse on camera and then actually play through an adventure. It mostly went well. A fair amount also went wrong. We had a good time anyway.
A few things to know going in. It’s an alpha, so it’s rough in places. The videos are just the two of us talking, no game screen, so you’re hearing the game more than seeing it. The rough parts are still in.
The pitch
The first video is mostly me explaining what this even is, and why anyone would want it.
The short version of the why, in my own words from the interview: “Being a dungeon master is a lot of work and prep work, especially for people that are not very good at improv like me. I always have to overprepare. And if I just want to play for a little bit, hopefully Quest Mouse can scratch that itch.”
That’s the whole idea. I love D&D. I don’t always have the time, the group, or the energy to run it. Quest Mouse is the thing that lets me just play.
I was also honest with Gene about what it isn’t. “In person D&D is always more fun and better, right? But [Quest Mouse is] something that approximates it.” I believe that. This isn’t trying to replace four friends around a table. It’s trying to be there on the nights that table can’t be.
I named it Quest Mouse because the domain was available and it’s easy to say. As I told Gene, it’s “not a particularly good name, but it’s perfectly adequate.”
Then we played
After the intro we moved to my laptop and started an adventure called The Waking Barrow. Two characters: Gene as Durgan, a dwarf with an axe, and me as Tirion, an elf cleric.
Here’s what worked. The narration is good. Generating fantasy prose was never the hard part, and you can hear that. Gene, who hadn’t played in over a dozen years, seemed to be having a decent time, though he may also have just been being polite.
Then things started to break. Voice recognition dropped certain things we said and we had to repeat or type them. At one point the system took a damage roll and treated it as an attack roll.
Somewhere in there Gene noticed he could just lie about a dice roll and win. We didn’t. It wouldn’t be real D&D, and it wouldn’t be as fun.
Where it came apart
The fight against the necromancer went long, and our dice rolls weren’t helping.
We played it straight. The dungeon master didn’t always return the favor.
Most of the time the rules engine is in a good place and the game holds to it. This session it went awry. The boss kept healing itself when it probably shouldn’t have, and after a while Gene said what we were both thinking: “We’re never going to take this guy down.” The turn order got muddled too. None of it made the fight unwinnable. It just made it drag, and a dragging fight is not a fun one.
I don’t think the model was trying to keep the boss alive for dramatic effect. It’s more boring than that. My best guess is something like context piling up over a long combat, which is exactly the sort of thing I can dig into in the logs afterward.
On camera, I called it what it was: “This is a terrible demo.” Eventually we faked a roll just to wrap the scene. “Let’s just pretend we hit 24. So, we’re cheating at D&D. But that’s for demo purposes.” We never finished the adventure.
So why is combat like this right now? Every turn runs through an LLM, including the enemy turns, which is slow and is where a lot of this kind of slip creeps in. The plan I’ve written about before still holds: take the LLM out of the loop for the parts that don’t need judgment, make more of the game deterministic code instead of model calls, and use the right size of model for each job so it’s faster and cheaper without losing what makes it good. A boss that can’t quietly heal itself is part of that work.
And we still had a good time
That’s the part that actually matters at this stage. The demo broke in front of Gene, and he still said he enjoyed himself. He may have just been being polite, but I’ll take it.
This is a side project. I have a job, a family, and a finite number of evenings. Quest Mouse is a childhood thing I picked back up and pointed my work skills at, and some weeks it moves and some weeks it doesn’t. A demo like this is a good forcing function. Nothing hides in a live run, and everything that broke in front of Gene is now on a list.
If you want to follow along as that list gets shorter, the waitlist is at questmouse.com