A free D&D 5e game where an engine rolls the dice and holds your gear and stats — enjoyable already, but slow between turns, eager to roll, and every character in it shares one verdict on what you did.

WorldAI — the app name for WorldArchitect.AI — is a browser-based D&D 5e game built and run by one developer, Jeffrey Lee-Chan. An AI narrates the world. The dice are not left to the AI: they are rolled on the server, and the rolls can be audited. An engine also keeps track of your items and stats, so your gear and numbers do not depend on what the model happens to remember. You sign in with Google or email, set up a campaign in a short wizard, and play. The public wiki documents much more: a living world where NPCs pursue their own agendas, an optional faction mode, standing “god-mode” instructions that shape the narration, and story export to PDF, DOCX or text.

It is already a good game to spend an evening in. We played it for 24 hours and finished with a story we enjoyed, one that never broke. We met a couple of bugs, and none of them spoiled a session.

Four things hold it back, and each has its own section in our first look:

Memory is lossy. The story is compressed as it grows, and then compressed again. The key facts persisted for the whole 24 hours. Some of the narrative detail did not.
Turns are slow. The wait between your action and the reply is on the long side.
It rolls too often. The dice are honest, but the game asks for them where no roll is needed. As an army commander, we had to roll just to call our own lieutenants in for a report — and the wiki says no player setting can switch the dice off.
The world has one opinion. When you do something morally grey, the game seems to decide once whether it was right or wrong, and every character takes that side — even characters whose values should pull them the other way. If the game decides you were wrong, you are penalised for it. Its own design spec says companions should “approve or disapprove based on their values”; in our campaign they did not.

Models

The default model is Gemini Flash. There is an opt-in “spicy” mode, off by default, which switches the game to Grok 4.3 for less filtered play. The project’s wiki also lists OpenAI, Anthropic and MiniMax as providers and describes bring-your-own-key support. We played on the defaults.

Pricing

WorldAI is free, and at the moment there is no way to pay for it: the developer considers it still in development. It is free while the load on the servers stays manageable, and that may change as more players arrive. We will add a pricing table if a paid plan appears.

We haven’t rated WorldAI, and won’t while its developer calls it in development. See our first look for the full 24 hours — a rated review follows at launch. (WorldArchitect.AI is an independent project by Jeffrey Lee-Chan; Arcanum is unaffiliated with it. Dungeons & Dragons and D&D are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC; “D&D 5e” is used here nominatively, to describe rules compatibility.)