AI Takes Over as DM

I built a D&D 5e skill that uses Claude Code as a DM so the family can play gathered around the couch.

When I type in the party's actions on my laptop, Claude handles dice rolls, NPC roleplay, HP management, and combat progression, and the narrative is automatically sent to a browser page and displayed on the TV via Chromecast.

The core features are as follows.

• D&D 5e support: handles initiative, attacks, saves, spell slots, XP, and leveling up
• Character creation guide: point buy / rolled stats, racial bonuses, automatic assignment of starting equipment by class and background
• Persistent campaigns: state, NPCs, and quests are saved as markdown files, carrying over between sessions
• Cinematic display: typewriter-style narration, per-scene backgrounds, and a party sidebar with HP bars
• 17 scene types: backgrounds automatically switch based on keywords like tavern, dungeon, glacier, crypt
• Combat tracker: automatic initiative, real-time turn order pointer

The structure was also tuned with token cost in mind.

• Simple, deterministic tasks are offloaded to python
• Remaining simple reasoning is assigned to Haiku
• Actual campaign judgment is handled by Sonnet
• Opus is used only for world generation, designed to produce more nuanced narrative elements

For session management, instead of sending the entire conversation history, it's summarized into a session-log md, and the character/state/world/NPC files are updated. The Flask server for the TV is a separate option, so the install is relatively simple.