It doesn't need to be random tidbits. You can add "life events" for the character to the prompt, and steer the responses heavily toward the character wanting to talk about those. With an LLM in the picture, you can even have the character remember past interactions with you, and expand on it different ways depending on how you interacted with them.

It's the whole debate about carefully created vs procedurely generated. LLM created dialog with be a vapid, vacuous and sterile as starfield was, or No Mans Sky

Instead of generating truly random dialogue, you could choose to only generate random seeds within a certain number range, so that the probability that two players seeing the same line of dialogue increases, while still having enough variety for it to feel "random" to a solo user.

> will inevitably make us lose common ground scenarios that end up being memorable moments, like the arrow to the knee from Skyrim or "such devastation! this was not my intention" from Final Fantasy 14.

GLaDOS from Portal would offer one player pudding and another one a steak. You get to a wall which says “the ravioli is a fraud” and become utterly confused.

I agree. An important aspect would be lost. It would be as interesting and relatable as sharing that dream you had last night with your friends. “Uh huh. Cool story bro.”

A better application of LLMs could be merely using them as a text parser in text adventures. NPCs could continue to have some hidden, hard coded information or abilities, here stored in the context window, and the LLM is used to provide that information to the the player he (or she) puts in roughly the right words. Rather than exactly the right words.