My AI policy

The use of AI has several effects on the environment. I believe that AI offers so many possibilities that it is worth finding a way to use it while keeping those effects as small as possible.

This is why I have decided to offset the carbon emissions of D&Digital, using the revenue the game earns. I want to do this with transparency. The live counter below accounts for every request made to the D&Digital Dungeon Master. Requests made with your own Google key or on your own device are not included (more about that further down). Whenever I buy an offset, I will add it to this counter, and the certificate will be here for you to view.

Which AI runs the game?

Mistral AI is a French AI company. I chose them specifically for the merit of their models, and for their transparency about environmental impact. When you play with credits:

• Mistral Large is your Dungeon Master. It tells the story.
• Mistral Small checks the rules after every turn, so your hit points, items and dice stay correct.
• The background work that costs you no credits (the plan of your story and a short summary of what happened so far) also runs on Mistral, as long as the turns you paid for cover it. Otherwise it runs on Google's Gemini.
• Gemini also steps in when Mistral is unavailable.

Mistral runs in the European Union and does not train its models on these requests. You can read more about what is sent where in the privacy policy.

The maps, the battle board and the home screen backgrounds are not made by AI. They are drawn by the game's own code, right in your browser, so they cost no AI at all.

How is this measured?

In July 2025 Mistral published a full lifecycle analysis of its Mistral Large 2 model. It was made with the climate consultancy Carbone 4 and ADEME, the French agency for the ecological transition, and checked by two independent reviewers. Most published AI figures only count the electricity used to answer a question. Mistral's study also counts training the model, and building and running the hardware it runs on, which is most of the footprint. The result: about 1.14 grams of CO2e for a reply of 400 tokens (a token is about three quarters of a word). You can read Mistral's study here.

The game records the number of tokens of every request, and multiplies the tokens of each reply by Mistral's figure:

• The reply counts, the way Mistral measured it. Each turn also sends the Dungeon Master a long description of your game. Reading it takes the AI far less work than writing a reply, so for now it is not counted on its own. If better figures for it are published, I will add them.
• The rules check counts too. The smaller model that checks every turn is counted at the same figure as the large one, even though a smaller model uses less.
• When Gemini steps in, I use Google's own published figure for those requests.

So far, a turn comes to about 2 grams of CO2e by this count, everything included.

How is it offset?

I buy certified carbon removal from Climeworks, a Swiss company. I use their Balanced portfolio, which combines removal by nature with direct air capture: carbon taken straight out of the air and stored deep underground. Climeworks was the first direct air capture company to be certified under the Puro Standard, and it is independently verified by DNV. You can read how they measure and verify it here.

Each purchase covers everything on the counter up to that moment. Climeworks has a minimum purchase, and while D&Digital is small, that minimum will usually be more than the game has emitted. I then buy the larger amount, and I do not count the difference towards later emissions.

These offsets cover carbon only.

What is not included?

The counter only includes requests made through the D&Digital Dungeon Master, because those are the only ones I can honestly measure.

If you play with your own Google key, your requests go straight from your browser to Google and are billed to your own Google account. I never see them, so I cannot count or offset them. If you run a model on your own computer, the electricity is your own.

Put simply: playing with credits is the only way your play is covered.

Why I don't call D&Digital carbon neutral

Removing carbon is worth doing, but it does not make the emissions disappear. That is why I do not call D&Digital carbon neutral, climate neutral or climate positive. I would rather show you the numbers than give you a label.

Sources

• Mistral AI, Our contribution to a global environmental standard for AI (July 2025): the lifecycle analysis of Mistral Large 2 behind the figure of 1.14 g CO2e per 400 token reply, carried out with Carbone 4 and ADEME.
• Google Cloud, Measuring the environmental impact of AI inference (August 2025): about 0.03 g CO2e for a median Gemini text prompt, the figure used for every request Gemini answers.
• The Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the accounting standard Mistral's study follows.
• Climeworks, where I buy certified carbon removal, and how they measure and verify it.
• Climeworks, first direct air capture company certified under the Puro Standard, verified by DNV, and the Puro Standard itself.