> a Symbol that marks the NPC

That seems a bit like deck-chairs on the Titanic. The hard part isn't icon design, the hard part is (A) ensuring a clear list exists of what the NPC is supposed to ensure the user knows and (B) determining whether those goals were received successfully.

For example, imagine a mystery/puzzle game where the NPC needs to inform the user of a clue for the next puzzle, but the LLM-layer botches it, either by generating dialogue that phrases it wrong, or by failing to fit it into the first response, so that the user must always do a few "extra" interactions anyway "just in case."

I suppose you could... Feed the output into another document of "Did this NPC answer correctly" and feed it to another LLM... but down that path lies [more] madness.

No, this is the Einstein/student model that has been proposed for improving LLM output quality.

Basically you have your big clever LLM generating the outputs, and then you have your small dumb LLM reading them and going “did I understand that? Did it make sense?” - basically emulating the user before the response actually gets to the user. If it’s good, on it goes to the user, if not, the student queries Einstein with feedback to have another crack.

https://openai.com/index/prover-verifier-games-improve-legib...

You prompt the LLM to point out that the clue will be added as is to the conversation, but for the LLM to include a marker instead of the actual text to ensure that actual critical details are included unchanged.

EDIT: Also, having the LLM botch a clue occasionally could be a feature. E.g. a bumbling character that you might need to "interrogate" a bit before you actually get the clue in a way that makes sense, and can't be sure it's entirely correct. That could make some characters more realistic.

Or they could just tell you. Imagine talking to someone over and over again. They would tell u to get on with wherever you promised them.

oh yeah that's much smarter than what I suggested

Repeating the last line of dialogue is not just a way to indicate that there's no more dialog, it often also works as a remainder, giving you the most important kernel of information ("You should go to [place] and talk with [npc]"), in case you come some time later and forgot what you were supposed to do. You can indicate there's no more dialog in many ways, but you'd lose that secondary feature. Same thing if the NPC just keeps babbling generated drivel.

So true. In such an LLM-driven game though, I would imagine the player would just ask the NPC: "I forgot what to do" or even "Can you explain it in other terms?" (if the quest description isn't clear enough).