How is Friends & Fables different from ChatGPT, AI Dungeon, or NovelAI?

While Friends & Fables may seem similar to other AI services such as AI Dungeon*, NovelAI, or even playing D&D with ChatGPT, it is actually quite different in purpose, architecture, and experience. In this blog post, we’ll take a deep dive into what makes Friends & Fables different from using other AI services to play roleplaying games.

Game State

Unstructured Text vs Structured Game State

The biggest difference between Friends & Fables and services like ChatGPT or AI Dungeon is the way that data is stored and accessed. Friends & Fables has a database purpose built for saving TTRPG game state (character and monster stats, coordinates, locations, quests, etc). When you’re playing D&D with ChatGPT, it does have memory and will store the information you give it, but it is all stored as unstructured text.

In the example above, ChatGPT would probably be able to look through the chat history and answer this simple question correctly. But imagine Garrick changes armor somewhere along the way, and this transcript is 10x as long, there’s 5 more characters, and some things are vague, like “I recovered the rest of my HP”. Since there isn’t a structured place for ChatGPT to write updates, it becomes harder for ChatGPT to search the text blob and reason about the most up to date information, which leads to more and more inaccuracies over time.

Players 🤝 AI - Shared State

In Friends & Fables, both the AI and players have the ability to update game state. This means that instead of relying on the AI for creativity, players can use our world building tools to build out a world with all of the characters, items, spells, and monsters for the AI to use as a starting point. The creativity and ground truth of the world becomes something that players and AI can collaborate on, but ultimately the players still get to decide how much of the creativity they want to control and how much they want to let the AI handle.

Hallucinations

When an LLM lacks a source of truth, it's more prone to making things up. By storing structured state and grounding the LLM in it, we can minimize hallucinations to maintain a more engaging and coherent experience.

State → Constraints

Game state is crucial not only for maintaining narrative consistency in the long term but also for enforcing constraints. Without game state, you can manipulate an LLM into bending the rules or allowing actions that don’t fit the games context (like brandishing a lightsaber in a Western setting). While this can be fun sometimes, a game can quickly lose it’s point without rules and constraints.

In the example above, you can see that without having state to enforce spell resources, the LLM on the left may just assume you are able to cast Fireball. In Friends & Fables, our AI campaign engine will run some state checks and feed the information about your class and available spell slots to the LLM, grounding the narration in truth. This means your choices and decisions carry more weight because they're grounded in a consistent reality and have lasting effects on the world.

Ruleset

When you look at AI Dungeon vs Friends & Fables, you’ll notice that having a ruleset is a big difference. In AI Dungeon, there is no specific ruleset. This gives you much more freedom to make a story about whatever you want. In contrast, the AI game engine in Friends & Fables is governed by the D&D 5e ruleset. Both the AI and user interface are designed and programmed specifically to follow the ruleset. For example, we have an inventory and character equipment system that uses carrying capacity and which the game master and user interface can both use. In AI Dungeon, you can describe items you’ve acquired or wish to equip to the game master, but there will be no user interface to see or update those items, and it’s not guaranteed that it will correctly apply the effects of those items later in the story.

Platform Features

Services like ChatGPT are generically focused to be chat interfaces for a multitude of tasks. Friends & Fables on the other hand has tools and features specifically made for TTRPGs.

World Building Tools

World builders can use generators to quickly create all the assets you need to fill your world with characters, monsters, items, spells, classes, and races.

You have access to a map editor and mini map so you can quickly place and build out your world during the creation process, and then visually see where you are on the map while you’re in the campaign. And a platform so that you can share all of your creations and worlds with other players.

Campaign Experience

Roleplaying

When you’re playing a campaign, it’s not just text. You can visually see things like where you are in the world through the mini map, details about your current location, and the nearby NPCs around you. And when appropriate, the DM will surface choices and outcomes such as asking you to roll for a skill check or displaying a new area you’ve discovered.

Combat

When you enter combat, there’s a specific combat mode which keeps track of the turn order, results of each turn, and visually depicts the outcome of each action.

Multiplayer

Lastly, Friends & Fables also supports multiplayer, so you can invite your friends to a campaign at any time and play together. This is great for when you want to get in a quick session or want to play a longer Play By Post (PBP) style campaign that you can play asynchronously.

Technical Differences

To achieve this gameplay from a technical perspective requires a system of LLMs collaborating and reasoning about different parts of the game as you play. So even though it may look like you’re interacting with a single model when you’re talking with our AI Game Master, you’re actually interacting with an entire system of models that have been fine tuned for specific tasks and that come together to create the final response of the game master.

In other services, you’re primarily only interacting with one model that has a prompt and your chat history, which is why they’re limited to being story tellers and not games. For those interested, we’ll have an article that dives deeper into the technical details upon the release of the new system behind Franz which we’ve code-named ACE-1 (Agentic Campaign Engine). More details to come soon.

Conclusion

We hope this article helps you understand the differences between all the AI services out there. To sum it up, Friends & Fables is built to be a TTRPG, while the other services are more focused on roleplay chat or writing. If you’re looking for a roleplay chat or a writing tool, then services like ChatGPT, AI Dungeon, and NovelAI may be a better fit for what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for a game experience that’s more akin to playing an AI RPG or TTRPG, then Friends & Fables might be a better fit for you!

* AI Dungeon Heroes: Since we’ve mentioned AI Dungeon in this article, we want to clarify that we are talking only about the current version of AI Dungeon as of Oct 19, 2024. They have mentioned publicly that they are working on a version called AI Dungeon Heroes (unreleased at time of writing), which should be much more like Friends & Fables than the current AI Dungeon.