RPG Solo Forums

Hey all. Just wanted to pass along a Solo RPG game, "Friends and Fables", I've been helping to alpha (and now beta) test since January of this year. It's loosely 5e D&D based.

It's solo in the sense that the DM is AI powered (currently llama model), whom the devs have affectionately named "Franz". (I have personally started calling calling the game "Friends and Franz").

Here's short youtube video about F&F.

Now, understand that Franz is a little wonky at times and often has memory issues and gets cyclical in some of his thinking. It's also in open beta so things are still being worked on. But honestly, I'm proud of the product and believe it's the best AI game mastered RPG game out there. It's come a huge way in just six months. The devs (all two of them) are very responsive and listen to and readily apply feedback and they're constantly improving the game. 

Some things I like about it:

• A character sheet with inventory 
  
• Combat that follows 5e rules
  
• Ability to generate your worlds in any genre 
  
• Ability to place custom interactions to guide the DM
  
• The app auto-generates images for items, places, etc
  
• Franz can take a few loose ends and make up stuff on the fly
  

You can start out with a fifty-turn free trial (which is like fifty back and forth actions with you and the DM). After that it's subscription based.
https://www.fables.gg/

Towards the end of the year, they're going to offer a free tier, I think.
Anyway, I'm also one of the mods on their discord server. I hope you give the game a try and come by for a visit.

Here's a screen capture of a fun moment I had in the game where I told Franz, I wanted a little more descriptive gore in his descriptions and he responded...
View Image

Thanks for sharing. It's very interesting. I'm curious how it does as far as large campaigns or story arcs. For example, kingdom alliances and wars, complex quests and world continuity after long game plays. Like will it remember a farmer I met a couple of months ago or that a particular merchant that caught me pilfering his wares?

The price is too steep for me but I'm probably not the target demographic. That discord link didn't work for me, by the way.

Hi Mark, at the moment, large story arcs are not very feasible, as Franz's memory is somewhat limited. That will improve over time as AI prices continue to drop and new AI tech gets onboarded and as the devs work on ways to bolster his memory. Currently, there's a Memory tab that stores Franz's recent memories, but those flow out of his memory fairly rapidly, IMO, as more recent current events enter his memory. There needs to be a place where you define those important things you never want the AI DM to forget and that he references regularly, akin to pinned memories if you will. Currently, you have to go in and manually type or paste old memories back in if you want him to be ware of them. So that might be one way around that until things get better.

Here's a sample Memories screen from a long-standing Fantasy "campaign".
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WB8zM0P...sp=sharing
As you can see, each memory is a paragraph of memories. Also, the help text at the top of the Memories screen says, "Franz automatically updates memories as you play. Oldest memories will fade away over time. This page only displays memories that Franz can still access. There is a ~3-6 message buffer before messages get turned into memories, so your most recent messages won't show up here."

(Sorry the discord link didn't work. I updated the original post to point to a different channel there, so maybe it'll work now. Btw, I also plugged rpgsolo tools on their discord as I do think a lot of the folks who show up there really want to role-play more regularly, but they don't have a regular group. I don't know if I'm the target demographic either. I'm certainly an older gamer. A few months ago, the devs interviewed me, and I brought that up and they said they don't really know age demographics on their users.)

Very nice concept! I have been playing around with a local LLM install myself. I use Oobabooga (TextGenWebUI), SillyTavern on the language/chatbot side of things as well as Automatic1111 on the image generation side of things.

I have not been very successful in getting the AI to properly GM a game or to be a player, but I have had a lot of interesting experiences when using it as a narrator and to act as specific NPC characters in my solo sessions, giving me actual dialogue rather than just theatre of mind and interpretation (although I still use the oracles to determine NPCs' goals, demeanors, contexts, locations, etc.)
It definitely adds to the immersion! As for creating the characters themselves, it used to be more of a hassle, but then I set up a specific "character" to act as a tool in generating characters using the PList format (for token management). I give the "tool" a rough description of the character and how I want them to be (using an oracle as starting point), or ask it to roll up a random one for me.
I then edit the character to suit my needs.

Using lorebooks to keep track of lore for my solo sessions/campaigns has also been a huge success, as has (to varying degrees) dabbling in scripting SillyTavern (STScript) to react to specific trigger words and add automated generators that don't require verbal prompts (i.e.: Roll me a 3d6, setting up custom oracles and so on.)

That's an interesting hybrid approach you have going on there. Thanks for sharing.