My overall experience.

I have made an overall feedback on my experience of F&F after almost a year of playing, world building and writing things for my campaign on a daily basis. I have made a list with all the good points I have experienced as well as the points on which I think should be improved.

1: World building tools:
The tools to create worlds as well as store information has been a big part of F&F as far as I can tell. This tool is very useful for people who wish to have AI assist them with creating a world, lore and write down visual information regarding area’s, point of interests and many other aspects such as spells for example. The tool is easy to use (Except for me, the quest system, I haven’t fully figured that one out on how to best use it, but that is my personal experience with it right now as I haven’t used it much in the first place.) the tool is easy to learn and can give users a place to store information in a central place, a bit like world anvil but assisted with AI. The addition of drawing an area rather than using cubes and rectangles only has also been a great improvement, as this allows us to create roads, rivers, nations, borders, etc. The addition of new image generation AI is also very good to have, but I think personally to keep images coherent and of high quality, using something like Gemini will give a better experience. I don’t know if there are multiple AI image generators currently doing the generation of images in F&F, but I for one think that giving user the ability to choose their preferred generator would be a huge overall improvement, however I do not know if that is even possible or feasible considering funds. One other thing I think I would personally like to see when it comes to world building is an easier method of pulling characters from POI’s. Currently when a character is in a POI and I want to move it to another area, I have to click the POI, then the character and then move it, which does not always work, as it will often just deselect the character instead of moving it. Other than those two points, I think when it comes to world building at it’s core, it is a fine and neat system that other AI TTRPGs lack, making this more unique.

2: Narration:
When it comes to narration a lot has changed over the months. And personally I have seen a lot of improvements but also a lot of regression. For example, while the talking on behalf of the player has drastically been lowered, it still occasionally happens and franz likes to act on behalf of the player regarding the actions the player takes a lot more. While some people might like this, in my opinion it takes away my agency as franz has said or acted things on my character’s behalf a lot of times that my character just wouldn’t say or do. This has been largely fixed over time but occasionally he still does this but is most often fixed by rewriting it and saying he shouldn’t do that.

Then there is magic and when it comes to a player using magic like, for example level 3 call lightning, he makes NPCs act like the player is some sort of demi-god capable of destroying everything in it’s path, while the spell itself is actually not very strong compared to other spells. While Franz is great at explaining what happens when a spell is cast and the after effects, he does like to blow the ability out of proportion in the perspective of the NPCs. (if it was an 8th or 9th level spell I could understand.) This is easily fixed by rewriting.

I also noticed that franz has a bit of trouble staying consistent when describing the appearances of characters, often mixing them up or placing them into a conversation where they do not belong. For example, when two characters are in an area like a male bathroom, suddenly a female character decides to come in and talk. It is rare for it to happen, but it has happened a few times now which I could easily fix by rewriting.

Now about overall story telling when it comes to narrating. This in my opinion has regressed the most, at least in my campaigns. Back when I subscribed I had two campaigns in which I was able to play for a very long time, one of which had a nice dark feeling with vampires, betrayals etc, while the other was a more downtime focused campaign. The story telling back then was great, and with a simple nudge in the right direction, Franz was able to weave a nice coherent story with only a few rewrites every now and then. This was back in January of this year and when I compare that time to now, I notice that I have to rewrite almost every two turns to keep the narration a bit coherent or ask franz to add either more details, npc interactions with each other or describe the surroundings a bit better. Due to this, I have been unable to stick to a campaign for a long time, causing me to drop it after just a few days because the story just doesn’t make sense anymore, or franz creates so many mistakes that it is impossible to bring the campaign back from it. Especially when the mistakes start out small with just a few words, but become bigger over time, changing into whole sentences. To watch out for these mistakes, makes playing the game less about being a player and more about being a co-dm while telling franz constantly what you do and don’t want. While I personally don’t mind sometimes having to tell franz what should happen and what not, I do begin to mind if I have to rewrite every other message only to have to tell him in game that this is not how things should be going as things don’t make sense the way he begins to tell the story. What is worse is that he will then proceed to ignore what you say, saying that this is how it is and how it should be while explicitly saying that you don’t want the story to go into that direction. I also noticed that Franz has a tendency to water things down significantly when telling the story or either pace it so fast, just to skip over certain scenes. For Example, I had a scene where one of the characters had to get information from a prisoner by any means possible. When we came to the point that the prisoner refused to talk, franz proceeded to let the NPC questioning the prisoner to just leave it at that instead of employing other means of information gathering at his disposal. My character then proceeded to do it himself, using a variety of methods including smashing his hammer on the prisoners fingers and healing them back up constantly until he would talk, and instead of narrating it, he simply skipped over the whole scene not describing what happened at all and just saying that the prisoner didn’t give any more information, not giving my character to try other means of interrogation. I tried rewriting it many times, saying the pacing was too fast and asking to rewrite the scene and describe the details, only for a few details to appear and then continuing to past the whole interrogation. I had to ask franz to rewrite the scene while describing what happens and not just skip over the scene while hoping he would listen, only to have him say that he is unable to rewrite scenes while he has done those things before. I truly think there have been a few improvements to the narration in certain parts, but I find the overall story telling has regressed quite a lot in my campaigns. And yes, I have tested it with and without custom instructions.

3 Memory:
I think memory has improved a lot, and I like how characters are able to remember you and your conversations better then back in the past. Although I would like the ability to make a summary of what has happened in my campaign on my own which I could make a memory and lock, it is in my opinion certainly an improvement to what it was before where you had to OOC remind franz about everything, just to have him forget it a few messages later even when you locked the memory for him. The only thing I have noticed when it comes to memory is that franz has trouble memorizing the last location a character was in. For example, player character was on a boarding platform for air ships, he proceeds to go to a hotel nearby and then to a market, only for franz to say that you left the boarding platform while the character left the hotel isntead. Franz also has these kinds of trouble sometimes when describing character appearances for NPCs, attributing certain appearance aspects of one character on another character and telling him make shim apologize only to have him do the exact same thing a few messages later.

Overall, I really like F&F but there are certain things that have been improved system wise, but in my opinion caused a regression of overall story telling, one of the things I find most important. I can’t of course speak for the other people in this server, and I see a lot of people still having a good time which I’m truly glad to see. For my part, I have deleted almost all my campaigns except for one of the campaigns I have played since January, however, I have put playing that one on hiatus until I find that there have been improvements to story telling which I personally like. In the meantime I will be continuing my support for this project by continuing my subscription and using F&F primarily for world building. I truly hope that this feedback is useful to you devs and if other people have some constructive feedback or additions to this, please feel free to share them, I am always open for a constructive discussion that could improve this project.