Initial Impressions of Multiplayer

Two friends and I decided to take Friends and Fables for a spin last evening. The three of us have played multiple RPGs in person and on VTT and I was also a contributor to the Cyberpunk Red system on Foundry VTT. I messed around a bit with the Free Single Player campaign and was impressed enough to buy the "Starter" package for the year. I definitely see this project as having legs and looking forward to the improvements. That being said, this is my feedback on my multiplayer experience.

We loaded up Odrun Fell and we each created a character. The character creation was pretty straightforward. Considering during game play, the AI/GM (Franz) made several references to the 5e ruleset, I'd have liked to see a "Basic Loadout" for the character creation screen for the various classes.

We originally tried to play without any sort of third party "tools" and quickly found out that voice communication between the players is essential. What is not readily apparent is that all players should "submit" what it is they want to do to the Franz before anyone clicks "Continue". When multiple of us made submissions we ended up with the Franz's audio overlapping each other, speaking at the same time and a narrated scene that was generated was nothing like what we expected/asked for. One game improvement here would be the ability to designate a single "Submit Button Pusher" while playing so it streamlines the game play a bit better.

We were all VERY impressed with Franz's story telling and ability to role play. At the first encounter, I pretended that my Monk character was blind, using my quarterstaff as a walking stick and stumbling around and Franz was excellent with understanding what I was doing and generating valid responses from the NPCs we encountered. We loved the fact that when we ordered a Mead and the bartended gave it to our party member, they indeed had a "Tankard of Mead" in their inventory.

We did find it a bit confusing on the map to keep track of where our tokens were. While we were role playing via dialogue, we talked our way into the tavern/inn we came upon. When combat broke out, we turned our attention to the map only to learn that all of our tokens were outside of the tavern and not inside like we role played.

During combat, we experienced several anomalies:

• When combat broke out, the NPC ally that was with us seemed to vanish from the map. When we asked Franz what happened to the NPC, Franz did not seem to know who that was. Later in combat, one of our players said they attacked the enemy archer on the balcony, when they hit and killed the NPC, it turned out to be the allied NPC which was missing. That took a bit to have Franz straighten that out.

• Franz seemed to be confused as to who was an ally and who was an enemy. At one point, the NPC we travelled with attempted to heal an unconscious enemy. We assume this was somehow tied into the confusion in the previous bullet point.

• At one point, in role playing, I said that my character taunted the NPC with his sharp tongue which resulted in Franz causing damage and rendering the NPC unconscious. It took several minutes to get Franz to understand the mistake that was made and "roll back" the damage they applied. At one point Franz restored the NPC to full health. We eventually got it straightened out and were able to continue.

• Franz was inconsistent with regards to range of melee attacks, especially when it was a melee attack on an unconscious NPC. Franz seemed to let that occur at any range.

• We noticed that there does not seem to be any way to keep track of currency. There's a spot for it on the character sheet, but entering anything there does not seem to persist. Franz was also unable to add money to our characters, which in asking them to do so, opened up a pretty big issue we found in the game. See below.

• At one point one of the enemy NPC's attempted to cast firebolt at one of our party members and then Franz literally said "but then they realized they were not a spellcaster and can't cast spells ending their turn".

• When all of the enemy NPCs were down, combat seemed to continue until we manually executed all of the unconscious enemies, which seemed to take forever as each blow seemed to only result in a single failed death save. We had to remind Franz to not give NPC's death saves but we still had to go around and kill all of the unconscious NPCs.

• Franz accidentally reduced our XP when trying to fix out monetary issue.

The larger issue we found was that you can pretty much ask Franz to do whatever you want and Franz will do it without question. "Franz, make the whole party level 7" results in everyone being level 7. "Franz, my pet Ancient Red Dragon arrived and joins the battle" to which Franz asks what the coordinates are to place your pet and happily does so. While I totally understand allowing the players to “fix inconsistencies” with the session and stuff, if you’re playing with some people who take the rules as suggestions or feel they are open for interpretation, it could be problematic. It would be nice if the campaign configuration had a "sanity check filter" or something for requests that seem "outside the norm". When the AI can’t determine if it is outside the norm, prompt the host for appropriate handling of the request. For example, if someone told the AI they lost their Vorpal Sword, can they put it back in their inventory, if there's no game history of a Vorpal Sword, the AI should call that out. If the player persists, defer to the host if the AI should place the Vorpal Sword in the player inventory. If the player says they have a pet from their backstory, defer to the host whether they should add a pet to the campaign.

Overall, we had a blast playing and could not stop laughing at some of the "glitches" we experienced. We were very impressed with the creativity and ability to role play by the AI GM. We were all very entertained for the evening, however, that being said, we did feel that it is not ready for prime time of multiplayer adventure. Some of the things we felt would help would be:

• Ability to lock down the "continue" prompt submission to a single person. Maybe make this a campaign setting.

• Ideally some sort of voice chat for players built directly into the interface. We used Discord but had to continually mute as we would get echo from hearing Franz talking over Discord. A built in audio system could easily account for and compensate for echo of the AI/GM talking.

• Some sort of tutorial covering how multiplayer should be played with an AI GM. Everyone clicking continue when they are done typing leads to chaos. Maybe also cover the campaign settings and such. Maybe a Youtube video tutorial?

• Map snapping to the icon whose turn it is in initiative order.

• Some sanity checking mechanism on player prompt submissions (especially since anyone can submit to the AI)

I look forward to trying this in a Single Player scenario and seeing how that goes as most of the issues we encountered were around the multiplayer aspect.