review of system after 30+ hours of play

I started play utilizing the initial dungeo. It seemed to woork pretty well at first, although, as a monk, the AI continually used the incorrect stat for a Monks attack, which is Dexterity and not strength. I met the NPV, Tavia and we killed a few bandits and continued towards Odrun Fell. Once in Odrun Fell, well looked at the message board and found an interesting job. While looking at the job board, a child tried to steal my gold pouch. I caught him, taught him a lessen and then Tavia and I started to walk further into town. We were being followed by someone, another child, and I called them out to find out why they were following us, his name was Varyn. After some discussion, I determined that these children were being ruled over and mistreated by and NPC called Brannick, I believe.

I took over the these kids, made Varyn an important member of the new Faction called the Unseen Hand. and started growing the presence of the Faction. I recruited a few NPCs to serv specific purposes over time. Tavia, Varyn from initial gameplay. Beron from a quest, where we found him down in the tunnels, Kaenen a thief promoted up through the Faction ranks, Valerious the “architect” that was part of the “Symphony of the Shells” quest. I turned him, made him a member of the Hand. Silvanus to work a smith business which was also the manager of all smithy and metal working businesses that the hand expanded across the city of Odrun Fell, Madame Vespera the manager of the Gilded Lily was made a member of the Hand put in charge of the Gilded Lily and other parlor and gaming house across the city of Odrun Fell. Elric who became a memebr of the Hand when the Hand bought his weaponry and armory business and he became the manager over all other Hand weaponry businesses in the city of Odrun Fell. Bram a dwarf brought in to the Hand as a Master craftsman to strengthen Hand operation and Hq buildings and build imperentrable Vaults under each. Lyra a Master Sorcerer to run the Sorcery school for Hand Agents, Alistair a Wizard to run the wizardy school for Hand Agents, Sylas a Weapons Master to run the weapons and archery trining for Hand Agents, Kaelen Isaac a Master Thief/Assassin to run the Thief/assassin/poison training.

There are a few others, this is the main group. the structure of the Hand has a council made up of My character, Tavia, Valarious, Varyn, and Beron. There is an operations division ran by Varyn that runs the Agents, the Agent team and their assignments. The Training and education division is Manageged jointly by Tavia and Valerious, with the four Masters, Sylas, Lyra, Kaenen and Alistair reporting under them.

Issue with NPC is that the AI tend to forget friendships, Agent team assignments, and sometimes has arbitrarily change the NPCs names and class.

Another issue is the quests. I completed the “Symphony of the Shells” quest in a way that destroyed all of the node and turned the primary node’s resonance toward the void before the node was destroyed. The Hand took over the Sanctuary “the silent Room” as their main headquarters. I searched out and eradicated any cultists and their allies. As I played more, this quest has tried to restart multiple time and I have tolde the AI, more than once that everything that was done to complete the quest previous and the AI states that it changed the context to align with the history that occurred. The problem here is that the AI just tried to restart the same quest through another means. Lyra brought up that her brother had been taken. I had the Hand help her locate her brother and rescue him if he was still alive. I captured someone called the Herald and had Lyra delve into his mind to get the truth. It was determined that someone within the Hand had turned and was traitorous. The way it played out is the Varyn had turned, along with some unknown quartermaster within the Hand. As Varyn and the quartermster were being interrogated, the information that Varyn was giving made absolutely no sense in regards to his history. the AI provided many weird reasons for Varyn turning, such as being offered more gold than the council of the Hand ever could. Varyn is a member of the council of the Hand and had free run of the Hand’s gold and resources. I played it as if maybe there was something wrong with him and has the Wizard check to see if Varyn was under some kind of mental control. I am guessing here, but it seems that the AI was “smart” enough at this point to go with it and it turned out there was some type of psychic control over him by someone called the “conductor”.

I used the Hand and its resources to weed out all of the bad guy, the Herald, Zeyna and the conductor. The problem is they were tryingt o start the “Symphony fo Shells” again and the conductor was apparently in the Sactuary in the silent room, which was impossible. Before naming the leader as the conductor, the AI named him the architect and had tried to reuse valarious, now a member fo the Hand again as that character. One of the teams we fought and captured its leader, also turned out to be Beron, another memebr fo the Hand. I found that out after interrogating him and killing him, as it killed Beron, a member of my party. I had to tell the AI that Beron was not dead and was a member of the Hand. I had to tell the AI multiple times through the hours played that the architect, known as Valarious is a member of the Hand and not a prisoner and not working for the Ailent architect, so the AI changed the second attempt at restarting the Symphony of shell to the conductor. The biggest issue it that the way in which I defeated the Symphony and the cultists the first time, having destroyed the husks, captured all of the tuning forks, reversing the resonance of the prime node before destroying it and sending the explosion from the psychic resonance overload directly into the void that there was no way to restart the Symphony at all, ever.

To try and help the AI, I also manually created the Unseen Hand faction in the world, i edited all NPC’s character sheet to update their background and make them a member of the Unseen Hand faction. I have tried to get the AI to realize that the Unsen hand’s headquarters is in what was known as the Sanctuary and the main operation and training is located in what was originally known as the shed. The Gilded Lily was old and rundown when it was acquired by the hand, but was refurbished into an opulent and high-end parlor house. I updated the Gilded Lily’s sheet as well in the World to show this, but the AI keeps going back after some time to saying it is old and rundown.

The AI seemed to have a lot of problems with rolls as well, so I started rolling myself and telling it what I rolled. This corrected the problems with AI rolls for my character, but then the AI quite rolling for the NPCs in most instances and it used my rolls and then created a narrative around my actions for all of the NPCs in my party.

The system is not horrible, but the hallucinations, the weird changes to NPC names and classes, the constant need to remind the AI and try to get it back ontrack, even after changing NPC character, places, and creating new places,characters, factions, and other information to try and keep the AI updated and alligned with reality has not worked well.

At this time, this might be a decent AI application for one shots, but anything longer, or more indepth makes it quite a lot of work to update and try to keep alligned and still, it hallucinates pretty badly. There has to be a way to create some kind of external file structure, or database for the AI to be able to access as needed to remember how things really are and make changes to it as any piece of that information changes. This would allow the AI to not get overloaded with absolutely everything in a campaign, and allow it to keep much betetr aligned without hallucinating so badly. My honest opinion is that at this time, the capabilites of the AI in Friends and Fables, although a very welcome capability still requires an immense amount of work to make it usable and is not really worth the subscription price being charged as of yet. When these issues are corrected, this could be a great and powerful resource for DM’s and solo/group play over elongated campaigns.