Craft vs Friends & Fables (2026): What Changed, and Should You Switch?
Craft and Friends & Fables are two AI RPGs from the same studio, both live, and the honest way to choose between them is not by score — it is by whether you play alone. Craft is the ground-up rebuild: no D&D 5e, no house game master, no prescribed memory system, and a creator layer where all three used to be. Friends & Fables is the platform it was built to replace, and it is still the one that seats a party of six.
We score Craft 4.3 out of 5 and Friends & Fables 3.9, which makes the successor the better-rated product on our benchmark. That gap is real and we will show where it comes from, axis by axis. It is also not the thing that should decide your month.
Access disclosure: Craft’s developers provided beta access and a subscription for our coverage of Craft. No conditions were attached to any of it, and this comparison is independent and unpaid — we do not accept payment for coverage or ratings.
The Short Answer
| You are… | Play on |
|---|---|
| A solo player on Friends & Fables today | Craft. Better memory, repairable campaigns, and the compounding-error problem is gone |
| A group of two or more | Friends & Fables. Craft has no multiplayer gameplay yet |
| Someone who wants D&D 5e played straight | Friends & Fables. Craft can run 5e, but somebody has to have built it |
| Someone who wants to build a world, not play one | Craft, and it is not close |
| Paying for heavy daily play on one model | Friends & Fables. Unlimited standard turns beats a daily energy budget |
| Not paying anything | Craft. Its free tier is one of the more usable ones in the directory |
What Craft Actually Changed
The studio told us directly why they rebuilt instead of renovating: Friends & Fables was designed around older, much less capable models, and modernising it meant renovating a building with the ceiling baked into the walls. Four things changed in the rebuild, and each one is a deliberate removal.
D&D 5e came out. Friends & Fables runs 5e as a real ruleset — stats, dice, hex-map combat, character sheets, with an orchestration layer doing the bookkeeping underneath. Craft ships no house ruleset at all. It runs whatever system the world’s author built, which may be 5e, may be something with sanity mechanics, may be something with no tabletop ancestor at all. The team said the push came from players: worldbuilders kept asking Friends & Fables to do things 5e was not built to do, and they were not all asking for the same thing.
Franz came out. Friends & Fables has one game master, and he runs every table the same way. That consistency was the platform’s signature strength — you knew what you were getting. Craft has no Franz-equivalent. Each worldbuilder writes their own narrator’s voice and behaviour, so a grim survival campaign and a lighthearted heist can sound nothing alike because neither is being pushed through one orchestration personality.
The prescribed memory system came out. This is the most distinctive decision in the rebuild. Craft does not ship one answer to the memory problem. Worldbuilders author memory structures in markdown, per world, and the platform supports whatever a creator designs. The bet is that thousands of creators solving it separately will beat one team solving it centrally.
The presentation changed completely. Craft reads like a visual novel — character sprites above a text box, expressions that shift as characters speak, real in-game cinematics. It is, alongside Tidefall, the best-looking thing in this category, and the two get there by opposite routes: staging against atmosphere.
What all four removals have in common is that they push a hard problem down to the worldbuilder rather than solving it upstairs. That is the whole thesis, and whether it is a good trade depends entirely on whether you are the worldbuilder.
The Scores, Axis by Axis
Both platforms were rated under methodology v1.0 on the same seven axes. Here is where the 0.4 points actually sit.
| Axis | Craft | Friends & Fables |
|---|---|---|
| Memory & Continuity | 4 | 3.5 |
| Player Agency | 3.5 | 3 |
| NPC Fidelity | 4 | 4 |
| Mechanical Depth | 5 | 5 |
| Determinism & Fairness | 5 | 5 |
| Longevity | 3.5 | 2 |
| Signature Design | 5 | 5 |
| Composite | 4.3 | 3.9 |
Three axes are identical, and they are the three Friends & Fables was always good at. Both hold Mechanical Depth — 5, for opposite reasons: Friends & Fables implements a real system properly, and Craft lets you write one. Both hold Determinism & Fairness — 5. Both hold Signature Design — 5. NPC Fidelity — 4 is carried across intact — characters hold their personalities and pursue their own goals on both, and it is the one axis where the rebuild is a continuation rather than a departure.
The whole gap is in two places.
Memory & Continuity — 4 against 3.5. Craft passed our planted-fact probe; a detail seeded early came back correctly much later, unprompted. It still garbles recent events, and it has let NPCs forget promises they made themselves, which is why it is not a 5. But it holds together considerably better than its predecessor.
Longevity — 3.5 against 2, and this is the one that matters. Franz’s failure mode is compounding error: mistakes accumulate until a long campaign is unrecoverable. That is the single biggest reason to leave. On Craft, errors do not snowball, and better still, the same worldbuilder-authored memory layer that makes memory a creator’s problem makes it a creator’s fix — a drifted campaign can be steered back rather than restarted.
Craft does not get a 4 there for one reason: the waiting. Turns take long enough to process that we spent about as much of a session watching a turn resolve as reading and playing one. Against everything else we have tested, this is the slow one. It does not break a campaign the way compounding error does, which is why the score stays high — but half your evening is dead air, and you should budget for that before you commit to a long campaign.
What Friends & Fables Still Does That Craft Does Not
It seats a party. Friends & Fables runs campaigns for up to six players — three on the free tier, rising by plan — and friends play free on the host’s subscription. Craft has no multiplayer gameplay. Its cofounder Will told us on 25 August 2026 that co-editing would come first and shared play “sometime within the next month hopefully”. The first half arrived the next day: project collaboration shipped on 26 August, letting an owner invite up to four more editors to build a project alongside them, with publishing and versioning staying owner-only. The second half has not arrived. As of 12 September 2026 there is still no way for two people to play a Craft game together. For a group, that is not a drawback to weigh against a 0.4-point score gap. It is the entire decision. If you want the ranked view of group play, that is how to play an AI RPG with friends, where Friends & Fables holds our Best Overall Multiplayer pick.
It gives you 5e without a construction project. Craft’s mechanical ceiling is not a property of Craft — it is a property of whoever built the world you loaded. An empty toolkit is not a game, and a world built by someone who did not use the depth available will feel thinner than Friends & Fables ever does. On Friends & Fables the hex battlemaps, line-of-sight calculations and damage multipliers are simply there.
It sells unlimited turns. Every paid Friends & Fables tier includes unlimited standard turns. Craft meters paid play in daily energy above its Core band. More on that below.
It is still being built. Friends & Fables is still shipping patches and still selling subscriptions. The studio’s parallel work on Craft has created real community uncertainty about long-term support — we said so in our review — but no shutdown has been announced, and an open question is not an ending.
What Craft Does That Friends & Fables Cannot
Write new mechanics as code. Not configure from a menu — write. Complex new gameplay systems, built by the person making the world, running inside the platform as first-class rules. Nothing else in our directory does this, and it is why a platform with no house ruleset ties the most mechanically complete tabletop we have rated.
Repair a campaign mid-flight. Because memory is authored, it can be edited. Across this directory that is rare, and it is exactly what long play needs.
Be worked on by more than one person. Project collaboration is the one multiplayer feature that has shipped — up to four invited editors building a world alongside the owner, seeing which files each other are browsing. Building together works today; playing together does not.
Surprise its own studio. Craft’s feature ceiling is gated by its users’ imagination rather than its roadmap. We have not scored anything else in this category where the honest answer to “what will it do next?” is that nobody knows, including the people who made it.
What It Costs
The two are priced on genuinely different shapes, which is why “which is cheaper” has no single answer.
| Craft | Friends & Fables | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Limited daily Core-model use, 10 project and 10 game slots, unlimited instant file generations | Up to 25 turns a day, 3-player campaigns, unlimited campaign slots |
| Entry paid tier | $19.99/mo | $19.95/mo |
| Top tier | $199.99/mo | $39.95/mo |
| How paid play is metered | Daily energy that partially rolls over; Core models unmetered from $39.99 | Unlimited standard turns on every paid tier |
| Annual discount | Not offered | Two months free |
Prices verified on each platform’s own pricing page on 12 September 2026.
Craft’s free tier is a real one — enough daily use to build and play — and its daily energy partially rolls over, which is unusual in a category where allowances normally expire overnight. Friends & Fables answers the same problem by not metering turns at all above the free tier. If you play heavily on one model every night, unlimited turns is the simpler deal. If you play in bursts, or want to spend nothing, Craft is the better shape. The full cross-platform picture is in what an AI RPG actually costs.
One dated detail worth knowing if you are moving: Craft ran a one-time offer to transfer Friends & Fables credits into a Craft account, and that window closed on 31 August 2026. Credits do not follow you any more. Your world still does.
So, Should You Switch?
If you play alone, and especially if you have ever had a Friends & Fables campaign degrade past the point of rescue, the answer is yes. That specific failure is the thing Craft fixes, and it fixes it twice over — errors do not compound, and the ones that appear can be corrected in place. You pay for it in turn latency, and you should know that going in.
If you play with other people, stay where you are. Not because Craft is worse, but because the feature you need does not exist there yet. Watch for multiplayer gameplay; when it lands, this answer changes.
If you want to build, the question was never close. Craft is the only platform in our directory that hands you the design surface itself, and the studio’s own first world, Project SABLE, was built with exactly the tools you get.
And if you are switching, you do not have to start from a blank page — moving your Friends & Fables world to Craft takes about ten minutes, and we have written down what survives the trip and what does not.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Craft the same as Friends & Fables 2? It is the same studio and the same ambition, but not a version 2 in the usual sense. Craft is a ground-up rebuild that shares no foundation with Friends & Fables. The team told us Friends & Fables was designed around older, much less capable models and was too hard to modernise, so they started over rather than patch it. Players call it Friends and Fables II because of the lineage, not because it is an upgrade path you are moved onto automatically.
Should I switch from Friends & Fables to Craft? If you play alone, yes. Craft scores 4.3 out of 5 against Friends & Fables at 3.9, and it fixes the single worst thing about a long Friends & Fables campaign, which is errors that compound until the campaign is unrecoverable. If you play with a group, no, not yet. Friends & Fables seats parties of up to six in one campaign and Craft has no multiplayer gameplay at all as of 12 September 2026. That one feature is the whole decision for most groups.
Is Friends & Fables shutting down? The studio has not announced any shutdown, and Friends & Fables is still being updated and still selling subscriptions as of September 2026. The parallel work on Craft has caused some community uncertainty about long-term support, which we noted in our review, but uncertainty is not an announcement. Treat it as a live product with an open question rather than a closing one.
What does Craft do that Friends & Fables cannot? Four things. It runs any ruleset rather than only D&D 5e. It lets a worldbuilder write brand new gameplay mechanics as code rather than configure existing ones. It lets each world author its own narrator instead of running everyone through one house game master. And it lets each world author its own memory structures in markdown, which means a campaign that has drifted can be repaired rather than restarted.
What does Friends & Fables still do that Craft does not? Multiplayer, first and foremost: Friends & Fables runs campaigns of up to six players and Craft has no multiplayer gameplay yet. It also gives you D&D 5e played straight, with hex battlemaps, line of sight and damage multipliers, rather than a system somebody had to build. And it sells unlimited standard turns on every paid tier, where Craft meters paid play in daily energy above its Core model band.
Can I move my Friends & Fables world to Craft? Yes. Friends & Fables exports a Workspace CDF zip from the three-dot menu on any world you own, and Craft imports it from the New Project page. Characters, locations, factions, lore and map images come across. You can only export worlds you created, and the import is a one-way snapshot rather than a live sync. The separate offer to transfer Friends & Fables credits to a Craft account closed on 31 August 2026.
Which is cheaper, Craft or Friends & Fables? They are priced on different shapes, so it depends on how much you play. Friends & Fables sells unlimited standard turns from $19.95 a month. Craft has a genuinely usable free tier, then meters paid play in daily energy, and stops metering its Core model band from $39.99 a month. A light player is cheaper on Craft and can play for nothing. A heavy player who wants the wider model roster pays more on Craft.
Scores cited here are current as of 12 September 2026; the live figures are always on our benchmark.
Product names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Arcanum is not affiliated with Craft, Friends & Fables, or Wizards of the Coast.