They are all good at something. Here is what each one is for, and where we sit, so you can pick the right table rather than the loudest one.
11 September 2026 · 6 min readThere are a lot of AI RPGs now, and most of them describe themselves the same way. That is not much help when you are trying to decide where to spend an evening. So this is the comparison we would want to read: what each product is built to do, how you pay for it, and the one or two things that actually separate them. Where we say something about another product, it comes from their own public pages and we have dated it. If you spot something out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
Each of these charges in its own currency, so the last column compares how you pay rather than what the tokens are called.
| Product | Built for | Rules | Play with friends | Memory | Tone | How you pay |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ink & Echo | A narrated table: worlds, stories, a cast that forms opinions of you, companions who fight | 5e-compatible: real dice against a real sheet, not a full rules reimplementation | Up to five friends, six at the table | Facts that persist and fade on their own rules; places and beasts remember too | Safe for work, real peril | Ten free rounds a day. Membership for unlimited standard rounds, within fair use |
| AI Dungeon | Freeform story generation, any genre | None built in; the model narrates whatever you type | Yes | Sold by tier, 4k to 32k tokens | Everyone to Unrated; ratings filter the library, not your own adventure | Free tier; subscriptions from $14.99 a month |
| Friends & Fables | A structured 5e-style game with battlemaps, running authored campaigns | SRD 5.1, tactical combat | Four players on Starter, six on Legend | A curated working context per turn | Not stated on their public pages | Twenty-five free turns a day; unlimited standard turns on a subscription from $19.95 a month |
| The Endlessness | Faithful 5e campaigns to level 20, read aloud | Full SRD: movement, dash, opportunity attacks tracked | Solo play | Worlds keep their state between sessions | Not stated on their public pages | Twenty free turns a day, one campaign, two characters; paid plans for more |
| Old Greg's Tavern | Fast rounds with an irreverent DM | Its own stats, lighter than 5e | Up to five friends play on the host's credits | Improved Memory | Rowdier and more mature by design; rated High Maturity on Google Play | Pay per round: $5 once for 50, then monthly packs |
AI Dungeon is the original, and still the widest sandbox: you can write anything and it will follow. That is its strength, and it is also the whole story. There are no dice, no sheet, no inventory that survives the model losing track of it. Memory is something you buy more of by the tier, measured in tokens, and its own community will tell you it drifts on long adventures. Its content ratings are worth understanding too: they control which community adventures you see in the library, not what the model will write inside your own.
If what you want is a text generator with no walls, it is the right pick. We are the opposite kind of thing. Ink & Echo is a game before it is a story: a skill check runs real arithmetic against your character sheet, your pack is a pack and not a sentence, and the innkeeper you insulted is still annoyed in a fortnight because that fact was written down, not because the model happened to remember.
Friends & Fables takes the game seriously, and it shows. It is built on the 5e SRD with character sheets, tactical battlemaps, and group play for up to six. Its flagship campaigns are written by tabletop authors, with the pacing, foreshadowing and payoffs planned in advance, and the AI Game Master's job is to run that material faithfully rather than invent the plot as it goes. If you want a well-made module run well, that is a real strength and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
We start from the other end. A story here is a premise, an arc and a set of quests, and the narrator and the players fill in everything between. Ten people can play the same story and come away with ten different tales. You can wander off the arc entirely, find a quest nobody wrote, and the world comes with you. Combat is resolved with real rolls and narrated rather than moved on a grid, so a fight reads like a scene. And everyone at the table gets the same world forge, stories, dungeons, bounties and music, not only the host.
The Endlessness is the closest to us in spirit. They say the table comes first and that they exist for the moments when you want to play and the table cannot happen, and they have written honestly about what an AI cannot replace. We would put our name to all of that.
Where we differ is what we built under it. They run the SRD faithfully: movement speed, dash, opportunity attacks, terrain, campaigns to level 20, PDF import, read-aloud on every plan. We are 5e-compatible by design and are not chasing the full ruleset; there are no battle grids or movement rules here, and we are not building them. We spent that effort on the world instead: a cast that forms opinions of you, memory that knows what to keep, companions who take their own turn, authored stories you can wander off, a world forge and a music forge. If it is the rules engine you want, theirs. If it is a world that reacts to you, ours.
Old Greg's is the quick one: fast rounds, a DM with a mouth on him, its own stat system rather than 5e, and a tone that leans older. Google Play rates it High Maturity. It is in the app stores and on the web, and friends play on the host's credits, which is a generous model.
The differences are tone and depth. Theirs is rowdier by design; ours is written to be safe for work, which matters if you play at lunch, with a younger sibling, or on stream. And under the fast rounds ours has more game: real dice against a 5e-compatible sheet, a persistent world with a map, authored stories and dungeons, and a cast that keeps its opinion of you.
You can try ours without an account. Pick a story and play a real round. When you want the world to remember you between visits, make an account.
One page, no jargon. Why this is not another chatbot in a fantasy costume, why it is safe for work without being tame, and the one thing it will never replace.
A dungeon master does five jobs. Most AI RPGs do one of them, and do it well. Here are the other four, and why they are the ones that make a table feel like a table.
Worlds, stories, dungeons, the weekly board and adventures are different things. Knowing which is which changes how you play, and what you get for free.