How to fix Franz and get your campaign back on track

If you’re reading this article, you are probably in the middle of arguing with Franz and having a frustrating experience. In this article, we’ll talk about why you might be having issues with Franz, why arguing with him will likely not improve your experience, and go over some tips and tricks for how to get your campaign back on track. We’re sorry you are having a frustrating experience and hope that this article helps!

Why you might be having issues with Franz (his limitations)

Franz is a system (with limitations)

As convincing as Franz can be sometimes, he’s ultimately just a computer program powered by AI and can’t always do what you expect of him. Sometimes he can do something in certain situations, but not in others. We wrote this blog post: How Franz Works, which explains it in more detail. Franz has a few key limitations you should be aware of:

1. Franz has limited memory and cannot see everything in your campaign history at once. That’s why we built the research step and working context to help mitigate these limitations. Additionally, we built in a system where he will attempt to update his working context / game state if you correct him on something.

2. Franz’s context and tools are situational. Depending on the situation, we show Franz certain context. For example, we don’t show Franz every full spell detail every turn. We only show him the full spell details when you cast a spell. Additionally, Franz only has access to certain tools in certain situations. For example, he won’t have the tool to accept a quest if there are no nearby NPCs with an available quest.

3. Some tools may not be implemented. Friends & Fables is still in active development. Franz may not have access to certain data or tools. You can check our roadmap to see if something has yet to be implemented.

Franz is made up of LLMs, which have their own limitations

Franz is a collection of large language models (LLMs). LLMs have their own personalities, tendencies, and intelligence levels. Some of these tendencies cannot be instructed away. For example, we tried a model in Franz 1.5 that constantly used bullet points and no matter how much we instructed it not to, it would continue to do so. We are constantly upgrading to better LLMs as they become available, but even the best language models on the market today still have their own tendencies and limitations.

Additionally, the quality of the output you get with an LLM is heavily dependent on the input. We wrote a simple article on How LLMs Work, which we highly recommend reading. The key point is that if all of Franz’s context is full of irrelevant context and you arguing with him, the quality of his output is likely to be worse.

Why arguing with Franz may not help

Correcting Franz here and there is great and is something you should totally do. We built in a system where if we detect that you are correcting Franz on something, we put him in a special mode to try to update his working context and game state according to your correction.

However, prolonged arguing with Franz will be counter productive as the entire chat history will be consumed by back and forth arguments, which will likely make his outputs worse. Franz’s context is limited, so instead of being filled with the right information about the world and your campaign, it’ll instead be filled with the arguments, making it harder for him to get back on track.

How to get your campaign back on track

Review / Edit Context

If Franz has incorrect information, search your context blocks or the plot to see if he has any incorrect context.

If Franz keeps repeating a description about a character or location, check your scene context and see if there’s anything in a description that Franz might be fixating on.

Edit / Delete Messages

If you’ve been arguing with Franz for 3+ messages, its best to delete those.

If Franz is doing something weird with formatting that you don’t like, check his previous messages. LLMs tend to repeat patterns. Franz sees his last few messages as examples of how his next one should be. Edit out anything you don’t want him to repeat.

Hopefully this helps. If you are still having issues, please submit a bug report or hop in our Discord and ask the community for help!