FreedomRPG vs AI Dungeon: which AI RPG is right for you?

I've worked in machine learning for a long time, so when AI Dungeon launched back in the GPT-2 days I played it on day one, and I loved it. I also understood why it couldn't hold a story together, and I spent the years after waiting for models that could. In 2025 they got there. FreedomRPG is the app I built when that happened, aimed at the one complaint every AI game master's players share: the GM can't keep the world consistent.

FreedomRPG and AI Dungeon are both AI game masters for open-ended text adventures, built around different bets. FreedomRPG bets on depth: it keeps your world's characters, places, rules, and lore as real, tracked things the game master maintains, and it runs on Claude, so a single long campaign stays coherent as it grows. AI Dungeon bets on breadth: a huge library of ready-made scenarios, native mobile apps, a big community, and a menu of models to pick from. If you want one world that holds together for months, that's what FreedomRPG is built for. If you want variety you can dip into tonight, AI Dungeon has more of it.

If you've played one of these before, you know how it goes wrong. The opening hours are great. Then, a few thousand words in, the game master starts to slip. A character forgets who they are. Something you did stops having happened. The world quietly rearranges itself around whatever the current scene needs, and the campaign you were invested in dissolves underneath you.

How each one remembers your world

Both apps hit the same wall: your story outgrows what the model can read at once. Both handle it automatically. What they do at that wall is where they split.

AI Dungeon compresses your past actions into short AI-written summaries, then pulls back whichever ones look relevant to your latest move. That's a real memory system, but what it recalls is a summary of a summary of what happened, and there's no model of your world underneath it. Context is tight too: 4k tokens free, 32k on the standard paid tiers, and more than that only on its top models.

FreedomRPG keeps the world itself. Anything worth tracking lives as a structured entity the game master reads and updates while you play, and the system doing the tracking isn't fixed: the GM builds the rules of your world in real time. Start in Earthgarden and you get a designed system that can still bend when your story needs it; start a world of your own and the GM invents one to fit, whether that's cultivation stages, a ship's cargo manifest, or your homebrew magic. Walk back into a town after fifty hours away and the GM isn't reconstructing it from notes; it looks the town up. The people in it have inner lives too: each character keeps their own private thoughts, persisted on the character, so an NPC you meet again a week later still remembers what they were thinking about you last time. Context runs around 300k tokens with automatic compaction on top, and the GM's memory carries across your games, not just within one.

An NPC's private thoughts from a real game. The player only sees this if they choose to peek; the character remembers it either way.

Play for an evening and you won't feel the difference. Play for a month and it's the whole difference: recalled summaries blur and drift until the world contradicts itself, while a world that's actually maintained stays the same place you left.

The model doing the storytelling

The model is the game master's brain, and it's where the two apps have quietly made opposite choices.

AI Dungeon runs on DeepSeek models and open-weight fine-tunes it hosts itself. That buys it a genuinely large menu, over twenty models you can switch between, and real variety in tone. What the menu doesn't include, at any price, is a frontier model: no Claude, no GPT, no Gemini.

FreedomRPG runs Claude for every player, on every tier, up to Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic's newest model) on the top one. That's not a spec-sheet detail. Prose quality, following your world's rules, and playing a scene straight instead of drifting into cliché are exactly the things frontier models are better at, and in a game that's held together by the model's judgment, you feel the gap within a session or two.

One day open models will be good enough for this, and when that happens FreedomRPG will run them too. Today the honest gap is real, and it's why the two apps feel so different to play.

Dice with teeth

FreedomRPG's game master rolls real dice. When an outcome should be uncertain, the GM makes a roll, in standard TTRPG notation, against a difficulty it sets, and shows you the result. It can't quietly decide you succeeded because that's where the story was leaning. AI Dungeon has no built-in dice mechanic; outcomes are whatever the model writes next.

The dice deciding a story for real: a cast roll fails against its difficulty, and the character dies for it. This game runs a player-made magic system the GM learned and enforced.

What it costs

AI Dungeon prices by tier: free at 4k context, then $14.99 to $99.99 a month, with memory, context, and credits scaling by tier. On top of the tiers sit two separate currencies (credits you're granted, "scales" you earn), three invite-only "Shadow Tiers" above the public ladder, and context limits that vary by both tier and model. It's a lot of system to understand before you know what you'll actually get.

FreedomRPG has one currency. Credits meter what the game master actually does (narration, images, voice), you get free credits daily just for showing up, and you can see what any given session cost you. There's no tier to pick and no matrix to decode. The honest caveat: heavy play costs real money, because frontier models cost real money. What you're never doing is guessing.

When the GM gets it wrong

Every AI game master makes mistakes. The difference is what you can do about them. In AI Dungeon you can retry the response or edit the text, and hope. In FreedomRPG you can step out of character and just tell the GM what it got wrong. It fixes the mistake, remembers the correction, and carries the lesson forward, including into your future games. The GM you play with next month is a little more yours than the one you started with.

Side by side

	FreedomRPG	AI Dungeon
Memory architecture	Maintained structured world: entities the GM reads and updates in play	Retrieval over AI-written summaries; no structured world model
Context	~300k tokens, with automatic compaction	4k free / 32k standard paid / 128k+ on top models only
Cross-game memory	Yes, the GM remembers across your games	No
Character inner lives	Persistent private thoughts per character	No equivalent
Rules system	Built and enforced by the GM in real time, including your homebrew	Narrative only; no enforced mechanics
Dice	GM-rolled, with difficulty checks, shown to you	No built-in dice mechanic
Models	Claude on every tier, up to Claude Fable 5	20+ models: DeepSeek and open-weight fine-tunes; no Claude, GPT, or Gemini
Pricing	One credit currency, daily free credits	Five tiers plus three Shadow Tiers, two currencies
Scenario library	One designed starting world, or build your own with the GM	1.5M+ community scenarios
Mobile	Web only (works in mobile browsers)	Native iOS and Android apps
Community	Small	Large, established since 2019

Which one should you play?

Pick AI Dungeon if you want variety tonight: thousands of ready-made scenarios, a native app on your phone, a big community, and a menu of models to experiment with. It's the established option, and its breadth is real.

Pick FreedomRPG if you want one world that lasts: a campaign you return to for months, a homebrew system the GM actually enforces, dice that decide outcomes, and a world that's still the same world in session forty. That's the thing it was built to do, and the thing nothing else does yet.

Try it

You get 300 credits when you sign up and free credits every day after, no card required. Begin your story

The community is small and early; if that sounds like your kind of thing, the Discord is where it lives, and joining earns you 500 credits.