Moki's RP Tips
Primarily revolving around SillyTavern I'm by no means an expert, just a humble roleplay enjoyer slowly learning how to use the awesome tools out there to accomplish the sort of entertainment I'm after. So take this as a collection of tips from a complete amateur with a passion for writing. This is just some useful info I've picked up through a lot of trial and error, and I hope it might help someone else, too!
Long Roleplay Tips
Memory
Once events have progressed in a roleplay past the model context, of course that older stuff is no longer accessible. So I like to put a brief summary of the most important events in the Author's Note. That way, it's really only necessary that the model see the AN plus the past few messages or so to keep things generally on course.
If you forget to summarize for a long time, long enough for stuff to fall out of context, you can always use one of the corpo models like ChatGPT or Claude to summarize everything (if you don't have any NSFW stuff in there).
If you want to watch your token usage, make sure to read through any summaries and condense them even further if you can, or add any important stuff that may have been missed. AI isn't great at knowing exactly what's important to human sensibilities, especially when it comes to relationship subtleties!
Staying in Character
But it seems to me that, no matter how good a character card is (and admittedly there are some pretty...meh ones out there), after around 50 messages or so every model I've used starts to slowly revert to stereotypes or character tropes rather than what's written in the card...and if the character has a non-Standard English dialogue style, that starts slipping, too. (I like longish messages, around 250-500 tokens for me and the AI each, so that's quite a lot of context by then.)
The way I get around this is by keeping a running summary of events, and when I start noticing the model getting sloppy, I ask it to write a new starting scenario from the current point in the story. Then I made a new Alternate Starter with that message (and my own edits/rewrites), plop the summary from Author's Note in the new chat, and go from there. I've managed to have some very long, very involved stories using this method.
Another thing: group chats are SO fun, but if the overall story focuses on one main character you're RPing with, you don't really need all that extra stuff taking up context. I like to branch off chats for group RP, then summarize what happened and return to a single character chat.
Writing
RPing with an LLM is a fun, relaxing hobby, but I think it's still important to keep up your end of the writing, too. I've never actually run into this problem, because I tend to either write long replies, or only use short replies for test chats, but I've read about people experiencing the AI's writing degrading over time into text speak, emojis, improper grammar, and misspellings. I don't know if it's true for all models, but I know Character.AI's chat would imitate the user's writing style over time. Your writing doesn't have to be perfect (mine definitely isn't) but I can only assume low effort responses from human = low effort responses from AI. Good example messages and a good starter in the style you want can help mitigate this problem.
Also, if your bot does something that annoys you, edit it out because it'll probably repeat it at some point. Any message you respond to is assumed by the AI to be acceptable! If you start seeing repetition, go back and edit some of it out or the problem will get exponentially worse over the course of the chat.
Author’s Notes
Aside from a recap of events, I like to include relationship notes if it’s not in the character card already, and brief instructions for the LLM on writing style and genre. The latter helps achieve the feel I’m going for fairly effectively. I keep my AN at Depth 4, so it has a pretty significant impact on things.
Example Author’s Note
This is just how I like to format it because I feel models keep the events in order better this way, but that could just be my own bias and not based in fact - YMMV.
# Relationship Notes
{{char}} and {{user}} have an xyz relationship. Etc etc.# Events so far
*Brief title for event*
Event text.
*Another title*
More event text.[Writing style: x
Genre: x, x]
Genre Examples
Mix and match: sci-fi, fantasy (or fantasy/sci-fi), political intrigue, explicit erotica (during NSFW scenes), drama, tragedy, slice-of-life, friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, married life, adventure, action, college life, royalty, family drama, found family
Writing Style Examples
Mix and match: beige prose, casual, evocative imagery, conversational, stilted and formal, scientific, friendly, humorous, tongue-in-cheek, satirical, gritty and realistic, dark, light novel, AO3 fanfic style, danmei, 18+ rated
Models
I’m picky so I’ve found having a service that provides lots of options suits my preferences. I use Infermatic and switch between the various models it offers. The Infermatic Discord has community settings for all the models, I usually use those. Here are my current favorites (highly subjective):
Model | Personal Notes |
---|---|
Qwen Kunou (72b) | current MVP, very smart, excellent characterization, she does it all |
Llama 3.3 Cirrus (70b) | nice for a change of pace from Qwen, still has some llamaisms but my second favorite, currently |
Hanami (70b) | nice casual writing style, follows directions well, great for all kinds of RP |
Euryale (70b) | not as good at regular RP as Hanami imo, since it REALLY likes NSFW; it excels at that, though, and regular RP isn’t BAD by any means (and sometimes it says really out of pocket things, which can be fun) |
Magnum (72b) | similar to Euryale, I like to switch between those two for any NSFW stuff, or just for a change of pace |
Wizard (8x22b) | a little too formal and prone to purple prose/future framing for me, but great for summarizing; sometimes good for RP if the character is naturally formal anyway; I prefer Sorcerer to base Wizard |
Midnight Miqu (70b) | a little old now, but still a solid option; prose sometimes veers into romance novel territory, but GREAT at characterization |
SillyTavern Lorebook Settings
I'll be honest, I'm not especially stupid, but it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand how lorebooks work, and every time I get that "ooooh, so that's it" moment with them, I find a newer, better way to make them. But I digress; this isn't about making them, it's about using them!
Lorebooks in SillyTavern can be global (attached to all chats) or character specific (attached to, you guessed it, a single character). So you can have a global lorebook with World Info in it, which all of your characters will have access to, and a character lorebook with character lore in it, that only THAT specific character can see. Ideally, entries are as short as possible so that all relevant entries can fit in the context you assign, without taking up too much space in your total prompt.
My global settings are:
Scan Depth = 2
Context = 100%
Budget Cap = 1024
Recursive Scan = Off
Match Whole Words = On
Include Names = On
I only use recursive scan if the creator of a card says to, and I'm still learning exactly how to leverage that best for my own characters. Recursive Scan just means that ST will read the contents of a lorebook entry and, if any of the words match another lorebook entry, it will pull that one up too. 1024 is the budget cap I use for lore-heavy stories/worlds (and for my private worlds, which are very in depth, I use 3000), for more simple cards 512 is sufficient. Context at 100% lets the Budget Cap work, to the best of my knowledge. Scan Depth is how far back ST will look for keywords in your chat. 2 means it will look back 4 messages (it looks in pairs!).
If you're adequately familiar with the trigger words for the entries in your lorebook, you can intentionally trigger them when you need them, which is super useful.
SillyTavern Quick Replies
for ADVANCED Quick Replies, click
HERE
Auto Background
If you name your backgrounds something descriptive (example: home kitchen interior), then there's a command in SillyTavern that will automatically choose from among your backgrounds based on the current chat context. I slapped this in a quick reply so I can use it whenever a scene changes.
/autobg
Model Switch
Recent versions of SillyTavern make this really easy! Just set up everything how you want it (Instruct, Context, System Prompt, Tokenizer, Model), save it as a profile, and then make quick replies like:
/profile yourprofilename
BAM, done.
Make sure you've got it set so you can see your Quick Reply buttons above your user input box in the chat. Now when you press one of those buttons, the process of switching between models and all their associated settings is automated, yay!
Quick Reply Organization
You can make use of the QR context menu feature for things like Model changing; click on the vertical ... next to a QR labeled "Models" or whatever, and then, under Context Menu, link it to a separate QR set with all your model switch QRs. Now your Models QR button with have a little ... on it, and when you click that, it will bring up a context menu showing your model options. You can have multiple QR buttons like this!
I originally had a few different QR sets with different buttons in them that I would manually switch between, but here's how I do it now. I have a MENU set that has a set of quick replies that act as links. For example, I have a Tools QR button with this in it:
/qr-set-on Tools |
/qr-set-off MENU |
When I click it, it switches to my Tools QR set. Then in that set, I have a Back QR button, like so:
/qr-set-on MENU |
/qr-set-off Tools |
Which takes me back to my main "menu". Very convenient :P
Music
The way I have this set up is I have a MENU button for Music (similar to what I described above). When clicked, it brings up a set of QRs labeled by type of music (Romantic, Sad, Action, etc). These are just labels, linked to context menu QR sets. Then I make separate QR sets for things like...soft_songs_romantic. And in that set, I have quick replies like:
/bgm assets/bgm/soft_romantic_yourhandsarecold.mp3
Which I label with the song title. The music goes in the folder listed in the QR (in SillyTavern root>data>yourusername>assets>bgm). So in my Music QR set, I have a Romantic QR button which links through its context menu to soft_songs_romantic. Now when I click on the ... for Romantic QR button, it brings up a context menu with all the songs I have linked.
This requires Dynamic Audio extension, but it's a way to access the music easily, in an organized fashion, during roleplay (without having to open the Extensions menu and search through the Dynamic Audio dropdown for an appropriate song).
SillyTavern Character Expressions
It took me a while to get into this, but now...wow, I love this feature. There are premade sprite packs out there, but if you're like me and you play with your OCs, here's a fairly simple method to get this set up. (Keeping in mind it's not perfect, and your sprites may be "cut off" at the top or sides depending on what images you choose for this, if you follow this simple guide...as long as that doesn't bother you, onward!)
Setup
- You need to go into your SillyTavern folder. From the root, go to data>yourusername>characters. Make a folder in there named for the character you're working with (example: Marie).
- Make sure you have the Character Expressions extension activated/installed in SillyTavern. Set it up how you want it (I have it using the neutral expression by default, allow multiple sprites, using my Main API).
Gen Images
- Use your image generator of choice to generate some expression images for your character. My trick is to describe the character, with specific details like "wearing a red hoodie" so that most of the gens have at least a red top, and the hair/eye/skin color, general look I'm going for, lol. Make sure to include "white background" in the prompt. For this, I use PixAI, the 3x5 size.
- After you've got the images you want, use a background remover to remove the white backgrounds. Save the files with the expression names (eg, anger, sadness, joy, etc).
- Move your images to the folder you created in the Setup step.
And that's it! A very basic character expressions setup. Now you get that visual novel experience, ugh, it's so good.
Fun Prompts
WIP I have a bunch saved but will have to get to this later
Moki's Programs
Character Card & Lorebook Extractor
A simple utility program that helps you manage and format character cards and lorebooks for better readability. I wanted a program I could drop a card into, turn it into plain text, and plop that into a big LLM to get feedback or ideas...so I made it myself. Excuse any spaghetti code pls. You can find it on Github.
Contact Me
Homepage
Email: [email protected]
Do I have every intention to responding to any messages punctually? Yes!
Will I get sidetracked and forget to check it and respond to your message several months later because I have inattentive ADHD? Also yes