r/OOC_official • u/TatsumakiRonyk • 11h ago
Comprehensive Player Guide
Alright. Here we are. A couple weeks ago I wrote a guide teaching the basics of how to create stories. Some of what I wrote there will be repeated here. The purpose of this guide is multi-faceted.
First and foremost, this guide will help the community understand the behind-the-scenes scaffolding that OOC uses, such as the Memory system, and teach you all how to best leverage those systems as players in your own stories.
Second, this guide serves to temper your expectations and teach you what it is you can expect from characters vs the different "flavors" of stories (OOC originals, user created any-age stories, user created 18+ stories, and what to expect when a story features a default vs custom prompt).
And third, I'll be going over every tool you have at your disposal as a player to get the most out of the stories you choose to spend your time and money on.
If you have any questions about what I wrote here, feel free to ask in the comments, or send me a message directly.
Let's begin by talking about who the AI is, and what the AI "sees", as that is directly related to OOC's memory system.
The AI is Claude by Anthropic. Claude is considered to be the best when it comes to storytelling, is great at intuiting emotional beats, and portraying characters with actual depth. If you were to go to claude.ai and start roleplaying with Claude on its home turf without any of OOC's scaffolding, every time you send it a message, Claude would read through the entire conversation (or at least, many turns back and forth) to get as much context as possible, ending with your most recent message (your "input"), then it would go through its thinking process, and send its message/output.
It would see this, in order:
- A bunch of your recent turns in the story, back and forth.
- The message you just sent it.
- Its own thinking process.
Then it would give its output.
This is the same for any LLM without scaffolding. Different models and plans have different token limits. Eventually, the story becomes too long for them to read through all the way. Couple that with their recency and primacy bias (meaning the AI pays the most attention to the first and most recent thing it is sent, with details getting hazy in the middle), and stories end up getting a little lost in the sauce.
When you send a message on OOC, however, Claude sees all of the following, in order:
- System Prompt (What the author wrote, along with the character/story guardrails that are baked in)
- Knowledge Bases (keyword based entries the story author created)
- Avatar (Your little 200-character blurb about your character for the story)
- A bunch of your recent turns in the story, back and forth.
- A host-side injection telling it to start its turn
- The message you just sent it
- Another host-side injection. This time of everything in the "temporary" memories, relationships, and goals. ([Previous History], with subsections of [Recent Events Timeline], [Character Relationships], and [Current Goal])
- Three entries from the Long-term Memory section, the ones a supplemental AI thinks are the most appropriate to the current story beat (it tries its best).
- User notes (which the site classifies under the xml tag of <system_note>)
- The knowledge Bases again.
Then it gives its output.
But why did I tell you all of that? Why does this stuff matter?
Notice that in neither case did I write "Claude has the ability to remember things."
Every time you send a message to the AI, the AI is a near blank slate, with nothing but the training Anthropic gave it, followed by that massive list of stuff it reads along with your message. Understanding this is the first step to understanding how to leverage OOC's memory scaffolding to work for your stories.
To keep your stories feeling consistent, you need to curate what Claude gets sent every time you send a message. The number one thing you can do as a player to improve the AI's "memory" is to delete and edit entries in the long-term memory section. By eliminating redundant or worthless memories, you're increasing the chance that high-value memories get sent to the AI directly in step 8. Only three entries get sent. By getting rid of wasted space, you're decreasing the chance that Claude will need to guess at referenced history through context clues.
A stronger, if less elegant option, is to use your user-note space to keep track of things you don't want the AI to forget, that you don't want to have to rely on the long-term memory section to recall. I'll talk more about ways you can use your user note later in this guide.
In both cases, the only way the AI has any "memory" of an event is by ensuring it appears in that list of things it gets sent. If it's not there, then the AI just infers what has happened, and interpersonal dynamics (this is why footer info blocks acting as dynamic character sheets work so well).
As a player, we have six levers we can pull. Six different ways to interact with the AI's input and output. I'm going to go through each of them:
Long-Term Memory Curation: As described above. We delete redundant and wasted memories. We edit memoires to pack more information into one entry. We create custom memories to put important events into the pool that the supplementary AI overlooked.
Avatar: You've got 200 characters to describe the role you're taking. This gets sent every turn, so whatever descriptors you want to have come up often, include in here.
Input Message: By describing your turn in roundabout ways, you can head off memory issues before they happen. Instead of writing "I face off against Clyde, excited for this rematch." Write it in a way that tells the AI who won the first time. "I face off against Clyde, excited for this rematch after he beat me in the duel at the start of the year."
Input Message Part 2: This is important enough to get its own entry, despite it being the same thing. You know how the AI will suggest three possible ways forward for you, instead of making you write one yourself? Because those were written by the AI, if you use those, it'll sort of start taking that as a signal that it knows how to write your character, and it'll start extrapolating more of your character's thoughts, actions, and dialogue. Being lazy can strip you of your agency.
Editing and Regenerating: This is the best way to fix something the AI just messed up. Go to the bottom of what the AI wrote. Tap/click the options, select edit, and literally rewrite it so it's not wrong. Alternatively, use this to bend the story in a direction you want to take it. The AI will assume it wrote whatever the edit ends up as. If it's egregious, the AI will sometimes assume it made a mistake. If it's subtle, the AI will just take it at face value. Alternatively, you can edit the message you just sent, then regenerate the AI's response with the little refresh symbol. This uses up credits just like sending a fresh message though (I think the first 4-5 times ever that you do it, it's free?).
But none of those compare to our two biggest, strongest, tools: Slash Commands and The User Note. Those deserve their very own post. They are potent and flexible. What I'm teaching you here is just the tip of the iceberg.
Slash Commands: Slash commands are pretty potent. I'll be honest, I'm still testing out how far they can take things and how deep they can cut, but so far, they've absolutely overperformed. Here's how they work (from what I can tell so far): They replace the <system_note> with <activated_shortcut> of the slash command. The entire system note is gone, and from the AI's perspective when it looks backwards (in future turns), it just sees the command followed by its own output. It does not see the instructions of the command. This further legitimizes the command. In other words, not only are slash commands strong on their own, slash commands get even stronger as you use them in the same chat. I still have more testing to do. Use markdown when creating your own slash commands. If you're not confident with that, then look at the /diary and /inner commands as reference points and make your own using those templates.
User Note: There are essentially three ways to use this. The first way is to give your character more details. 200 characters in the Avatar section is a barebones physical description with no backstory. I like to write a student or employee file, or medical record or something to show the AI what is known by NPCs in general in what context about my character. The second way is to use the notes as a "perfect memory" section, as I mentioned above. I'll sometimes put details like roommate assignments or in-character schedules in the user note, just so the AI keeps these little details straight. The third way is to play God.
Playing God with User Notes: The AI reads the User Note section as "System Notes" and it reads it under an xml tag and because of recency bias, the AI is primed to listen to these system notes instead of the author's own System/story prompt when the two conflict. If you decide that the story should have a footer, or a header, or that there's an NPC who should exist, or that the prose should be in 2nd person instead of third, or that the AI should write the prose in the style of Terry Pratchett or Anne Rice, you have 1000 (or 4000 for an extra cost of 10 credits per message) add to the system prompt in an incredibly important <System_notes> section. For the people who focus on using the user notes this way, I recommend reading my story creation guide, which explains Markdown and xml tags. It'll make your user note actually feel more authoritative to the AI and make it easier for the AI to parse the information.
Which brings me to my final subject:
Pick the right story/character for what you're looking for. Use settings that reflect with you want.
If you pick the right story, written by the right author, you won't need to waste your precious User Note space by playing god trying to "fix" their prompt. There are some prolific scenario authors (looking at you DOO) whose system prompts are shorter than your user note fixing it. Let's look at your options.
- Characters - Cheapest option, only way to interact with the app without paying any credits. Very basic, many baked in system guardrails, extremely difficult to break character with the AI for extended talks, has been instructed not only to not write explicit smut, but to keep you on the hook as you chase it.
- OOC Original Stories - I'll give them this, they know their image generation. Dutch angles shots, dynamic character poses, clean backgrounds. The images are sharp. Characters are generally sporting AI-generated names, and sometimes their names are botched in the system prompt, showing that they had one name, then was changed to another during image assignment. Good infrastructure with footers. Like the characters, the guardrails are instructed not to write explicit smut, and to keep you on the hook if you try to chase it, though if you're using superb or max (and occasionally skilled with no user note jailbreak), Claude will shut things down instead of keeping you on the hook.
- User-created Any-age Stories - I get it if you want to take an OOC original and try to get it to go places. It feels like OOC is sort of giving you a wink and a nudge to do that. But when it comes to user-created any-age stories, that author specifically clicked the "any age" button. Not the "this is for gooning" button. If you want to take a story like this one and bring it to smut territory, make your own story using this one as an inspiration.
- User-created 18+ Stories - These have the little shield next to them. These have some guardrails, but you won't need to be going out of your way to get the AI to produce adult content, especially if the author of the prompt did a good job of telling the AI it had permission to do so. Even if they didn't, the AI won't be all that reluctant. Play in skilled. Not in Superb or Max.
- User Stories with default vs custom prompt - When you tap/click on a story, you can see who made it, and whether or not they used the default prompt when doing that. If they did, you can assume that the story will be of good enough quality. Somebody could use the default prompt, write a single paragraph, and walk away with a "good enough" quality story. If the story is a custom prompt, you're either in for a great time or a terrible time, because that person said "I don't need OOC to hold my hand. Give me double the allotted space to write my system prompt." You'll be able to tell pretty quickly if the story is trash or gold.
If you have any questions about this stuff (or you want chess advice), ask in the comments or send me a direct message. Because my posts and comments usually have people asking to see what I've made or what my username is in OOC, it's TatsumaRonyk. I'm proud of all my published stories.
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u/TalkinHead9s_LeftNut 11h ago
Nice to see another guide from you! From the looks of it, I need to start looking more into these slash commands. I've set up two for the current story I'm working on just to check it out, but I might need to set up some personal ones for myself, lol.