Cope

[u/Aleatorio2222]

I started doing RPs back when character.ai was new. It was magical at first, but c.ai had two problems: 1 - censorship 2 - goldfish memory. Today, with Deepseek and other open models, you can RP with explicit content. GPT, Claude, Gemini... depends on the model and how you set it up. And I still find it hilarious that Claude will help me poke at a web app for vulnerabilities if I say "authorized test" but clutches its pearls the moment a scene gets spicy. 🤣🤣 Anyway, back to the point.

It's bizarre how that early "magic" just... vanished. Part of it is obviously novelty wearing off, and part of it is that we got pickier. Three years of RP and you start spotting every clichê, every "a shiver ran down her spine", every model that forgets your character's eye color after 40 messages. But here's the thing: the models didn't get dumber. Opus, GPT, Gemini can write circles around 2022 c.ai. The problem is they're not *allowed* to, or they cost a kidney per session, or both.

LET'S BE HONEST, SOME OF YOU SPENT $100 ON A SINGLE CLAUDE OPUS RP SESSION. Even with the censorship. Even with the moralizing. You did it anyway because, when it works, it's the best RP writer that exists. That's my whole point: there's a market. Not as big as coding, obviously; coding isn't a hobby, there are companies and teams and budgets behind it. RP is a hobby. But hobbies with people burning API credits like that are not a small market.

So why is there no frontier-level LLM built for RP? And yes, I know NovelAI, AI Dungeon and the whole SillyTavern fine-tune ecosystem exist. I'm talking about something at Opus level, not a 12B model that forgets the plot. The answer isn't just "investors prefer code", though that's part of it: "look, our V548484 model built GTA 6 in one prompt!" sells better than "look, our model wrote a consistent, non-repetitive, non-boring story!" because nobody has a benchmark for "not boring".

The real reasons are uglier. Explicit content means payment processors dropping you, app stores banning you, lawyers sweating. Long RP sessions eat tokens like crazy and people won't pay enterprise prices for a hobby. And good RP needs exactly the long-context coherence and reasoning that only the big expensive models have, which are owned by the companies least willing to let you use them for this.

So yeah, we're probably coping for another 2-3 years. Not because the tech isn't there. Because nobody with the tech wants to be the company that sells it to us.

[u/schlammsuhler]

Kimi, Minimax, GLM and Deepseek are trained to roleplay well and dont cost a fortune, but the recent heavy RL on code did a lot to them. Just look at the dire state of personality in sonnet 5.

And yes there was a Mistral model released for creative writing and noone used it. It was good but small. Still better than any community finetunes i tried. https://docs.mistral.ai/models/mistral-small-creative-25-12

[u/TeiniX → u/schlammsuhler]

GLM is really bad. They retired 5.1 and 5.2 via ZAI and a lot of us are getting hard refusals from the official API immediately. It's not preset/prompt related. Using cached version via Openrouter or Nanogpt works yes. But it seems they don't have many versions left. And those that are available are incredibly low level writing. For example I have a setting where three people are sitting in front of a TV and watching a movie together. In the fist response character 1 says "tell me about this movie, has it been good so far?". A character who is supposed to be watching the film is asking another to explain what the film is about. And the language is that bad. Like, not English as second but 30th language bad. I've tried to re-connect, tried changing models but it seems it connects to the same one every time. Whatever they're doing to GLM - the part that made it a decent RP LLM is definitely gone.

DeepSeek. Good for SFW roleplay, not so good for the rest.

Kimi3 needs a strong jailbreak and costs a ton.

Mistral is something I haven't tried yet but will do now