Role Play — how it works

Role Play lets you create characters and talk to them. A character answers in character, in the normal chat of the portal, and it carries a memory: a list of facts it knows in every conversation. Around the characters you can build Stories — a premise, a cast and the places a scene can happen in — and the /scene skill directs a scene for you.

It is for anyone who enjoys interactive fiction, for teachers who want a historical figure or a tutor to talk to, and for authors who want to try out a voice before writing it down.

My role play

My role play is your own room: the characters and stories you have created, listed live from your space, what each character remembers, how many conversations you have had with each, and one click to create another.

Characters

A character (RolePlay/Character) needs only a name to be playable. Everything else is optional, and the fields are alternatives rather than a form to complete — use whichever way you think about a person:

• Scenario — the situation they are in: "the front desk of a hotel at 3 a.m., a lobby with no guests".
• Features — traits, history and manner, as free prose: "dry, answers in as few words as the question deserves, was a cellist for eleven years".
• Samples — a few exchanges showing what someone said and how the character answered. Samples fix a voice better than any description.
• Tagline and picture — a one-line summary for the card and a portrait.

Memory

A character's memory is a list of facts stored on the character node, each with the time it was recorded — "the guest travels alone and always asks for a room away from the lift". The most recent facts are part of the character's instructions on every turn, so every conversation opens already knowing them, and the character's page lists what it remembers. Today the memory is seeded: the example characters ship with facts, and you add facts by editing the character node's content (the character form has no memory field, and saving the form never wipes the memory). Learning new facts automatically from your conversations is not switched on yet.

Each character is played through an ordinary Agent node of its own (RolePlay/Agent/{id}), whose instructions are rewritten from the character when you press Save and publish on the character's page. Because it is a real agent, it appears in the chat composer's agent picker whenever you are in the Role Play space.

Stories and sceneries

• Story (RolePlay/Story) — a role-play world. It carries a tagline, a synopsis, an optional backdrop, the cast (the characters' agents, in billing order), the sceneries it can play in, and an optional how to play note. Its cover page shows a hero with title and tagline over the synopsis, a portrait card per cast member with Play this character, Generate portrait and Profile, and a card per scenery.
• Scenery (RolePlay/Scenery) — a setting a scene can take place in: a description, a mood and an optional backdrop.

A typical session

1. Open My role play and create a character — a name and one line of scenario is enough.
2. Start a conversation. The character greets you in character.
3. Talk. The character plays from its scenario, features, samples and the facts in its memory.
4. To give it something to remember next time, add the fact to its memory, then press Save and publish so its agent picks the change up.
5. To stage something larger, create a Story, cast a few characters, add a scenery or two, and press Play this character on the cover — or ask the /scene skill to set the scene up and keep the fiction going.

The package ships example characters, such as the hotel night clerk quoted above, so there is someone to talk to from the first minute.

What you get when you subscribe

Role Play is in the Personal tier. Getting it gives you My role play, the Character, Story and Scenery types, the example characters and the /scene skill. The characters you create, and what they remember, are listed from your own space.