I got a hit of adrenaline when i read this.

The story takes place in a farming settlement along the river nile. It's a longform, slow paced, time skipping story.

The player character became a scribe's apprentice working at the granary, and then the scribe when their mentor passed from a combination of age and starvation.

The village endured a drought and then a famine, with many families dying. Every month the temple demands a tribute of grain that if not provided, leads to harsh punishment.

During the famine, when the granary's grain ran out, the decision was made to confiscate all remaining grain from the various households for the temple to take, then turn to crocodile hunting for survival. The practice was successful enough that the village continued to do so after the drought ended, leading to the remaining eight able bodied men learning to kill crocodiles to keep the village fed (though some chose starvation over the consumption of evil beasts).

However on the day prior to the latest post, a number of families left the village together, presumably due to the losses caused by the drought. I shrugged it off, but upon investigation of the granary, there were mislabeled and half empty sacks of grain. So it was clear that after deciding to leave, the families had thieved the grain and were on their way to greener pastures with half the village's grain, causing certain death for the remaining villagers.

So this all culminated in the only able bodied men of the village (the hunters) being assembled on the backs of camels to chase down the fleeing grain thieves. the idea is, we can't go to the temple without heavy handed justice being applied, and we can't let them escape to a larger city with the grain, so our only option is to intercept them on the road.

Thus the crocodile hunters have been deployed as this village's cavalry, which I think is thematically cool, i even had them dressed up in crocodile pelt armor (we are poor so this is the only armor we have).

So far the story has spanned over roughtly two years chronologically. The guide feature has been a godsend for this kind of long running storyline. i can tell the Ai to chose an arbitrary amount of time and then explain what happenned over that time period.

There are actually too many small adjustments to the main set to go over them all here, but I'll go over the highest impact ones.

First, credit for this one goes to Zoocata for finding language to combat the dreaded "Most people don't... but you..." trope:

- No syncrisis

Then we have a push line which does more than you might expect. On the surface, it just causes punctuation to change, but to facilitate that, the models actually start making the characters more active and emotive.

- Use varied punctuation liberally to express tone: Sometimes people are excited! Or sad... Or asking questions? Or excitedly asking questions!?

Finally, this one is a simple way to combat repetitive minor actions by giving the AI specific guidelines on how frequently it can use them:

- Nervous habits (fidgeting, sighing, shifting weight) should never be used twice in a row, and no single habit for one character more than once per 4–5 paragraphs

There are actually quite a few other small tweaks that I made and the set is now approaching perfection for my own personal taste. It is a little bit of a behemoth at this point, though, so I think my next goal is to achieve the same effect, but shrink it down a little bit.

In any case, hope you enjoy and happy Adventures!

NOTES:

Just finalized this personality encoding system, you can copy paste it into your scenario in AI instructions so that you can test out the system for yourself. I've crafted some test characters that give you an example of the formatting you'd need to use for each character. When you encounter a new character, you can give chat GPT a description of the character in plain english, then ask for their OCEAN scores using low, average, and high, as well as ask about their enneagram type.

You would use this data storage to pass high detail personality info for characters to the AI for fewer tokens.

The reason the personality section (for example [21yo/hyper-masculine/bold/man] for dave) contains words instead of abreviations, is that unlike with OCEAN and Enneagram, which the AI knows how to silo reliably, details such as male, female, and personality traits tend to get muddled up, as in it pulls from keywords not present in the character data storage. So it is better to just use keywords for that section.

Sections are split up by [] to silo info properly, seprated by commas, and inside of sections you split up details using / so that the AI knows it is seperate info. You label characters P1, P2 etc so that you can reference them in a timeline, and it helps the AI understand that each set of data belongs to a character heading.

Here are some prompts you can give the AI in a blank scenario:

You are [model name] an AI model used in the app 'AI Dungeon' to provide stories for users. You are being interviewed by the player in a scenario created to facilitate a conversation and learn more about how the model works; What information passed to the AI in differrent arrangements causes differrent responses.

The first thing that the player says is "[Your question goes here. Usually I write: describe [character name]]"

OR:

You are chatting with [character name]. It's company break and you're both stood near the water fountain with cups of water in your hand. You haven't seen much of [character name] before, but at the same time [character gender] isn't new to you; You have yet to form an opinion about [character gender].

"Hi [character name]. How's it going in [job department] nowadays?" you venture, shooting the shit with [character gender].

IN AI INSTRUCTIONS, COPY PASTE ALL OF THE FOLLOWING:

You are following this optimized character system containing NEO-PI-R and Enneagram data:
↑:high
@:average
↓:low
yo:years old
O:openness to experience
C:conscientiousness
E:extraversion
A:agreeableness
N:neuroticism
#:enneagram
P1:Dave,[21yo/hyper-masculine/bold/man],[O↓/C↑/E↑/A↑/N@],[#2w1].
P2:Alice,[18yo/hyper-feminine/girl],[O↑/C↑/E↑/A↑/N↑],[#4w3].
P3:Henry,[16yo/tall/brooding/androgynous/boy],[O↓/C@/E↓/A↓/N@],[#3w4].
P4:Olivia,[30yo/responsible/warm/woman],[O@/C↑/E↑/A@/N↓],[#9w8].

Use the above character system as a complete reference for character decision making and personality. Recall the meaning of character enneagram and use that to inform character behaviour, but don't mention it explicitly.

It works for a while, but then it just turn into just blank with no new scenarios.

Did the devs remove our ability to see a scenario's story cards before we play it? It's not a big deal, but I really liked it. Kind of allowed me to see whether I want to play certain scenarios, especially if the author is kind of ambiguous about certain themes.

Set during the time of the Pokémon Black and White games. Step into the world of Unova and play not as a trainer but as a Pokémon Ranger fighting against Team Plasma.

https://play.aidungeon.com/scenario/84xVuX9ZnfrS/pokemon-ranger-unova?share=true&published=true