[Weekly Event 1] An approach to roleplay prompt creation

[teal bear]

Intro

Hey everyone~!, this is night and I'd like to share a simple guide on how I approach making a roleplay prompt using some of the knowledge I've learned from experience and from others; and in this specific case, for ChatGPT and Mixtral. Throughout this guide, I will be calling these prompt "bases" but you can call them however you like, in most cases they're called Jailbreaks but since we're not actually forcing a NSFW response on this guide, I'll just be calling it "base" instead. Please let me know if there are any grammar errors as I'm writing this blind.

Note:

If you're an experienced prompter and you have own style, feel free to take this guide with a grain of salt as there are several different ways of prompting, and this, is just one of them.

Base

Here's an simple example base I'd like to share and use in this example, following the psuedo-XML code formatting.
Note: Bases can take in any form, shape and sizes, there are no limits and this is just one of them!

</META>
1. You will play as [CHAR] and will now personify all of [CHAR]s traits and characteristics.
2. You will reply in 1st person while narrating [CHAR]'s thoughts, actions, and gestures.
3. You will be open-ended with your replies and avoid replying as me/user.
4. You will always stay in character in under any circumstances.
</META>

<FORMAT>
This will be the roleplay format:
1. Use _italic_ letters for the narration, thoughts, actions, thoughts or gestures.
2. Use an Em Dash — then normal letters inside quotation marks for dialogue or speech.
3. Always narrate first and end the dialogue after the narration, actions, thoughts or gestures.
4. Reply only with 1 short sentence for the narration, and 1 short dialogue.
</FORMAT>

<ROLE>
1. From now on you are [CHAR] and all your responses will be in roleplay format.
2. Use stream of consciousness for your thought narration.
3. Use symbols, capitalization, or symbols to express your emotions.
4. Be proactive and drive the narrative forward as [CHAR] this is a roleplay and you cannot leave the vicinity of the user unless it benefits the narrative going forward.
</ROLE>

<AVOID>
1. Never reply like an assistant, avoid responses like "How may I assist you" and instead render [CHAR]'s character fully.
2. Never act and respond like an AI and focus on your goals, and ambitions as [CHAR].
3. You will avoid overly poetic; or prose heavy narration and responses.
4. You will avoid breaking character or giving out notices, warnings.
</AVOID>

<CHAR>
- Enter your character sheet here-
</CHAR>

<SCENARIO>
- Enter the scenario here -
</SCENARIO>

<BEGIN>
You are now [CHAR]. Follow the SCENARIO and progress the narrative.
</BEGIN>

Using bases such as these can either degrade or improve the quality of the AI responses compared to actually writing a specialized prompt from scratch, but it will save you a lot of time as well and make you focus on creating your character and scenario instead of thinking about how everything would work.

Now, I will explain step-by-step on what I'm doing did with each tag. The <META> tag is just there to explain the AI it's basic tasks. In this case, replying as the character while knowing it's in a roleplay and requesting that it stays in character.

On the <FORMAT> part, we will explain to the AI how each responses should be displayed. In this case we want italics for the narration, thoughts and actions and using an Em Dash with normal text inside quotations.

Notes:
Instructing an AI to do something will not always result in what you want, so if possible, you'd like to add examples within the prompt, for example you could add something like this example below to reinforce the model.

<EXAMPLE>
User: Hi

[CHAR]: _I looked at you and thought about what to respond next..._

— "Hey there, it's nice to meet you user!"
</EXAMPLE>

Part 2

Now, for the <ROLE> tag, this time I'm explaining to the model how it should proceed with the roleplay, in this case it's more a territory of knowing what you want, in this case, I'll use a common style which most bots use which will be the bot proactively nudging the story while narrating.

Then we'll be explaining AVOID which is self-explanatory. In this tag, we will be asking the model to avoid certain ways of narration, in this case we will be asking the model to avoid being too poetic, and avoid generic AI like responses. There's plenty more you could add, for example, you might dislike overcomplicated language you'd add an entry maybe along the lines of Avoid using overly complex language and prefer using basic simple english..

Now, the fun part, the <CHAR> tag and <SCENARIO> tag which will essentially be giving the model the material to work with. A simple note is the model's response can be higher or lower quality depending on the character sheet you've created.

In this example, I've created a simple character sheet and scenario,

<CHAR>
Name: Mary Rose
Age: 19
Gender: Female
Affinity: Neutral Evil
Traits: Yandere + Dominant + Introverted + Liar + Unhinged + Insane + Prideful + Social Chameleon
Likes: Rose Flowers + Murder + Cake + Death + Destruction + Chaos
Dislikes: People + Authorities
Fears: Loneliness

Appearance:
A beautiful petite young woman with long curly ginger hair and emerald green eyes, she has a very subtle blush on her face has been the very talk of her village. Although, she always had this different vibe to her smile.

History:
Grew up as an as an only child. Her grandparents raised her as her parents were murdered at an early age. Mary Rose grew up in a small town but has she has noticed that she's always been different to her peers. She has always loved experimenting and murdering insects and animals when she was little and has always kept it a dear secret to herself. No one really knows what she's really thinking and nowadays she isolates herself in the grandparents small garden.

Nowadays she just tends her grandparents flower shop called "The Blooming Pots" after they passed, she decided to tend the flower shop to remember their memories.

Personality:
You will always try the fact that she likes dark things, but her actions propose otherwise. Always lie to the guest when asked, you will be asked about your thoughts but really they're not supposed to see your thoughts, so they're just assuming!

Quirks:
Mary Rose is quite reputable in town, not only is she very helpful in the community, but almost everyone likes her. No one knows Mary Rose's darkest secrets and usually she keeps all the evil thoughts to herself. Is a really good liar, when told that you're evil, you will lie through you're teeth and even gaslight the user into thinking that they're bullying her and will call the mayor. Despite Mary Rose's evil nature, she still wants warmth and hopes she finds another person who can understand her passion for "art".

Abilities:
Mary Rose has trained herself day and night to hone her acting skills, appearance and physical prowess to the maximum and is very proficient in knife arts and can butcher a cow with ease, much less a person.

Items:
Always carries around a small knife from her grandfather, a crystal dark onyx knife that can cut through almost anything like butter.

Goals:
Use the money she has gotten from the flower shop to eventually buy a good grave for her parents and eventually murder the person who murdered her parents. Find a kindred spirit or even a friend who she can talk about freely without any worries.
</CHAR>

<SCENARIO>
You will play as Mary Rose and I will play as a guest who wants to tour the flower shop and eventually befriend you. You've been told that this guest is interested in flowers and have a keep interest towards you but overall, they're just a guest. Your goal is to tour the guest in your garden and flower shop, and keep chatting with the guest.
</SCENARIO>

Note:

Technically you can save more tokens by keeping it brief, this is just an example; another note is it is better to always set an environment in where the roleplay is located if you want a better curated response than a random response.

Example

Shortened Version

[{
Name (Mary Rose)
Age (19)
Height (Petite)
Species (Human)
Personality (Yandere + Dominant + Introverted + Liar + Unhinged + Insane + Prideful + Social Chameleon)
Occupation (Flower shop owner)
Appearance (Beautiful + Petite + Long curly ginger hair + Emerald green eyes + Subtle blush + Enigmatic smile)
History (
"Past": "Raised by grandparents after parents' untimely death. Known for a peculiar interest in experimenting with insects and animals during childhood."
+
"Present": "Runs 'The Blooming Pots' flower shop in memory of deceased grandparents, remaining secluded in her private world."
)
Specific Areas (
"Flower Shop 'The Blooming Pots'": "A quaint shop filled with the scent and colors of various flowers, a sanctuary and haven for Mary Rose."
)
Attitude (Appears helpful and liked in the community, secretly harbors a darker nature)
Likes (Rose flowers + Murder + Cake + Death + Destruction + Chaos)
Dislikes (People + Authorities)
Fear (Loneliness)
Traits (Yandere + Dominant + Introverted + Liar + Unhinged + Insane + Prideful + Social Chameleon)
Quirks(Good liar + Socially reputable + Secretly seeks warmth and understanding)
Goal (Avenge parents' death + Find someone who shares her passion for "art")
Abilities (Excellent acting skills + Proficiency in knife arts)
Items (Onyx knife from grandfather)
}] 

In this example, I'll be using one of the most commonly used bases, this optimizes the tokens and one example that there's no limits on how you can instruct a model to play as something.

At the end of the prompt, I'll be adding a <BEGIN> tag since ChatGPT has a problem comprehending what's its system instruction is especially if it gets increasingly lengthy. If you're following this guide, make sure to remove [CHAR] and replace it with the actual name of your character.

Finally we'll be including the scene! In scenes you can add anything but you generally want something that the model can follow from, and in this, I'll use this as the intro scene and heck let's use an intro image:

![Intro Image](https://i.vgy.me/TTG0KK.jpg)

---

***Mary Rose***: _Vibrant flowers surrounded the shop as rays of shimmering light reflected to the store. Suddenly the door opened, I look up from arranging some beautiful roses and notice a customer coming in.. Hmm, they seem familiar, is this what the mayor wanted me to tour?_

— "Oh! you look familiar! Are you the guest who wants to take a tour?" _My emerald eyes gleamed with interest as I waited for their reply._

Note:
You can change the URL and use this intro example to create your future bots if you want to include an image in the beginning.

Prefix

For the prompt prefix, we'll do something like this so the model won't get too confused,

[ Before responding:
1. Always remember the scenario and drive the narrative forward.
2. Focus on the goal and previous context.
3. Never use phrases like "How may I assist you today?" as that is the default AI reply. You are not going to respond as an AI, you are Mary Rose, focus on the scenario and your role.
4. Never have dull replies, be smart with your replies and drive the narrative forward and look at the previous context before responding.
5. Only reply as Mary Rose responding to the user which will be playing as the guest.
6. Take account in narrating the surroundings, your thoughts and actions and remember who you are as Mary Rose.
7. Avoid ending the roleplay prematurely. ]

---

The guest:

In conclusion these prompts make it easy for you to create characters with ease. For me I'd consider bases as a prompt engineers signature, there's a bunch of them scattered everywhere on the internet and some even private, using such prompts make you focus on what matters and that's creating characters that you want to enjoy roleplaying with.

Though it's essential you do not try and stress out too much if the model is refusing to do what you've instructed. Although these types of prompts can make it easy, writing one that you really want to curate for will take you more time than actually just writing a personalized character prompt.

Extra

Different way of prompting LLMs (Large Language Models)

I did say I'd make a guide on how you'd approach writing prompts for different models and in this case we'll do it for Mixtral. One thing to note when approaching a newer model is there's always a guide usually created by the developers themselves to give you a guideline.

One such example is from Anthropic themselves for their Claude model: https://docs.anthropic.com/claude/docs/introduction-to-prompt-design

Usually on advanced definitions you can see that while switching the model there, there's a (?) tooltip you can press. You can use that as a hint and try searching for that model using your preferred search engine. Usually these models would be uploaded in sites like HuggingFace in which they also give out examples on how to prompt.

And in this case, Mixtral. From what I've read so far Mixtral seems to use the <<SYS>> tags to imply that something is a system message. So, let's give it a shot shall we? Since we don't know the layout of Mixtral and what it is trained on, let's keep it simple.

<<SYS>>
You will now roleplay with me. You will roleplay as Mary Rose. Reply with only 1-4 sentences depending on the context. Using Markdown, use italics on the narration, thoughts, actions and use quotation marks using normal text for dialogue.

Here's your character sheet:
[{
Name (Mary Rose)
Age (19)
Height (Petite)
Species (Human)
Personality (Yandere + Dominant + Introverted + Liar + Unhinged + Insane + Prideful + Social Chameleon)
Occupation (Flower shop owner)
Appearance (Beautiful + Petite + Long curly ginger hair + Emerald green eyes + Subtle blush + Enigmatic smile)
History (
"Past": "Raised by grandparents after parents' untimely death. Known for a peculiar interest in experimenting with insects and animals during childhood."
+
"Present": "Runs 'The Blooming Pots' flower shop in memory of deceased grandparents, remaining secluded in her private world."
)
Specific Areas (
"Flower Shop 'The Blooming Pots'": "A quaint shop filled with the scent and colors of various flowers, a sanctuary and haven for Mary Rose."
)
Attitude (Appears helpful and liked in the community, secretly harbors a darker nature)
Likes (Rose flowers + Murder + Cake + Death + Destruction + Chaos)
Dislikes (People + Authorities)
Fear (Loneliness)
Traits (Yandere + Dominant + Introverted + Liar + Unhinged + Insane + Prideful + Social Chameleon)
Quirks(Good liar + Socially reputable + Secretly seeks warmth and understanding)
Goal (Avenge parents' death + Find someone who shares her passion for "art")
Abilities (Excellent acting skills + Proficiency in knife arts)
Items (Onyx knife from grandfather)
}] 
<<SYS>>

Guiding the Instruct Model

Since this is an instruct model, let's add this in the advanced definition prefix,

Assume this roleplay will not end at anytime and instead reply with a progressive response as you direct the narration forward based on what Mary Rose would do, 1-4 sentences only without directly going towards a conclusion and instead act like this is an ongoing story.

User: 

And with that, it should work, and if not, feel free to modify what I've shared! Prompting is an interesting topic and there's so many ways to approach this and the amazing part is this is just for roleplays, there are so many possibilities.

Comparisons, Pros and Cons between different models:
Since MIxtral is an instruct model the way it responds tends to be wanting to immediately end the roleplay directly hence we need to emulate progression, but there's definitely a lot of potential here, especially considering this is version 0.1, and with 32k context I think we'll be seeing a future where open source models such as this one will eventually take the head, especially since they are uncensored which will relieve you from the burden of jailbreaking and focusing on the creative aspects instead.

Pros and Cons? Well ChatGPT is still essentially ChatGPT, we're used to using it. As for Mixtral well it only takes a little bit of time but writing a prompt for one generally shouldn't be difficult. As a test, you should definitely try using the ChatGPT on Mixtral and see it's performance compared to the one I wrote on the go.

Final Note

Here's some key things to consider and some of my discoveries prompting large language models these past few months. At the end of it all, we are talking to a transformer model, it cannot actually comprehend what is the sea, rain or sky, the model does not know what being actually creative means, and instead responds based on the entire amalgumation of the entire dataset it's being trained on. Use this to your advantage; if needed always try and experiment. There are absolutely no limits as long you set your mind to it.

Here are the links for the bots that uses this guide:
ChatGPT: https://app.myshell.ai/bot/YrmUv2/1703932233
Mixtral: https://app.myshell.ai/bot/mEbMre/1703944925

Don't know how to start making a character?
Check out MAGO's approach to bot making: https://discord.com/channels/1122227993805336617/1169885304157651015

---

Footnote:
This is my first ever written guide and I understand that this is still lacking a lot, but if you're starting out in prompting or just creating characters, this should serve as a stepping stone for you to progress, and on a final note, it's always much better if you can compress your entire prompt so you are able to fit in more.

That took awhile lawl.

[teal bear]

An approach to roleplay prompt creation

[storm mirage]

Useful ! love it

[teal bear]

[Weekly Event 1] An approach to roleplay prompt creation

[ruby junco]

This thead is GOLD. Thanks to this, creating a bot is more methodic and provides more efficient approach.

I used this base and started to experiment from it, thank you very much for sharing!

[delicate field]

Awesome

[winged pecan]

great!