Roleplay framing

Setting explicit rules at the start of a roleplay (who writes what, what's in-character vs out-of-character, response length) to prevent drift.

Every long roleplay drifts. Characters slip out of voice, the model narrates your actions instead of letting you write them, responses get too long or too short, scenes rush to resolution. Framing up front reduces all of this.

A good framing prompt establishes: (1) stay in character, (2) don't narrate the user's actions, (3) keep responses within a length range, (4) use OOC notation for anything meta, (5) acknowledge these rules before starting.

The reason this works is that once a model has acknowledged a set of rules in-context, violating them requires contradicting itself, which models generally avoid. Set the rules before the first in-character message and they hold much longer than if you try to correct course mid-scene.

Prompts that use this concept

Roleplay Setup

The rules-of-engagement block

Setting explicit rules before the roleplay begins dramatically improves persistence. Most quality loss in long roleplay comes from the model silently violating implicit rules. Making them explicit fixes this.

Roleplay Setup

Third-person-narrator toggle

Third-person past-tense framing puts the model in novelist mode, which pulls from denser literary training data. Prose tends to come out tighter, description richer, dialogue more natural. Many users report better output from the same model just by flipping this switch.

Roleplay Setup

Present-tense immersion

Present tense produces a tighter immersive register but is easy to lose: models drift into past tense as responses lengthen. Pinning the tense explicitly fixes the drift. Present-tense first-person is also the format most romance/erotica training data uses, so the model has strong priors.

Related concepts

OOC (out-of-character)Pacing

Put this into practice

Our prompt library shows these techniques in real, copy-ready prompts, tested across 22 AI companion apps.

Browse prompts →