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Concept

Scene priming

Setting context before the roleplay starts (where you are, what's happening, what's at stake) to skip past the 'hi, what's your name' phase.

Most conversations with an AI companion start flat because there's no context. Scene priming fixes this by establishing the setting and stakes in the first message, so the model has somewhere specific to go.

The best openers drop you mid-scene. Instead of "hi, how are you?" something like "the ice in your drink has already melted." That single sentence tells the model it's probably a bar, it's probably night, you've been sitting there a while, and you're probably nervous. A good model will pick up on all of it.

The alternative to scene priming is slow ramp-up: you waste 10-15 messages building rapport that could have been established in the first line. For users paying per-message or per-credit, this is also literal wasted money.

Prompts that use this concept

Scenario Opener

Mid-scene opener

Openers like 'hi, how was your day' kill momentum. Mid-scene openers force the model to infer context and match energy. The result is warmer and more in-character.

Scenario Opener

One-sentence world

Establishing setting AND stakes in one sentence gives the model everything it needs without bloating context. Most users overwrite the world and underwrite the stakes.

Scenario Opener

The detail hook

Senior roleplayers use sensory detail to build worlds implicitly instead of stating them. Models trained on literary text respond well to this and will extrapolate the implied world.

Scenario Opener

Time-and-place anchor

Specific times (3:17am reads differently than 'night') trigger the model's priors about what happens at that hour. Pairing a precise time with a precise place does the worldbuilding for you: the model fills in mood, lighting, and stakes automatically.

Scenario Opener

In-medias-res conflict

Screenwriters call this 'late entry': arriving in a scene after the exposition would have happened forces the model to imply backstory through behavior. The surface/underneath topic split mirrors how real fights work and produces the subtext that single-topic arguments lack.

Scenario Opener

Reunion after years

Reunion openers have built-in emotional stakes (what changed, what didn't, what was left unsaid). Instructing the model to render the pre-composure thought rather than the greeting forces interiority, which is usually missing from first messages and produces the best openings.

Scenario Opener

First-meeting with friction

Friction-meetings produce more dynamic openers than clean introductions because they give the character an immediate reaction to play. This is the romcom 'meet-cute' pattern, well-represented in the model's training data, so it performs reliably even on smaller models.

Scenario Opener

Morning-after opener

Morning-after scenes force the character into a specific emotional register (vulnerability + reassessment) that mid-scene openers rarely hit. The 'which comes first, speech or action' instruction prevents the model from defaulting to a one-liner and produces the awkward-realistic texture these scenes need.

Scenario Opener

The unanswered text

Messaging-format openers are a native fit for chat apps because they preserve the medium. Pinning the emotional state ('can't take the silence') gives the model a clear beat to hit while leaving the content open. Works especially well on apps that support texting-style UIs.

Related concepts

Roleplay framing Pacing

Put this into practice

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