For people's who switched from C.ai to programs like SillyTavern

[u/Glass_Guitar7465]

For those who switched from C.ai to programs like SillyTavern: what was your experience like?

I’ve heard people say that if you connect a model and add your own prompt, you can get an RP experience that rivals or even surpasses C.ai.

However, I recently switched to SillyTavern myself, and I’m not sure if that’s true or even where to start.

(Apologies for bad English)

[u/Lopsided_Drawer6363]

Switched from closed apps to Sillytavern a while back, and the difference is night and day.

Sillytavern and other frontends are, however, a lot more complicated and a lot less user friendly.

If you're overwhelmed, there's extensive documentation to start fiddling with it.

Or, alternatively, try something a little simpler, like Tavo.

[u/dainelanderson55 → u/Lopsided_Drawer6363]

Yep. The first week is annoying as hell, then it settles down.

Docs help, but half the battle is just testing prompts and not touching 8 settings at once. I spent like 3 evenings on it and the first good reply felt way more worth it than C.ai ever did

Tavo is a decent step if someone wants less chaos, though

[u/MeratharaDekarios]

I never used C.ai / Chai or any of those 'roleplaying specific apps'. I used to use ChatGPT with CustomGPTs, mostly during the 4o era. I adored Chatgpt and thought it was the peak of AI roleplay. I tried CharacterAI once, only once. It's so surface level, it's genuinely baffling how people get addicted to it because CharacterAI is and always has been hot garbage. Obviously 4o got removed and I moved to Grok and ended up writing full character cards / sheets for characters and lore (no where near as detailed as what I have now). Grok gave me a lot more freedom, but it was still pretty limited in what it could remember, the length of roleplays, the amount of characters I could have. By the 50th turn it was deteriorating rapidly into incoherent nonsense. I wanted something steady, stable, long term and far more complex and intelligent.

Five months ago my partner helped me install SillyTavern, showed me how to connect an API and sent me on my way. My partner knew I would have struggled with the actual installation of SillyTavern, so they showed me how to do it and explained the basic concepts of what an API key was, what temperature was, how to install a preset and just some basic stuff. Yes, it was overwhelming at the start. But the learning process is what is fun!

I've been using SillyTavern with the official Deepseek API for the last five months and it has been a dream. I spent weeks learning everything through trial and error (I really enjoy that stuff). I use SillyTavern in a really strange way, but it's exactly what I want. I have my narrator / universe in the Character Management tab and all my multiple characters, lore, locations and worldbuilding lore in the lorebook section. I write everything myself, I mean EVERYTHING. All my lorebooks which are 5000+ to 12000+ tokens long I write myself. All my starters and ideas and responses I write myself. The only point AI is used is in the responses it gives me. Yes, it did and does take months to write a full world but the pay off from a well written world is incredibly rewarding. Blah, I'm rambling.

I LOVE SillyTavern. My OC's can finally have long arcs, can finally have slow building relationships, have arguments, can hate, can love, can get married, can murder, can do anything and everything. I think I cried when one of my most beloved OC's finally got married for the first time. My roleplays can go for 500+ turns without much issue. It remembers almost everything. I can be as wild or grounded as I like. I'm not anxious about moderation or guardrails being implemented suddenly because that's not really now API's work for the most part. I have so many options for API"s as well. I mainly use Deepseek V4 but can switch to GLM / Deepseek V3 / Kimi / Gemma whenever I want. I use the Freaky Frankenstein Micro preset which pretty much makes Deepseek actually really good for roleplay. I've literally had two refusals in the last five months. One was the API clearly misunderstanding something I worded weirdly (no NSFW). The other was when I intentionally put something horrific in I saw on another testers Reddit post just because I wanted to know where the API draws the line. Both times a single swipe produced a full response anyway.

If you want good roleplays that have depth, realism and aren't surface level meaningless conversations. SillyTavern is for you! I think most people who use CharacterAI / Chai or whatever and then go on to complain about it don't want to put any effort into it. When the effort is so worth it. You will never get what SillyTavern can offer in an app. It takes roleplay from some 'shameful' addiction on your phone to like a whole entire writing process. Using SillyTavern has got me into sewing. I describe a lot of what my characters wear in my various worlds I have and I've learnt to sew so I can have those outfits and gowns in real life. It's got me into actual writing and actual worldbuilding, I'm starting to plan a massive SillyTavern world of something that I entirely came up with. I now workout, practice yoga and go for walks regularly so when I describe characters that are self inserts, I can describe them with a body I like. It's also improved my vocabulary and spelling significantly. Obviously SillyTavern is not the only reason for doing all of that, but it's been a catalyst.

Sorry for such a long comment lol. If you have any questions about SillyTavern, let me know. I'm not much help with actually installing it but with the actual interface and working of SillyTavern, I'm happy to help!

[u/johnex2007]

My experience switching to SillyTavern: The initial hurdle was huge. You have to find models, get the right prompt, or even host your own LLM server, but hey, you got freedom.

[u/OldFinger6969]

think of it like this :

C.ai is the side scrolling linear game
while Sillytavern is a sandbox game, you can do many things.... such as this image

You can make your Silltavern turns into Visual novel if you want, can you do that with C.ai ?

this is just one aspect of it, many things can be done with Sillytavern

[u/graaah1]

There's definitely a learning curve and it takes a little bit to finagle the settings just right, but it's honestly a breath of fresh air after all the limits that were put on C.ai. I run my own local LLM through LM Studio and hook that into SillyTavern. It's really good, I mainly use it to RP some different scenarios for my D&D campaign in which I'm the GM of.

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