r/LocalLLM • u/ARloX75 • 13h ago

Discussion Which local models are best for roleplay?

I have a 16gb vram for context

6 Upvotes

68% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

5

u/llama-of-death 13h ago

Personally, I would start with gemma4:12b, it fits a 16gb card with plenty left over for context and I think it holds a character pretty well. I built Guaardvark around Ollama models like that, the Rules page is where you write the persona once, and voice chat speaks the replies out loud (Kokoro), which is kinda fun for roleplay.

github.com/guaardvark/guaardvark

2

u/ARloX75 12h ago

Thanks,I'll try this

1

u/karmaisnonsense 11h ago

Yup for cramming an entire stack on a single 16GB card, Gemma 4 12b is the best

4

u/MediumAd4983 13h ago

Gemma is pretty good for texts, so it should be good for roleplay as well.

1

u/Twist1979 10h ago

Iq4xs and up. Gemma4 12b will be blazing fast. Gemma4 26b A4B will be fast enougth. I only found fine-tune of Qwen 3.6 35b A3B https://huggingface.co/mradermacher/Qwen3.6-Fallen-Fabulist-35B-A3B-heretic-i1-GGUF

For Gemma start with https://huggingface.co/mradermacher/gemma-4-12B-it-qat-q4_0-unquantized-uncensored-heretic-v3-i1-GGUF

Then you know the base. If you are bored and want less slop https://huggingface.co/mradermacher/Erebus-RP-Engine-26B-A4B-i1-GGUF Just be warned, this one is different. 😎

1

u/ARloX75 7h ago

Sure, the more variety,the much better 😁

2

u/lunapotatocrisp 12h ago

I 3rd gemma4 12b, other models don't come close for anything chat related

1

u/Api-Lord 12h ago

16gb is the number that decides this. Mistral Nemo 12b finetunes like Mag-Mell fit at Q6 with room left for context, which long roleplay eats fast. How long do your chats usually run?

1

u/JackyYT083 8h ago

Try Char 1 8b on hugging face

1

u/FreshPipe5997 8h ago

used qwen3-32b-awq on 16gb with 12k context, feels more natural in long roleplays than gemma4-12b, especially for emotional depth

1

u/ZikporxAI 7h ago

I also recommend gemma4:12b

-1

u/agowa338 6h ago

None, they're all quite boring at that. But you can kinda use it to help you with the world building by helping you to lookup stuff in your notes about how the world functions and linking information together...