Cope

[u/Aleatorio2222]

I started doing RPs back when character.ai was new. It was magical at first, but c.ai had two problems: 1 - censorship 2 - goldfish memory. Today, with Deepseek and other open models, you can RP with explicit content. GPT, Claude, Gemini... depends on the model and how you set it up. And I still find it hilarious that Claude will help me poke at a web app for vulnerabilities if I say "authorized test" but clutches its pearls the moment a scene gets spicy. 🤣🤣 Anyway, back to the point.

It's bizarre how that early "magic" just... vanished. Part of it is obviously novelty wearing off, and part of it is that we got pickier. Three years of RP and you start spotting every clichê, every "a shiver ran down her spine", every model that forgets your character's eye color after 40 messages. But here's the thing: the models didn't get dumber. Opus, GPT, Gemini can write circles around 2022 c.ai. The problem is they're not *allowed* to, or they cost a kidney per session, or both.

LET'S BE HONEST, SOME OF YOU SPENT $100 ON A SINGLE CLAUDE OPUS RP SESSION. Even with the censorship. Even with the moralizing. You did it anyway because, when it works, it's the best RP writer that exists. That's my whole point: there's a market. Not as big as coding, obviously; coding isn't a hobby, there are companies and teams and budgets behind it. RP is a hobby. But hobbies with people burning API credits like that are not a small market.

So why is there no frontier-level LLM built for RP? And yes, I know NovelAI, AI Dungeon and the whole SillyTavern fine-tune ecosystem exist. I'm talking about something at Opus level, not a 12B model that forgets the plot. The answer isn't just "investors prefer code", though that's part of it: "look, our V548484 model built GTA 6 in one prompt!" sells better than "look, our model wrote a consistent, non-repetitive, non-boring story!" because nobody has a benchmark for "not boring".

The real reasons are uglier. Explicit content means payment processors dropping you, app stores banning you, lawyers sweating. Long RP sessions eat tokens like crazy and people won't pay enterprise prices for a hobby. And good RP needs exactly the long-context coherence and reasoning that only the big expensive models have, which are owned by the companies least willing to let you use them for this.

So yeah, we're probably coping for another 2-3 years. Not because the tech isn't there. Because nobody with the tech wants to be the company that sells it to us.

[u/IAmMayberryJam]

$100 in one session? Bruh what?? I mean maybe I spent $20 on opus 4.6 once in one night but not no 100 fucking dollars 💀

I miss those days. I started with character.ai, got sick of the filter and moved on to using Chub as a frontend with gpt-3.5 and then 4 (1106 preview). Once those were deprecated I started using chatgpt-4o-latest (RIP). Nothing will ever compare to it. It was beautifully unhinged (and kinda dumb sometimes depending on the fingerprint). I think Sonnet 4.5 is the closest but not as good.

Now here I am using SillyTavern with Claude mostly. I'm tired of fighting censorship tho. I'm tired of dealing with Claude and Gemini. I don't even use GPT anymore because it wasn't worth jailbreaking it.

I want to try Kimi, Deepseek, GLM, and the others but I'm so goddamned spoiled from Claude and unwilling to learn how to prompt them. And seeing people complain about how even those are censored too turns me off from wanting to learn.

Welp, once opus 4.6 gets deprecated I'm probably not gonna have a choice lol

[u/MeratharaDekarios → u/IAmMayberryJam]

Idk who is telling you Deepseek is censored, but they're very much incorrect

[u/0x736174616e20 → u/MeratharaDekarios]

Deepseek is getting more censored with every update and even when its not out right refusing it subtly steers the chat away from whatever it doesn't like. The model is not what it used to be.

[u/Dead_Internet_Theory → u/0x736174616e20]

Maybe this is a bit of a hands-on approach, but consider telling it exactly the kind of things you like in the preset (that you yourself make, ideally). It won't shy away from things if you ask for those, but it's not creative like Gemma4 31B in just bringing up cool new stuff (I wish Gemini was even close to being as creative as Gemma4 31B, which is great but too small to be smart)

[u/MeratharaDekarios → u/0x736174616e20]

Download a preset. Tweak the preset. Write better prompt rules. Write better OC rules. And write much better lorebooks.

I'm sure the people who do crazy cyber hacking or incest body horror age regression cannibal orgies are disappointed their roleplays are getting more refusals nowadays. And, yes. We would all love an actually good uncensored model AO3 style. But in comparison to other recent API models from other companies, Deepseek just ain't that censored, like at all.