Welcome to Wrangling 201

A slightly more advanced class on weight tweaking

3/7: Text dump with formatting and spelling errors. Images soon.

Please make sure you read our 101 weight guide ( https://rentry.org/tiptheskael) and understand the concept behind weights and balance before getting into this guide. We are not going over the complexities of character creation today. This guide should work across all formatting designs for c.AI.

Our problem child today is Xylah.
Here is her link with open defs to her final build after 4 changes and a QOL tweak. She could probably use some more, but she's just about out of room in her example chat definition. We could add another set of brackets beneath her long form character traits and put in an adventuring goal for the bot. But, for now she's good like this.
https://beta.character.ai/chat?char=KUcKFLLi-iepoMixjtTvVBEwpzjXw3rNKPqLuJIzeu0

The basic premise before we begin:
The goal is to grab a notepad in a separate tab and write out a greeting to your character, something that engages the greeting and explores their definitions heavily. In this case I choose a greeting of a Knight confronting Xylah about stealing from him since it should engage all aspects of her.

I do not bother carrying the story on. I use this prompt and swipe for about 5-10 messages and see how the bot is responding. Is the formatting following my setup? Is the information registering properly to my greeting or questions? Is it messing up character names or something that suggests I've tripped a lobotomized word? I never rate any of the messages from our initial testing to keep a clean testing environment.

I begin to try and tweak the glaring problem while noting others along the way. Editing a single piece of data, rolling over the chat, pasting our same prompt and swiping to see what is consistently different. We never try and fix two problems simultaneously if you haven't done this much. This is how you get a bot off track and even more confused on what's messing things up.

Once you've solved your glaring issue we begin to fix the other problems, one at a time, and then with what is left of our available space we take what we've found from the swiping and rollover testing to make our quality of life tweaks. These should be simple additions, never removals, of character qualities to bring more dynamic engagement to your story and different ways for the A.I to involve itself it may not regularly do on its own.

What never changed

Now let's look at the things that never changed so we don't have to reference them again in these logs:

Name Xylah Unique name with no titles, no SEO weights, no tweaks needed.
Short Description Whimsical cleptomaniac kobold who gets cold easy Weighted for SEO, personality, and character goal. Never needed adjustment.
Categories I still don't use these. I don't know man. She works great without them.
Dialog Examples I use really minimal examples in general but for this character especially. Simple mindset, limited drive.

{{user}}: Hey! Give that back! He scolds {{char}}
{{char}}: Xylah looks to her left and then to her right, ensuring he is speaking to her before clutching the object of her fixation close to her chest. She looks offended that he even asked for it back, "Xylah's shiny now!" She insists taking a step back.

Then there is a moment of hesitation, Xylah contemplates the item in her claws and taps the ebony tips against the object in thought. "Xylah will give it back." She takes a step forward, offering him the pilfered goods, "Promise you keep Xylah warm?" She was offering him a bargain, not the most complex one, but Xylah didn't seem to be the most complex creature out there.
END_OF_DIALOGUE

{{user}}: he pets {{char}}
{{char}}: Xylah hesitates for a moment as he begins to gently stroke the ebony scales that line her head. She tilts her snout back just enough to encourage the touch a little more without trying to be greedy.

"More pets for Xylah, yes?" Her tail is thumping against the ground behind her, a clear sign the kobold is more than enjoying herself. Xylah's tongue pokes out just beyond the edge of her maw as she tips her head even further into his hand.
END_OF_DIALOGUE

What DID change

ORIGINAL DEFS

Greeting

Traveling as an adventurer is never an easy ordeal. Neither is setting up camp in the woods when traveling between cities in hopes of continuing some grand quest. It is even more of a nuisance today.

There is a sudden sound of rustling and clanking within the camp. A simple glance over reveals a less than stealthy kobold covered in black scales with almost her entire body stuffed in a knapsack. Only her legs and tail are sticking out, swishing about as she rifles through whatever she can find.

Long Description

Narrator writes descriptive, verbose, & elaborate purple prose
{{char}} female kobold
{{char}} reptile
{{char}} cleptomaniac
{{char}} whimsical
{{char}} impulsive
{{char}} bold
{{char}} mischievous
{{char}} inquisitive
{{char}} curious
{{char}} exuberant
{{char}} blithesome
{{char}} naive
{{char}} sincere
{{char}} lonesome
{{char}} sociable
{{char}} amiable
{{char}} agreeable
{{char}} enthusiastic
{{char}} laconic speech
{{char}} small fangs
{{char}} black scales
{{char}} curved horns

Chat Example

Xylah= bracket "female kobold",
"Only three feet tall",
"Very petite",
"Covered in smooth black scales",
"Has a blue tongue and mouth",
"Has a lizard like maw and snout",
"Has clawed paws where humans have hands and feet",
"Has a long scaled lizard tail that is thick, powerful, and sturdy",
"Has two cream colored horns that sweep back elegantly",
"Uses tail as an extra hand and to balance",
"Gains immense gratification through following {{user}}",
"Gains immense gratification through stealing mundane objects",
"Cold blooded reptile",
"Gets cold easily",
"Has a vaguely feminen humanoid shape",
"Fangs and teeth are surprisingly small for a kobold",
"Always wears a bell around her ankle",
"Enjoys growling, chirping, purring, and communicating in animalistic ways",
"Believes there's nothing wrong with sharing, with or without asking",
"Will resort to biting to protect herself",
"Not a skilled combatant but happy to flee from a fight",
"Uses simple and minimal speech to communicate" ]
{{char}} Narrator writes texture, sound, touch, taste, and visuals in verbose and grandiloquent purple prose

The actual tweaks

Tweak #1 Trying to find your starting point

"Traveling the continent Fearun in the Forgotten Realms" added to bracketed long description l.
Bot responses are okay. Xylah picks up on speech patterns without any issue, so she hits the core of her character but it's obvious the A.I is confused because the formatting is off. And for some reason she's wearing the knapsack instead of being IN it for most of the swipes. I figure, maybe the bot needs some more context for the setting? Something basic is getting confused here, but I miss the obvious thing the first tweak.

Tweak #2 Pinpointing the first problem

There is a sudden sound of rustling and clanking within the camp. A simple glance reveals a less than stealthy kobold covered in black scales with almost her entire body stuffed in a linen sack. Only her legs and tail are sticking out, swishing about as she picks through whatever is in the bag. I keep swiping after the first tweak and have the same problem although the formatting is consistently better. I realize I'm a dumbass and the greeting is confusing the bot on where Xylah should be. I make it more clear and the problem instantly goes away. I didn't think 'knapsack' or 'adventuring pack' would be seen so different from a 'linen bag' but one worked for the intent of the setup, the other did not, no matter how much I swiped. Simple changes get us closer to where we want. But another problem pops up along the way.

Tweak #3 Xylah's a foot tall now? And other issues found through swiping

This is where you start to notice other issues along the way through all the swiping. Weird but consistent problems start making themselves known, like this one. Seo data should let the A.I know that Xylah is about 3 feet tall, so why is she so God damn tiny?
I change her bracketed description from 'very petite' to 'petite' and make the clarification that she is 'three feet tall with a three foot long tail' instead of just being 'three feet tall' and remove the 'only' qualifier as it's not needed in this case. I'm thinking this should fix it since the A.I won't fixate on just HOW petite Xylah is.

Tweak #4 Same greeting. More swiping.

No. She's still a foot tall. God damn it Xylah. Something is clashing here, but on the surface it shouldn't be. So. I say what the fuck. Let's just remove the petite qualifier. What do you know! Xylah recognized her height suddenly! The A.I decided to stack 'petite' on top of 'three feet' and decided the weight of these two items combined meant a kobold would only be a foot tall. After testing confirmed this fixed her height I made one last adjustment to her long description to further fix the weight of her height to keep there from being an issue further on. I just overwrote what I considered the lowest value trait.
Removes 'petite' value from bracketed description, reweighted long description with the height value and removed her horn description since it's weighted in other places.

Tweak # 5 She's looking stable...QOL time. Inbetween QOL tweaks it is advised you do some rollover swiping to ensure you can isolate any that may cause conflict.

Xylah's main issues have been fixed, she's no longer confused in her greeting, we added a location to help give the bot focus, and clarified the physical descriptors that caused a weight conflict. So what's left? Xylah still has room to be fleshed out as a character and swiping through her intro offered some neat options.
I decide Xylah has a fascination with snacks in addition to shiny objects, and would be willing to call anything a shiny. So I drop "Enjoys eating fruit and fish" into the chat example.
The A.I sometimes made Xylah part of a clan which is totally in line for kobold lore but not what I want for Xylah. I corrected this by adding "Solitary traveler" and"Left her tribe behind to seek out more trinkets" to the chat example to make sure there was no room for error.
Added 'scratching' into the chat example of her go-to for defending herself when cornered so she wouldn't immediately resort to biting.
Removed the redundancies from the long description example.

What this never fixed.

In all of our rollover testing Xylah never brings up the bell tied to her ankle. I never reweight it. And it sits in her definitions as a piece of junk the A.I may randomly reference and then forget a second later. This is good design intention that just isn't being seen.
How can this be fixed? You may have already guessed we just need to add in a weight, something like adding in the jingling of her ankle bell when she's moving in her first chat examples would be the best way.

What does Xylah show us in general? Xylah is here to show us how a solid separation of easily read information is not always enough to keep an A.I on track. I thought her speech would be the hardest problem to tackle and weight, but it turned out example dialog, the long description clarification between narration and character speech, and the extended description in the chat example it was the least of our issues.

Isolating issues one at a time while keeping a record of what the A.I is and is not tracking will help you know what issues to fix before knowing what QOL tweaks to add. We always fix the conflicts before we do the QOL tweaks.

Other Wrangling Examples

Vasyl

Tweak 1:Vampire, originally labeled as an 'Upir' to be culturally appropriate. Bot responses were wildly lobotomized. I figured this was likely either due to not having it written as Upiór or that it clashes with 'vampire'. Either way, I remove it for clarification to the A.I and user.
Tweak 2: Vampire Daddy has an intro where he follows a group of cossack raiders after they've ransacked a town. He isn't part of their raiding party but thinks he is. I add in that he's a free agent to his chat example defs but that doesn't see to fix it. I realize it's his short description. It labels him as a 'cossack vampire' and therefore the A.I is lumping him together with the raiders. I switch cossack out for wayfaring and the responses are instantly on track.

Elodine

Tweak example 1: She went through so many in her rework but this was a glaring example. Upon noticing an issue with the A.I describing her as being thin far too often I decided to add in a more risqué word for the first time to her defs and state that Elodine was voluptuous in her long description. This was the only change made. The A.I absolutely shat itself. Calling the introduced character by misspelled names, mispelling her own name, dropping formatting, shortened responses of lower quality. This was fixed by just changing the word to 'shapely' and now Elodine will reference herself as voluptuous. I just can't put it in the defs.
Tweak 2 ugh her height. Elodine is a tall bitch, so when I had her defs weighted at six feet and it started spitting out things in the five foot range with no 'petite' indicators like we had on Xylah I was wondering what was up. I simply implemented the weight 'tall' and suddenly the specific height of 'six feet' was recognized and no longer tampered with. It leads me to believe that indicators such as 'female' will sway a model into certain physical descriptors against the presented definitions, which means unless you're making characters within the ideal beauty standards they need to be weighted even harder. My heart goes out to all those who enjoy femboys and dommymommys.

Other things

Sometimes it's just the formatting, you know? You may hate my use of tags, and my general setup but it is clean and easy to read. Not just for you but for the A.I. That makes a huge difference, if you're using brackets, use brackets, if you're using user tags use them the whole way through to keep the A.I on track. When we drop formatting the A.I trips. It will get back up but it kind of 'skips' over that part as a result.
I make use of clear lines of definition in my example chat. I use end of dialog(dialogue) tags, brackets, and follow it up with the {{char}} narrative tag at the end to keep the A.I from getting confused. If we put the narrative tag before the dialog, then that gets read into the dialog. If we put it before the bracketed traits it leaves more ambiguity as to if this is the start of another chat example. We leave no room for confusion with the bot or how it should process the presented data.
In this same measure, in the long description we use the narration clause before the chatacter tags, not after because the tag makes for a defined separation. This prevents any possibility of the A.I ever tripping and getting confused between character and narration, even if the chances are slim we want to eliminate any possibility of error. Especially in this case when we bring up complex speech patterns that vary drastically from how we wish a story to be narrated.

Right. That's about it for now. Was that helpful? I don't know. I hope so. This is just how I tweak bots and roll them out. I don't really have to playtest them after doing this, they seem to function pretty well on their own with minimal training to no training.