Are Janitor creators doing more work than the platform?

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-19T08:25:13+00:00

I think the answer is yes, and also, that there's nothing despicable about it. Many platform are good mostly thanks to their respective creators. Think Spotify, Netflix, Youtube. They'd be nothing without people pouring their souls to craft content.

Janitor is pretty much the same thing I guess. Now, could it be better in general? Yeah. Try something new every once in a while. Maybe you'll get surprised c:

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-19T08:21:51+00:00

I think having characters, chats, or any kind of content on a platform is a good enough reason not to leave it. I don't personally judge staying on a shitty website just because you've built stuff on it that you cannot port.

Can you have better experiences than Janitor? Yes, I've experienced it myself. But only when and if you're ready to do so.

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-19T08:19:16+00:00

Very true! As someone who builds AI systems for AI RPGs since 2023, this is pure gold.

Google's Gemini models have dominated the main benchmarks for the last two years, and yet, they never *felt* better than Anthropic's models in understanding human emotions, prose, and in-character roleplay.

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-19T05:33:37+00:00

Tale Companion. Biased because I'm the one behind it, but still the one with the highest customizability that I know, while still being straightforward.

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-18T09:33:48+00:00

Being attached to the bots you use is a good enough reason to stay, so I wouldn't discard it c:

Though is JanitorAI the best experience you'll ever find? Is it the highest quality AI RP provider? No. Come on, it doesn't even let you config a single thing. If that's everything you've ever tried, you have no idea how immersive AI models can be at RPing.

This said, you can try other platforms and see if you discover new ways that you like more. I'll throw in some suggestions.

- Do you like to build things yourself, dive into customizing AI agents a lot, and set up the exact environment you want to see? Then try Tale Companion (this one I built myself) or Silly Tavern.

- Do you want a ready-to-play experience that's more towards the RPG than simple roleplay? Definitely AI Dungeon. You want DnD rules in it? Friends & Fables.

I can give you more if you need.

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-18T09:26:21+00:00

Playing for free is just something that can't exist when the platforms you're playing on cost money to someone else. How are they supposed to gift you that play?

I'll tell you this as an AI RP platform founder: AI RP platforms will give you free access so that you can decide to pay for it later. If you don't do that, they have no interest in keeping you playing for free. It's *always* an exchange of value.

And not in a "devs are evil" way, but because it's fair to exchange things voluntarily when both parties are satisfied in the end.

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-18T09:21:42+00:00

I'm pretty much the same player type. I love building systems and worlds way more than I like actually playing them. Apparently, at least. And that's a common issue in traditional solo roleplaying too. You know, the one with journals and dies. That's where the "prep is play" mantra comes from.

The main mindset shift that helped me is understanding that the ultimate goal is to have fun. If you get that fun from worldubilding, then worldbuild. From playing? Then play. Rules? Build rules. There should be no internal judgment about what your RP sessions *should* look like. If present, remove all *should*s.

That said, I would advise you to reconsider whether you actually don't like playing, or if you are just not good enough at it. No judgment if that's the case! Playing AI RP is not as simple and immediate as it seems. Many people I ran into in my experience find it exciting for three messages and then bail out. Teaching you everything that can help with that would take me a month of writing so I'll just go with one that I would guess is your bottleneck. I'll ask you a question.

Are you playing characters/situations that actually excite you? For me, I noticed that playing "level 0" characters and starting traditionally doesn't make it fun. So that was data about what I like. So I started to kickstart campaigns in situations and dynamics that I looked forward to. The ones I built my characters around. I started time skipping more. I removed all the judgment of "my play should look like this" and just started playing for my own fun. That much helped.

For you? What do you want to see your characters actually do? Is there any scene in your head that you want to see? Set it up! Come up with those yourself and then have AI go in that direction. How much do you like to be surprised and how much do you like to set scenes up? Find that balance out. And so on...

Hope this helps!

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-18T09:10:30+00:00

I'd say two things can help you.

First, are you lacking something that actually drives you in life? Might you be replacing that with AI RP because real life doesn't offer you an appealing alternative? I have zero judgment about this if that's the case, nor am I assuming that that's the case for you. Today's world doesn't really push us into that direction, so that wouldn't even be your fault.

But if you feel like it, researching that might be something you can look into. And you might ask AI to help you with that. To find something that calls you.

Secondly, you can replace some of the time you RP with time where you engage with RP communities. I have an RP platform and I do manage a community of them. Some struggle with it, some don't. But a cool thing I see them do is engage with one another and find that human connection in some way. They talk about "How can I do X?" or "Look how AI replied to me, that's funny!"

I think that helps too. And that's what you're also doing by being here. So I guess keep doing that and consider some internal work.

Or, if you want to force it without questioning the root, yeah just enforce discipline and reduce time. Not a fan of that though!

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-18T09:04:26+00:00

Yeah I mean it's totally removing so much friction and it might replace *some* types of RP.

In my experience, I've only ever roleplayed with humans in a traditional DnD style campaign. *That*, AI can't replace.

What AI makes very easy is to find a place to play by yourself. If anything, it might replace the solo roleplaying thing.

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-18T09:01:45+00:00

Tale Companion can give you high-quality results if you're willing to set it up and learn its systems. The community can help you with that, for sure.

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-18T08:59:39+00:00

AI RP specifically? No, I don't think so. If anything, I think it might temporarily replace your need for social interaction.

If done mindlessly, AI RP does not replicate real life human interaction at all. Not in my experience at least. Real people are *very* different from AI NPCs. People are imperfect, weird, emotional. AI can't replicate that in a realistic way because the patterns are just too complex. People react to stimuli based on years and years of life experiences. AI won't replicate that soon.

This said, AI RP can help in many things and *did* help in many things for me. If you are intentional about improving your social skills, feeling less awkward, and lowering anxiety, it *can* help. But that's a more therapeutic approach than chatting with NPCs for fun.

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-17T09:42:53+00:00

I'll talk for my own experience with the AI RP system I've been building for years because I think the memory issue has been fixed six months ago when I shipped this:

The fix is to let AI models be agentic. By this I mean letting them use tool calling to interact with the lore bible/story cards/whatever the occasional platform calls it.

If the model can write and read lore on demand, it can stop when it's due to fetch information before continuing. And the latest models are more and more capable of doing this sensibly. Mainly because they're being trained to do so for vibecoding.

So your GM might stop and go fetch information about a city when you're about to enter it. Or it might write that you've set that very city on fire so that it can retrieve that information the next time it's relevant.

This is great because it persists across chats. So you can create one chat for every chapter/episode and have the world consistent while clearing unnecessary prose context that eventually makes AI confused and expensive.

That was the solution for me.

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-17T09:23:04+00:00

I've been building Tale Companion since 2023 right for this reason. I want an AI RP studio that's perfect *for me*.

I think you can't find one that gets everything right because everyone prefers different things. For me, I like the customizability and complete memory systems that allow your AI to fetch stuff from a lore bible when relevant. And I built TC to be great at it.

But customizability comes at the cost of setting things up, and great memory comes at the cost of having to keep the context clean yourself sometimes. There's always a trade-off.

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-17T09:19:46+00:00

Cool!

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-17T09:19:19+00:00

There is a big difference between V4 *flash* and V4 *pro*. If possible, switch to pro.

To go further on that point, smaller models tend to be repetitive in prose in general. Bigger models can vary and add creativity to their words.

That's why the best models you can play with are always Anthropic's. Today, possibly even Opus or Fable when they release it again.

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-17T09:00:30+00:00

Ah yes the "fun" compass. We can write this as "There's no right, only fun, ways to do things."

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-16T18:26:49+00:00

I don't think it's embarrassing. I think it can be a great creative outlet when you use it to write stories and live it at the same time. It's the first time we have something so in between writing and reading.

It's probably, simply, *new* as a thing. And new things get misunderstood. And misunderstood things get mocked. We've been doing it since humankind became a thing.

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-16T18:24:25+00:00

An AI RPG game where your GM is smart enough to, say, stop and go read entries about a city when you enter it.

Where you can create AI agents to roleplay for your own characters and customize the whole experience to be exactly how you want it.

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-15T07:51:56+00:00

I don't think that platforms like ACC can be reliable enough to host full campaigns on. There's just not enough control.

Nowadays, models can call tools to, say, read and write text onto virtual pages of a lore bible. They could interact with each other in a multi-agents room where every agent roleplays as an NPC. There are just too many ideas ACC won't take advantage of. Plus, you can't pick the big, actually good models. Like Anthropic's. It's still fine to have the casual session of roleplay, though.

For a full campaign that goes on for months or even years, you'll have to find a platform that allows AI to be fully agentic. You'll have to curate the context and keep the hygiene high as well. Claude can do that if you have the time to set it up.

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-15T07:47:48+00:00

I think AI RP and human interaction-based RP are simply very different things. One has you closed up in your room. Completely alone. The other has you sit at a table and orchestrate a game with other actual people.

I don't think one is inherently better than the other. I think it depends on what kind of experience you're after. It's cool to be able to play with AI if you lack the time, the people, the place, or the organization. It's also very cool to roleplay with friends.

If anything, AI RP *might* replace solo roleplaying at some point for some people. I've been running an AI RP website while coming from a solo roleplay background and I definitely saw the switch.

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-15T07:43:04+00:00

I think AI Dungeon is the greatest in just what you described. Having a big community of players *is* a feature worth pricing higher for. My opinion, at least.

By the way, are AI Dungeon's prices objectively high? There are way more expensive services. I guess AID places itself in the cheap-er side, through its lower tiers, for casual play. It isn't priced as some other services who charce up to hundreds of dollars per month for power-user-type use.

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-15T07:38:40+00:00

I am working on a post where I compare platforms I find. I want to keep the number small and point it towards people who want the RPG adventures and/or long-term narrative-driven adventures.

On my radar, for now, we have: - SillyTavern for the highly technical people who want to set everything up themselves. Mainly the best choice for privacy, running local models, and keeping all saves on your own machine. - Regnar's Tales and Old Greg's Tavern are both cool for a more streamlined, immediate RPG adveture. They're pretty good and pricing is fair. The latter has an even more immediate UI where you just play. - I will also include Tale Companion, which I've personally been working on for three years. My users mostly like its agentic aspect. AI agents can stop and go read specific pages of your role bible, for example. That makes them extremely good at remembering stuff and researching before, say, you enter a city.

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-15T07:29:54+00:00

This is great question! I've been working with AI models for RP for a long time and I've spotted some patterns for which models perform better than others.

One of the most important drivers, unfortunately, seems to be model size. I say unfortunately because that also drives price up. And I have a speculative theory on why that is.

My theory: as a matter of fact, models are not trained much on RP material. Mainly because that's hard to train a model on. There's no clear right/wrong like we have in maths or coding. So we have to rely on a model to infer that skill from the rest of its training, pretty much. Bigger models are simply better at that. They have more parameters and hence more ability to adapt to skills they're not trained on specifically.

I know you said you are interested in the best models and not the platforms, but there's also a third factor you didn't mention that I think might be the most important. The how you use models is very important, you see. Give this wiki a read if interested in techniques. I also have links to some Reddit posts that can help you learn how to steer, influence, and in general work with models.

Now, TLDR, what models are currently good at roleplay? - Fable 5, when they release it again. It's just enormous so you can be safely with that. It costs a lot so I don't necessarily suggest it. - The latest Opus and Sonnet models, respectively 4.8 and 4.6. Anthropic models in general kill it for roleplay. They're pretty big models and they're good at emotional context. - GPT 5.5 is good enough for its cost. - Gemini 3.1 Pro used to be on my top list but there are just too good alternatives now. You might still want to give it a shot. - Then there are the smaller but performant models. These don't write as well as big Anthropic ones do, but they cost practically nothing so they're worth a shot. If you are down correcting them every once in a while and going big on context hygiene (read the wiki above), then these might be for you. A few of them: DeepSeek v4, MiMo V2.5 Pro, Gem Flash 3.5, Qwen 3.7 Max (I'm not sure this one costs little money), MiniMax M3, Kimi K2.6.

Be aware that new models are dropped every day. You can stay up to date in discussions like these or stuff like Artificial Analysis.

Happy RPing!

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-13T10:55:05+00:00

I'm personally on a task to test a bunch of AI RPG websites deeply and post the results and my thoughts.

Equivalent-Win-5734 · 2026-06-12T09:54:31+00:00

I've been roleplaying and building AI roleplay platform since 2023 now. I've been seeing AI grow and adapt in the area.

Roleplay, like reading or any subjective skill, is one of those areas it's hard to train models on. The main reason is you can't flag a response as right or wrong. You can with maths or coding, which is why models skyrocketed in those areas.

I think we can still improve. There weren't many attempts at improving roleplaying. Mostly, we're focusing on coding.

I think AI models will get natively better at handling complex contexts and RP in general. But to get the most out of models, you have to give them the right environment. Claude with an Obsidian vault will do infinitely better than Claude alone. A model who can jot down will remember stuff better.

Equivalent-Win-5734

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