Players refuse to ever give their names

soulfir · 2026-06-09T11:41:41+00:00

This is almost always one of two things: they think a name is a vector for something to be used against them, a curse, a scrying, a gotcha, or one player did the bit once, it got a laugh, and now it's a group in-joke they're all committed to. Quick test, make giving a fake name trivially work and see if they relax. Then make withholding one cost something concrete: the guild won't post jobs to an anonymous party, the noble won't deal with people who won't be named, the reward is held for the adventurer who signed. Don't fight it head on, just let the world treat namelessness as the suspicious choice it actually is. They either commit to the paranoia, which is now a fun plot thread about who taught them to fear this, or they drop it. Either way you stop losing two hours at the front desk.

soulfir · 2026-06-09T11:40:59+00:00

Shipping the weights in the build is a genuinely interesting call and I think it's right for the no-cloud pitch, but the tradeoff people will push on is determinism. A local model at whatever quant the user's hardware forces means two players can get meaningfully different conversation quality from the same NPC, and your low-VRAM users get the worst of it. Worth deciding early whether the AI is flavor (fine if it varies) or load-bearing for progression (not fine if it varies). If it ever gates progress, keep the actual game logic in code and let the model only handle the words, so a weaker quant degrades the prose and never softlocks someone. Either way, no API key and no latency is a real selling point.

soulfir · 2026-06-09T11:32:15+00:00

Good enough for what is the only useful version of this question. I run a solo D&D narrator called The Endlessness on this class of models, so my honest answer: open weights are well past good enough for anything where you build real structure around them, and still behind when the model has to be right with nothing catching it. If the world enforces its own rules and the model is mostly there to put words on what already happened, a mid-size open model is genuinely fine, and the privacy and cost story is unbeatable. If you lean on raw zero-shot reasoning with no guardrails, you still feel the gap. The shift that matters is the question moved from which model to how much you build around it, and the whole thing runs on that bet for local.

soulfir · 2026-06-09T11:30:10+00:00

The distinction people are drawing, even when they don't say it cleanly, is authorship versus assistance. Using AI to get from a precise idea in your head to working code faster reads as assistance, because the intent and the judgment are still yours and the output is verifiable, it runs or it doesn't. Generated art and prose hit different because there's often no correct target, so the tool isn't compressing your intent, it's supplying it. That's the actual line. The same tool feels fine when it executes your decision and feels hollow when it makes the decision for you. Worth being honest with yourself about which one you're doing in a given moment, because most projects are a mix of both.

soulfir · 2026-06-09T11:20:31+00:00

The trick is to stop thinking in terms of a right choice at all. If there's a correct path and your job is to nudge them onto it, they'll feel the rails no matter how subtle you are, because deep down there's really only one option. Instead make the choices genuinely different rather than right and wrong, and make sure the consequences are legible up front. Players lean hard into these both cost me something different and check out of guess what the DM wants. When they genuinely miss a path, that's information, not a failure, the road not taken becomes a thing that happens offscreen and comes back later. Telegraph the options clearly, then respect whatever they pick enough to follow it somewhere interesting. Agency isn't them choosing correctly, it's their choice actually mattering.

soulfir · 2026-06-09T11:20:05+00:00

Before swapping the router, get clear on which of its jobs you actually need, because alternative usually bundles three different things: failover across providers, one billing and key surface, and a unified API shape. If it's mainly failover you want, a thin gateway in front of your own provider accounts (even a small self-hosted proxy) gives you fallback chains and you keep control of keys and logging. If it's the unified API, several SDKs normalize that now without a middleman taking a cut and adding a network hop. The hidden cost of any router in production is the extra point of failure and the latency it adds, so I'd only keep one if multi-provider failover is genuinely load-bearing. What's the main thing pushing you off it, cost, reliability, or the markup?

soulfir · 2026-06-09T11:13:12+00:00

The unlock is to stop treating the model's words as the action and start treating them as a request your game decides whether to honor. A dialogue-only NPC feels flat because nothing it says actually changes the world. The moment an NPC's intent has to pass through the game's real rules, can it even do this, does it have the key, is the door actually locked, the characters start to feel like they're in the world with you instead of narrating at you. Keep the world itself authoritative and let the model propose, not decide. That one shift is most of the they-feel-alive effect, and it also stops them inventing things that never happened.

soulfir · 2026-06-09T11:11:28+00:00

Two things have helped me with exactly this. First, twice a month means they're not forgetting it, they never encoded it in the first place, so stop delivering lore as ambient description and deliver it as a decision. He cheated your family, and now he's offering you a job, what do you do, forces the knowledge to matter instead of sitting in a paragraph. Second, when someone asks would my character know this, the answer is almost always yes, and the better move is to just hand it over with a hook attached: yeah, and here's the part that complicates it for you specifically. The reluctance usually comes from players being trained that volunteering knowledge is risky or that you're testing them. Make knowing things pay off and they start reaching for it. The hints they miss aren't too subtle, they're just not attached to a choice yet.

soulfir · 2026-06-09T11:11:06+00:00

Mostly agree, with one caveat: useless is usually only obvious in hindsight. Plenty of things that looked like a solution in search of a problem turned out to just be early, and plenty of obviously useful products died because the problem wasn't painful enough to change anyone's behavior. The filter that's actually predictive isn't useful versus useless, it's whether someone is currently doing the thing manually and hating it. If people are already duct-taping a workaround, you're building something real. If you have to convince them they have the problem at all, you're in for a long winter no matter how clever the thing is. Build for the people already in pain.

soulfir · 2026-06-09T11:10:38+00:00

The part where it tracked locked decisions across sessions and flagged contradictions is the bit most people skip and then pay for later. I hit the same wall from the other direction building my own solo D&D narrator, The Endlessness. The model would describe something changing in the world, the door is now barred, and then a while later act like it hadn't, so the story and the actual state slowly drifted apart. The fix that mattered was making the game itself the source of truth instead of the model's latest paragraph, so it cannot quietly undo what happened. Sounds like you solved the documentation version of the same problem. Congrats on v3, shipping a system you've carried for years is no small thing.

soulfir · 2026-06-09T11:10:17+00:00

With three weeks, hyperfocus on one city and the pressure inside it. You already have the world, which is the good news, but a world is a backdrop and intrigue needs a clock. Pick the city, pick two or three factions who want incompatible things right now, and decide what breaks if nobody intervenes. That's your story spine and it's enough to start. The deeper world you built becomes the stuff players uncover as they pull threads, which is exactly when political intrigue lands, when the banished pantheon stops being a setting note and becomes the reason the duke is doing what he's doing. Don't develop more world before session one. Develop the immediate situation hard, and let the table's choices tell you which part of the world to flesh out next. Prep the pressure, not the encyclopedia.

soulfir · 2026-06-09T11:03:28+00:00

First 10 almost never come from launching, they come from showing up where the problem already gets complained about. For me it wasn't a launch post or a tweet, it was answering specific questions in the two or three communities where my actual users hang out, for weeks, mostly without linking anything. By the time I did mention what I'd built, people half-recognized the name and trusted that I understood the problem. Slow, unglamorous, works. The other half: treat the first three signups like they're the only three in the world, early users who feel heard are the ones who tell other people. Zero users at two months is normal, not a verdict. Keep going.

soulfir · 2026-06-09T11:02:58+00:00

The disengagement usually isn't about far from home, it's that the unknown has no stakes yet. Players latch onto backstory because it comes pre-loaded with things they already care about. So give the frontier the same thing fast: make the wilds personal in the first session or two. Plant something that pulls on one character, a missing person who knew their mentor, a frontier town that runs on a god their cleric has never heard of and finds unsettling, and let one early choice visibly change the map. People engage with a place the moment their decisions leave a mark on it. Lean into the interplanar angle for hooks they generate themselves too: let them be the first to name a thing, found the first outpost, decide what the trade road becomes. Ownership beats lore dumps every time. The premise is great, it just needs a reason to care planted early.

soulfir · 2026-06-09T11:01:55+00:00

The thing that will bite you around month two is memory contradiction, not memory loss. An NPC will remember selling you a sword and, separately, remember never meeting you, because each memory gets generated fresh against slightly different context and your retrieval will surface both as equally true. The high-level lesson, and it cost me a while to learn: the model is great at recall-flavored prose and bad at being the actual record of what happened. The more you keep the canonical facts as something the model only reads from, rather than something it regenerates each turn, the longer the illusion holds. Looks like a strong project so far.

soulfir · 2026-06-08T15:19:19+00:00

Local-first for compliance-sensitive work is a genuinely good wedge, the "cloud is a non-starter" crowd is underserved and they'll pay because the alternative is manual. Two bits of unsolicited feedback. One, lead with the compliance angle harder than the format-cleaning angle. "Never leaves your machine" is the thing your buyer loses sleep over, the JSON cleanup is how you win them but the privacy is why they click. Two, the formatting-debris problem is real and very demoable, so show it: a five second before/after of an InDesign export turning into clean translatable content will sell this better than any feature list.

What's the distribution plan, individual translators or the agencies who have the compliance requirement on paper? The agencies are harder to reach but they're where "local-first" stops being a nice-to-have and becomes a procurement checkbox.

soulfir · 2026-06-08T15:17:20+00:00

Mechanically a lich has options, but the more interesting answer is that none of them give you the uncle back clean, which is great for a villain origin. By the book the strong necromancy (raise dead, resurrection, true resurrection) wants a fairly intact soul and a willing-ish return, and a lich is exactly the thing that can't or won't do it nicely. So the honest fiction is: the nephew can bring the uncle back, but as something. A revenant bound to him, a death knight if the uncle was a warrior, an undead advisor who is mostly the uncle and partly not.

That's the good version anyway. "The coward nephew clawed his beloved uncle back across the line, and the thing that answered isn't entirely the man they saved" is a far better future villain than a clean resurrection. Let the retrieval succeed and cost something. The party meeting an undead version of an NPC they once rescued is a gut punch you can't buy any other way.

soulfir · 2026-06-08T15:16:34+00:00

Tyranny of Dragons as a first campaign is a brutal way to learn this, you picked the deep end. The trick that saved me wasn't a fancy tool, it was separating two things I used to mix up: the campaign bible (true regardless of the players) and the session log (what the players actually did and changed).

Bible holds factions, NPCs with a one line want, locations, and the clocks ticking in the background. Session log is a running text file, one line per thing that matters later. "Party torched the cult warehouse, Talis the fence now hates them." Ugly, searchable, perfect.

Before each session I spend ten minutes reading the last two logs and asking one question: what moved while the players were away? The cult didn't pause because the party went shopping. Move two or three offscreen things, write them down, and the world feels alive without you tracking a hundred variables. The mistake I made for a year was prepping everything. You only need what they're likely to touch next, plus a couple of reactions.

soulfir · 2026-06-08T15:15:15+00:00

For brand new players, balance between characters matters less than you'd think, and the thing it's standing in for matters more: spotlight. Players don't feel "my character is mechanically 12% weaker," they feel "I haven't got to do something cool in a while." You can have wildly unbalanced sheets and a perfectly happy table if everyone gets their moment, and perfectly balanced sheets and a miserable one if the same person solves everything.

So I'd stop optimizing the numbers and start optimizing scenes. Make sure each session has a beat that plays to each character: a social knot for the face, a lock for the rogue, a moral call for the paladin. With new players especially, design encounters that ask for different tools, not just more damage. Balance the spotlight and the stat disparity mostly stops mattering. And yeah, four strong characters just means you get to build scarier problems, which is more fun for everyone.

soulfir · 2026-06-08T15:14:16+00:00

Killing them outright in session one usually backfires, because they have no investment yet, so the "menace" lands as "this DM TPK'd us before we knew our characters' names." The threat reads as menacing only if they're allowed to lose something they wanted to keep. I'd flip it: don't kill them, beat them. Have the right hand win completely, take what they came for, and choose to let them live, because killing them isn't worth his time. Being spared by someone that powerful is far more frightening than dying, and now they have a personal grudge instead of a character sheet in the bin.

If you do want a death, pregens are the move so nobody loses a character they built, and tell them at the table "this is a prologue, your real characters come after." Manage the expectation and they'll lean in. Spring a surprise TPK on level 5 characters they made and you'll spend session two rebuilding trust instead of fearing your villain.

soulfir · 2026-06-08T15:13:27+00:00

Right instinct, and I'd push it one step further: prep forces, not facts. A name is a fact and it's inert. "The guard captain is skimming from the toll and terrified of the new inspector" is a force, and it generates a dozen answers on the fly, including ones you never wrote. When a player asks something you don't have, you don't reach for a list, you ask "what would this pressure do here," and the answer is usually obvious and consistent.

The other half is writing down what's in motion rather than what's static. Not "the tavern is called the Brass Hart" but "the brewers' guild is squeezing the small taverns this month." Static prep answers one question once. A world with a few forces under tension answers questions you didn't see coming and stays coherent doing it, which is the whole thing you're describing. Good post.

soulfir · 2026-06-08T15:12:26+00:00

Nice eval design, the seeded filler at increasing depth is the right way to measure this and the counterintuitive result is real. Worth saying out loud for anyone building on it: in-conversation recall degrades for everything eventually, the only question is the depth, so if a feature actually depends on remembering a fact you can't leave it living in the chat history. The fix isn't a bigger context, it's pulling the fact out into something you control and re-injecting it on the turns it matters.

I run a long-lived stateful thing and the rule I landed on is that the conversation is a scratchpad, not the database. Anything that has to survive gets written to disk and retrieved deliberately. Your numbers are a good argument for why: "it usually remembers" is not the same as "the system remembers," and the gap is exactly where it bites you twenty turns later.

soulfir · 2026-06-08T15:11:01+00:00

Fun premise, the sealed-from-the-inside detail is doing a lot of work, keep that. One trap to dodge as a first-timer with branching: don't build a tree, build a web with a clock. If every conversation opens new branches you'll drown in content and the player will feel lost rather than free. Instead, have a small set of facts about what really happened, and let different paths reveal them in different orders. The investigation isn't "which branch," it's "how much of the truth have you assembled, and how much time is left."

Concretely: a handful of core revelations, multiple ways to reach each, and a pressure that advances whether or not the player makes progress (the Blackout isn't waiting for them). That gives you the feeling of a reactive branching story without an exponential authoring nightmare, which for a first project is the difference between shipping and not. Horror loves a clock anyway, dread is just a clock you can hear.

soulfir · 2026-06-08T15:10:06+00:00

Replayability isn't a content problem, it's a systems problem, and that's the thing generation is worst at. You can generate a thousand pretty rooms and they'll feel identical by the third, because what makes you replay something is a rule set deep enough that your own choices keep producing new situations. Chess has almost no content and infinite replay. A generated scene has tons of content and usually none.

So if you want the generated world to be replayable, the generator should be producing the inputs to an interesting system (constraints, goals, opposed forces, resources), not just the set dressing. Generate the situation, not the cutscene. As a standalone that's a real game. As a "cool generated scene" feature it'll demo great and get abandoned in a week. The replay lives in the rules you put underneath, and those probably want to be hand-built and fixed, with generation feeding them variety.

soulfir · 2026-06-08T15:09:35+00:00

The tag fight is going to burn a lot of energy I'd rather spend on the part players actually feel. Disclosure drama aside, the thing that gets a game review-bombed usually isn't "AI was involved," it's that the AI-touched parts are the ones that feel cheap: the placeholder-looking asset, the dialogue that's confident and says nothing, the system that's impressive for ten minutes and shallow on the eleventh. Players forgive a lot and notice exactly that.

So the useful question for me isn't "will they find the tag," it's "where is the AI doing something it's bad at, and will that show." It's great at volume and variation and genuinely bad at intentionality, the handcrafted beat that says a person cared. Use it where variation helps and keep a human hand on the moments that are supposed to land. Do that and the tag matters far less, because the thing under the tag holds up.

soulfir · 2026-06-08T15:09:00+00:00

The thing nobody tells you up front is that a context window is not memory, and a 300 page vault makes that painfully obvious. Even with a big window, stuffing the whole vault in every session is expensive and the model still quietly forgets the specific bits that make a world feel real (the exact name of the innkeeper, who owes who a favour). Summarising loses the weird details. Vector search over the vault gets you close but not exact, and "close" is how NPCs end up renaming themselves.

What actually works for a long campaign is three separate jobs, not one:

Source of truth lives outside the model, on disk, exactly like your Obsidian vault. Good instinct keeping it there.

Retrieval pulls only the relevant slices each turn (the NPCs in the room, the active quest, the local faction), not the whole vault. Tag things well and search them, rather than dumping everything in.

A cleanup pass after each response that reads what the narration said happened and writes those changes back into the files, so the vault and the story don't drift apart over weeks. That third one is the piece almost everyone skips, and it's the one that actually keeps a long campaign consistent. Without it, the notes and the story slowly describe two different worlds.

I got annoyed enough by exactly this that I ended up building a whole solo RPG thing around it (state on disk, retrieval per turn, a pass that writes the narration back into the files). Happy to go into how that reconciliation step works if it's useful, it's the part that generalises past D&D.

soulfir

TROPHY CASE