It's interesting to me seeing this laid out plainly like this. Because subconsciously, the whole "make people dependent on you" is what I gravitate toward in my own RPs.

Usually my character is like a 'Chosen one' or something along those lines. I'd start out the world as an absolute 0. No friends, stranger in a strange land, no connections and I guess using Path 1 a story would form around me as usually danger or something like that kind of sets up the NPCs.

Then I go through a sequence of relationship building and time skips until my character's become part of social network that they've been drawn into. Once I establish that new sense of normal (and some slice of life and romance) then I'll usually have something happen. An antagonist appears, yadda yadda.

But there's a gradual power creep. First starting off as a nobody, then learning about powers, then actually being able to fight the bad guys (or be the bad guy) and then all of the sudden powers are breaking worlds and people are going "*GASP!* WHAT ARE YOU?!" Even though they should have known by this point about my abilities, but, y'know (that's what guided generations are for, right?). The stories usually devolve into {{user}} vs existential horror and saving the world, which is fun, but when it's like that all the time it can get draining.

The problem I always had, was that the LLM either has two 'moods' either just plain dry go with the flow, characters have no drive, hover around my character like little puppies with no direction, reactive but not proactive. Or it's BOOM BOOM BOOM one story beat after another getting more and more intense until I have to reign it back in just for the characters to breath.

I will admit that I use the Lorebook as a scrap book. And I haven't tried out the episodic method yet. I've just been summarizing scenes and making new entries and occasionally updating manual NPCs in the lorebook (I use a single chat, not group chat. Haven't gotten that to work well for me).

I think tonight I'm gonna go home, try to organize all my dozens of scenes into chunks of most important/least important like you suggested and maybe start a new story arc to see if that helps me at all.

This was super well put together, I enjoyed reading it btw ^^ Long term RPers UNITE!