IMO this is because responding within a json response with all those other fields shifts the distribution to text that's staler.

If you told it to roleplay a pixel knight fighting to the death and provided it responses like "Authur (renamed claude sonnet 5) moves west towards you menacingly", the whole thing would come alive.

I've been working on an AI roleplaying game for a while now and it had felt stale until I separated the story output from the plumbing output (importantly, I do story first and then base the plumbing on that). I think the two just have incompatible distributions.

I’m not sure what good output in this case would look like. I’d expect “good prose” in a book’s fight scene to be action oriented and show something about the character or reflect something about the narrative, so, it should often not involve talking.

I guess realistic fights are just a lot of shouting and semi-coherent thoughts (because people don’t have time to come up with a full clever quip in that sort of situation).

I think much of that is not due to limitations of their capability.

I think the text is bland because they are aiming to produce bland text.

Make it interesting in any particular direction and someone may not like it.

actually, it's mostly the harness' fault. messages have a character limit of only 50 and messages above that are silently trimmed. there's no space for anything interesting, though they still shouldn't have been that bad.

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