Writing a character
Description, personality and greeting — what separates a good character from a flat one.
Reverie gives you several text fields and sends most of them to the model on every turn. What distinguishes a character people keep chatting to is rarely length — it is specificity, and knowing which field a given fact belongs in.
Who sees what
| Field | Tab | Who reads it |
|---|---|---|
| Character Bio | Basic Information | Players, on cards and the character page |
| Detailed Description | Basic Information | The AI. Hidden from other players |
| Creator notes | Basic Information | Players, on the character page. Never sent to the AI |
| Character Personality | Character Description | The AI |
| Appearance Description | Character Description | The AI |
| Relationship with Player | Character Description | The AI |
| Character Greeting | Advanced Settings | Players, as the first message |
The split matters. A note like "play her as sardonic, don't be nice to her" belongs in creator notes, where it reaches the player. Written into the description it becomes instructions the character will try to follow.
The description
The description defines who the character is. Concrete facts beat adjectives, because a model can act on a fact and can only paraphrase an adjective.
- Name the place, the job, the era, the thing they own, the thing they lost.
- Give one contradiction. A character who is generous and stingy about exactly one thing has a shape; a character who is "kind, smart and mysterious" does not.
- Write what is true, not what you hope the AI will do. Directives belong in the prompt fields.
You have up to 10,000 characters. Most good characters use a fraction of it — every sentence you add competes for the model's attention with every other sentence.
The personality
The personality is optional, and unlimited in length, which makes it easy to turn into a trait list. Trait lists produce narrators who describe the trait instead of characters who have it.
More useful shapes:
- Rules they follow. "Never answers a direct question the first time it is asked."
- Reactions. What makes them warm up, what makes them shut down, what they do when embarrassed.
- Speech habits. Sentence length, vocabulary, what they call the player, whether they swear.
If you do not fill the personality at all, the description carries it. That is fine for simple characters — and it still satisfies the discovery checklist.
The bio
The bio is a sales pitch, not a summary: 10 to 500 characters that tell a browsing player what makes this character worth opening. It is what appears on the character card in discovery.
The opening
A greeting is a Starter Dialog: one Character Greeting plus any number of Suggested User Responses. Write it as a scene the player can step into, not as a hello.
- Put the player somewhere. Time, place, what just happened.
- End on something that demands a response — a question, an accusation, a door opening.
- Give at least two suggested replies, pointing in genuinely different directions. Two reply choices per opening is one of the things Reverie's completeness checklist looks for.
- Add a second opening when it starts a different story. Reverie picks one at random for each new chat, so near-duplicates only add noise.
Use {{user}} and {{char}} to address the player and the character by name; the greeting editor has one-click chips for both. The full list is in advanced settings.
The greeting is written into a chat once, when that chat starts. Editing it later changes what new chats open with, and leaves existing ones as they are. Every other field is read fresh on every turn — see publishing a character.
Show the voice, don't describe it
The most direct way to fix a character who sounds like every other character is example dialogue. Each Example Conversation is a pair — a user message and the reply you wish you were getting — and two or three that differ in mood do more than a paragraph about their speaking style. See advanced settings.
Test before you decide it works
Write, then open AI Studio → Test and play five turns. Most flat characters are obvious in the first two replies: the character explains themselves, answers everything immediately, or speaks for the player. Test drive covers what that panel does and does not simulate.