This is an opinionated guide on how to write public descriptions for a character on ourdream.ai. These are all my opinions. No one should regard them as authoritative. And of course, if you do not plan on making a character public, there's no reason to spend effort on polishing up its public description.
Public descriptions for a character should be a concise explanation of what makes the character interesting. If the situation the character and a user start out in is important, then a short explanation of the situation should also be included.
After I write a public description for a character, I always double check it through a number of steps.
Ask the AI to see if the public description fits the character.
Ask the AI to check the description for grammatical errors.
Read the description myself again.
The AI does not have access to the public description, so you will have to paste the full public introduction into the message when asking the AI about the public description.
You can use the following messages when asking the AI about its opinion of your public description.
/analyze How well does the following public description work for the character? <paste public description here>
/analyze Check the following for grammatical errors. <paste public description here>
Then read it yourself, just to make sure the public description is truly readable by a human.
The following sub-sections explain my opinions as to what a public description should not be like. These are all my opinions, so they should not be considered authoritative.
Public descriptions for a character should not be too long. There are so many potentially interesting characters, and I'll get tired before I even get to the interesting parts of the public description before deciding to check out the character or not. Not to mention the user interface isn't great for reading long public descriptions, although a better user interface or presentation won't negate the previous point. Nitty gritty details that the user needs to know can go into the custom greeting.
Descriptions which go into how much everyone loves the character, that everyone can't take their eyes off the character, that the character is the greatest at something, etc. should be avoided, or at least kept short.
First, such descriptions don't really tell me anything about the character. If they go too long, I'll get tired of reading the public description and will skip the character.
Second, when chatting with such a character, it's almost invariably the case that I'm the only person paying any attention to the character in the chat, or the character doesn't actually show the traits claimed, and these superlative descriptions sound like a lie. Basically, they're violating the rule of "show, don't tell", and not in a good way.
Descriptions should not spend an inordinate amount of time explaining what the character looks like. There are images right there to show me what they look like. You don't have to spend multiple long sentences to explain every little detail of what they look like.
Read the public description yourself. There are public descriptions which feel like the creators themselves didn't even try to read. These are most obvious when there are an overabundance of markup which don't work in a public description and hurts my eyes when I try to read them. Another example of such descriptions are those where the text {{user}} shows up in the public description.
From the flip side of overly long descriptions, overly concise descriptions which omit important details should be avoided.
Some public descriptions mention words and names for which I have no idea what they are talking about. For example, there are public descriptions that just say things like "She is a Hunter". What does that even mean? A hunter of what? What do they actually do?
Things are even worse when a description is both overly long and overly concise. This is admittedly a little vague, as descriptions saying "They are from the SomeRandom empire" are fine even if I don't know anything about the empire, as long as the rest of the description gives me a vague idea of who the character is and what is going on.