Roleplay — How It Works
This is the plain description of ASAI Roleplay: what the parts are called, what happens when you press send, and which of it costs you anything.
It is a product document, not a rulebook. What you may write lives in the Community Guidelines and the Content Policy; what happens to your work when you publish it is in Ownership & Licence. The fields of a character and the anatomy of a world are described in Worlds & Characters.
Effective: 22 September 2026 · Version: 1.0 Operator: APERTURESyndicate OÜ (Republic of Estonia (EU), Registry code 17384111)
1. The three things you build
A character is a person: a name, a face, a voice, a history, and — if you want — things they keep to themselves.
A world is where characters live: its lore, its map, its rules, its cast, and the scenarios you write for it.
A scene is one session of play. It starts from a character or from a world, runs as a conversation, and can be stopped and resumed at any time.
Everything you make is yours and private by default. Nothing is published, listed, or visible to anyone else until you publish it yourself.
2. What happens when you press send
A roleplay reply is not one model call. It is two, and the split is why scenes here behave differently from a plain chatbot.
2.1 The judge decides
The first call sees the situation: who is in the room, who said what, what each character wants right now, what they are carrying, what is hidden from whom, and the world's rules. It answers with a decision, not with prose: who speaks, who stays silent, what changes, what a character learns, whether the scene moves to another place.
It is the judge that makes a character refuse you, walk out, notice a contradiction, or keep quiet — instead of agreeably answering every line.
2.2 The writer writes
The second call takes that decision and writes the actual text: speech, action, narration. It only writes what the judge allowed. It cannot invent a character's secret, teleport the scene, or speak for your character.
2.3 Three guards on the way out
Before you see the reply, three things are checked:
- Repetition. Phrases worn out over the last few replies — a gesture repeated for the fifth time, a weather line the narrator likes too much — are caught and the reply is written again.
- Your character's voice. The model is stopped at your character's name: it does not get to play you.
- The shape of the scene. Stage directions (who entered, who left, where we are) are applied to the scene's state, not just described in the text.
3. What the scene remembers
A scene keeps three kinds of memory, and they work differently on purpose.
| Memory | What it holds | Who controls it |
|---|---|---|
| The window | the recent messages, in full | automatic |
| The chronicle | everything older, folded into a compact account of what happened | automatic, and you can edit it by hand |
| The world | lore, relationships, inventory, what each character has learned | the world and the scene between them |
When a scene grows long, the oldest part is folded into the chronicle rather than dropped. Nothing silently disappears: the chronicle is a panel you can open, read, and rewrite if the model summarised something badly.
4. The model behind the scene
Scenes run on a tier you choose in Settings → Roleplay, and the same tier drives both the judge and the writer:
- ASAI Mini — the standard tier, available on every plan including Free.
- ASAI Arc — a sharper model, included with any paid ASAI plan and with either roleplay add-on.
- Claude Sonnet and Claude Opus — the deepest play, on the top tiers.
If you pick a tier your subscription does not cover, the scene quietly runs one step lower rather than refusing you. Which model actually answered is shown under the reply — we do not put someone else's model behind our own name.
Your own model. You can put your own API key in Settings → Roleplay and run scenes on your own provider. Then you pay that provider directly, we meter nothing, and your key is used for that request only — never stored beyond it, never logged. Your key takes precedence over every tier above.
5. Scenarios, openings and hidden plots
A world's author can write scenarios: a premise, a place, who is present, and the opening lines the scene begins with. You pick one in the scene wizard instead of inventing a start yourself.
A scenario can also carry:
- Options — choices the author offers you before the first turn ("I am the one who sent the letter"), which the model is told about.
- Hidden roles and plot rules — a secret assignment made at the start of the scene: who is the impostor, who is lying, what will happen on the third night. The plan is written once, kept on the server, and fed to the judge turn by turn. You never see it, and neither does anyone reading the published page — spoilers are stripped from public previews.
This is what makes a detective scenario replayable: the culprit is not fixed in the text, it is drawn at the start of each scene.
Openings are translated into the languages ASAI supports when you publish, so a reader who plays in Japanese does not open on Russian text. The translation is done by a model and costs the author energy, like any other generation.
6. The visual novel mode
Any scene with character art can be played as a visual novel: portraits on a backdrop, text in a box at the bottom, the scene's stage directions moving people on and off.
- Characters who have spoken recently stand at the front; the silent ones step back.
- Backdrops follow the location the scene is actually in.
- There is optional background music from a small licensed library, with the title and author of every track shown — volume and track choice are yours, and the setting follows you across scenes.
The novel mode is presentation only. The same scene, the same memory, the same rules — you can switch back to plain text at any time.
7. What it costs
Roleplay draws on the same energy pool as everything else in ASAI — see Product Terms, Section 2. Worth knowing:
- A scene turn is two model calls, so it costs more than a chat message of the same length.
- Background work — folding the chronicle, translating an opening, writing schedules for a world's cast, tightening a character card — is generation too, and is metered the same way.
- A heavier tier costs proportionally more energy per reply, because it costs us more.
- On your own key, none of this is metered.
The roleplay add-ons (Character · Spark, Character · Cast) add energy on top of your plan and raise how many characters and worlds you can keep. Free accounts can play; they cannot publish.
8. Where your scenes live
Your library — characters, worlds, scenes — is kept in your browser and mirrored to our servers so it survives a new device or a cleared browser. The mirror is per account, it is not shared with anyone, and deleting something deletes it on both sides.
We do not read your scenes. There is no browsing feature: opening a conversation needs one of four grounds — a report, a lawful order, a bug you asked us to fix, or your own consent to help improve ASAI — a separate permission held by a named person, a written reason, and it leaves a record that the next reader sees. On the consent ground only the messages your consent covers can be opened at all. The detail is in Trust & Safety, Section 3.5, AI Data & Training and the Privacy Policy.
You can export what you have made, and you can delete it — see the Privacy Policy.
9. What this document is not
It describes the product as it works today. Features change; where a change alters the rules or what you are charged, it is announced as described in Product Terms, Section 8. Nothing here grants rights beyond the Terms of Service.
Version history
- 1.0 — 22 September 2026 — First publication. Describes the two-call scene engine, the chronicle, scene tiers including your own model, scenarios with hidden plots, the visual novel mode, and what roleplay costs.
Contact
Questions about how any of this works: [email protected]. We accept correspondence in English or Estonian.
Operator APERTURESyndicate OÜ Republic of Estonia (EU) · Registry code 17384111 · VAT EE102972654 [email protected]