looking for sites like character.ai for roleplay? check these five things first
Last month I wrote that Character.AI’s CEO leaving for Disney meant my campaign needed a dungeon master, not a showrunner. I ended it with “nothing has happened to Character.AI yet.”
Well. On October 12 the company filed for Chapter 11 to sell its assets. The app is still running, and their own update expects the sale to finish by the end of November or early December. Also in that update: “If such a bid is unavailable, however, the platform will be wound down.”
So every roleplay Discord I’m in has the same thread right now. Sites like character.ai? Fifty replies, fifty links, zero criteria.
Here are mine. Five checks I ran before moving a fifty-session campaign. They’re not about which app has the prettiest homepage. They’re about what breaks at session forty.
1. can you see what it remembers
Every site says “long-term memory.” Ask the follow-up: can you see it, and can you fix it?
A campaign is a pile of facts. The bridge is out. The innkeeper hates you. The duke owes you money. If the memory is a black box, you’ll find out it forgot the bridge when your party walks across it.
What I wanted, and got on Soulkyn: searchable history over the whole campaign, a running summary every fifty or so messages, and force memories, which are notes I pin to the chat myself that go out with every single message. “The bridge at Varn is collapsed” goes in once and stays true. There’s also a small decision model now that digs older moments back up when they matter. It’s how my rogue’s ancient grudge resurfaced at exactly the wrong time. (Perfect time.)
2. can more than one character share a scene
One-on-one is a chat. Roleplay is a table.
Check whether the site does real group scenes, not one bot “playing” six people in a trench coat. Soulkyn rooms hold up to eight characters, each running as itself. You can invite or remove someone mid-scene, mute a member without kicking them, and set how chatty each one is. There’s a newer slider for how many answer each message, from “only the one I’m talking to” to “anyone who has something to say,” up to three replies per message. There’s even a setting where they react to each other when you go quiet. Off by default. Chaos when on. I love it.
3. is there a narrator
The difference between a character and a world is someone describing the rain.
Look for a narrator mode, then look for whether you can correct it. Since September, Soulkyn’s Edit Message lets you fix the location, the outfit and the narrator line in place: move the fight from the docks to the cliffs, save, and the story carries on from the corrected version. No regenerate-and-pray.
4. does chance exist
If you can’t fail, it’s fan fiction. (Which is fine! It’s just not a campaign.)
You want dice that the story actually respects. Soulkyn has an “Auto D20 on every message” switch, and the narrator turns the number into the outcome. My persuasion roll against the innkeeper came up 3. It stayed a 3. You can turn the full-screen dice animation off for faster play, and the roll still happens.
5. can your story leave
This is the one this week taught everyone. Can you get your stuff out?
Check for chat log downloads before you invest a hundred hours, not after. Soulkyn lets you download your chat logs (they even fixed it for iPhone in August, which is how I know someone actually uses it). And campaigns can become other things too: Writings has novels and logs, and there’s a new comics beta that turns a scene into lettered pages with up to four of your characters. My party’s tavern fire is a two-page comic now. The innkeeper still won’t look at me.
the short version
Memory you can see. Real group scenes. A narrator you can correct. Dice that mean something. An exit door.
If you’re moving a campaign this month, start by moving your world. Write down the ten facts your party would die without, build your first character, pin the facts, and run one session before you commit. If it remembers the bridge on day two, you’re home.