AI roleplay prompts and scenario ideas that give the AI something to do

What a scenario prompt needs

I check every prompt against five things before I play it. It does not need all five, but it should not miss more than one.

• Your role, in one line, with a job or a reason to be there.
• Someone opposite you who wants something of their own.
• A problem between the two of you that neither can walk away from.
• A clock: a storm, a deadline, a train that leaves at six.
• An opening beat, the first thing that happens before anyone speaks.

A weak prompt and a stronger one

Here is a prompt I see constantly, and the version I would actually play.

Weak:
You are in a castle with a mysterious knight.

Stronger:
You are the castle's new steward. The knight
guarding the gate tonight was dismissed this
morning, and he will not say who rehired him.
The king arrives at dawn.

The first gives the AI a setting and an adjective. The second gives you a job, gives him a secret and gives both of you a deadline, so the very first reply already has something to do.

Where to put a prompt

In a character chat app, the prompt usually goes in the scenario field or the opening message. In SillyTavern it belongs in the Scenario box, which is sent with every reply, and the character card guide explains which fields stay in the prompt and which drop out. On the prompt generator here, you paste it into the box and the follow-up questions fill in whatever it leaves open.

Mystery and puzzles

• You audit a small-town bank and find one account that has paid the same stranger every week for forty years. The stranger is in the lobby when you look up.
• A famous crossword setter has vanished, and the answers in her last published puzzle spell out your name.
• You restore antique clocks. A customer brings one that runs backwards and offers triple pay to have it fixed by Friday, no questions asked.
• You are the substitute juror on a murder trial, and the defendant keeps looking at you as if you have met before.
• A gallery hires you to prove its star painting is genuine, and its curator very much hopes you will fail.

Space and the far future

• Your mining tug picks up a distress call from a ship that, according to the registry, you scrapped yourself ten years ago.
• You translate for an ambassador and have just realized the treaty's last line means the opposite in her language. She signs in an hour.
• A generation ship's archivist wakes you to say the history files were edited overnight, and only the two of you have noticed.
• You run the only repair dock on a comet, and the bounty board has just posted a reward for the passenger asleep in bay three.

Court politics and fantasy

• You are the royal food taster. Tonight the soup is safe, but the chancellor quietly asks you to say it is not.
• Two rival guilds have each hired you to forge the same seal, and both want it by morning.
• You inherit a seat on the city council by accident, and tonight's vote decides who controls the river.
• A retired oracle asks you to help her fake one last prophecy, because the real one would start a war.
• You are a herald ordered to announce a victory you watched turn into a retreat.

Survival and disaster

• The flood has cut the valley road. You and the rival vineyard owner share the last boat, one map and no trust at all.
• A blizzard pins a mountain rescue team in a hut with the climber whose shortcut started the avalanche.
• You are the radio operator at a polar station when the supply plane calls to say it will not be landing.
• A heatwave knocks out the city grid, and the only working generator in your building belongs to the neighbor nobody has met.

Slow burn

• Two rival ghostwriters hired for the same memoir must agree on every chapter, and they disagree about the ending.
• You and your fiercest courtroom opponent are stranded overnight at a small airport with one working charger between you.
• A celebrated perfumer has lost her sense of smell and hires you, secretly, to describe every scent before her launch.
• Your bike repair shop and the café next door are both losing their lease, and the landlord will only renew one of you.
• The architect you fired last spring is the only person who can fix the bridge before Monday's inspection.

The uncanny

These four are hooks rather than full prompts: a strange situation and nothing more. Add the person opposite and the clock before you play.

• Every photo you take this week shows the same stranger in the background, a little closer each time.
• Your town elects a mayor every year who never appears in public, and this year the ballot carries your name.
• Postcards keep arriving in your own handwriting, describing your week in detail, and every one is postmarked next month.
• Your secondhand houseboat came with a logbook, and someone is still writing in it at night.

Changing a prompt to fit you

Keep the pressure and change everything else. The clock prompt works just as well for a starship mechanic with a reactor running backwards, and the food taster becomes a press secretary told to call a scandal a rumor. Swap genres freely. Remove the deadline or the person who wants something, though, and you have removed the prompt.

When a prompt stalls

Even good prompts flatten out after twenty turns or so. These fixes work in any app, because they act through your character instead of arguing with the AI.

• Do something that cannot be undone: burn the letter, sign the paper, open the door.
• Bring in a third person with an agenda of their own.
• Move the clock forward. Skip to the next morning, the next port, the next vote.
• Ask the other character a direct question they cannot dodge without lying.

And when a scene really is finished, end it. A fresh scene with the same two people usually beats squeezing more out of a dead one.

Questions