What is a custom instruction?

Custom instructions are instructions that you provide to direct the GM to behave differently than the defaults. They are generally used for controlling the way the GM narrates or talks to the party.

For those more technical, custom instructions are a way to provide your own prompt to the messages in the narration module.

Custom Instruction GM Modes

When creating a custom instruction, you can set which GM mode it’s used in. This allows you to ‘hook’ into a certain GM mode and ensure that the custom instruction will be used when the GM is in that mode. Read our article on ACE-1 to learn more about GM modes.

For example, if you made a custom instruction with the GM Mode “NPC Dialog”, that custom instruction will be visible to the GM when they’re in a mode focused for NPC dialog.

If the custom instruction is set to ‘Always’, then the instruction will always be provided to the GM no matter which mode they’re in.

Examples

Good Examples

Good examples are generally focused on one topic and tend to focus on how the GM should respond, narrate, act, or describe things.

The examples below are exaggerated to show the range of different outputs you can get with differently focused instructions and how you may use them.

1. [Always]: This is a pirate themed world, always talk like you’re a pirate in your responses and make liberal use of the phrases “Arrrggghhhh” and “Matey”.

   Effect:

   

2. [Always]: This is a gritty world, you should swear a lot and so should all the NPCs when players talk with them.

   Effect:

   

3. [Always]: Begin each message with [location, fantasy date and time] followed by a new line.

   Effect:

   

Note: This instruction will not actually keep accurate track of the date or time. State like this may be tracked through the chat history, but will not be persisted and has no accuracy guarantees with other mechanics. These types of instructions are more of thematic purposes and an example of how you can modify the aesthetics or syntax of each response from the GM.

4. [NPC Dialog]: Dialog should be very conversational and NPCs should be very humorous and tell jokes often.

   Effect:

   

Bad Examples

In general, bad examples are ones that try to impose game mechanics or instructions to interact with game state. Custom instructions are just text that can impact the output or flavour of the narration. They do not have any impact on what the system can look up or interact with.

1. Look up existing NPCs in the database before creating new ones. If an existing one is found then do not generate it.

   Why is it bad?: Telling the model to look something up will not give it the ability to do so. This will have no effect and ACE-1 automatically does this for you.

2. Do not include ANY tropes, if you detect tropes such as “hooden figures”, “wooden boxes”, stop generating and replace the tropes with an equivalent.

   Why is it bad? The model can not rewrite or replace its response in the middle of generation. Telling the AI to not do something is generally ineffective; positive instructions

   describing what you want to happen are generally better.

These examples do not cover every possible use case for custom instructions, and are guidelines so you can understand what affects they will actually have in your campaigns. We encourage you to experiment and share in the Discord custom instructions you find useful!

Custom Instructions for Generations

Additionally, you can provide one custom instruction for the generators of new entities. These custom instructions will ONLY be used when creating a new entity such as a Character, Area, POI, Item, etc.

It’s best to place custom instructions in here that will affect the details on the generated entity. For example, you can add a custom instruction that all new characters should have a certain trait in their personality or backstory. Or that all new items should have a minimum cost or be of a certain shape.

What are custom instructions NOT used for?

Custom instructions are only able to affect the behaviour of the output of narration responses. They can NOT be used for controlling game mechanics such as dice rolls, XP, item bonuses, etc. Nor will they have an affect of how ACE-1 can look up or update game state variables.

In the future this may change as we give you more ability to hook into and affect different parts of ACE-1.