interactive-story/plan/18-persona-and-memory-quality.md

The protagonist has no name, and the summarizer is told nothing

Two changes, in order. Phase 1 gives the adventure a persona. Phase 2 uses it, along with the cast, to fix the memories. Phase 1 is worth shipping on its own; Phase 2 depends on it and is much smaller once it lands.

Phase 1 is built and green (593 backend tests, frontend builds). Phase 2 is not started. Phase 1 has NOT been driven in a browser yet — see "Still to check by hand" at the end.

Last updated: 2026-08-31.

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The one sentence version

Memories come back inconsistent and vague because the summarizer is handed six actions of second-person prose and nothing else — no protagonist, no cast, no setting, no instruction about what person to write in — so it cannot say who "you" is or who "she" is, and neither can any memory it writes.

The evidence

This is the entire prompt that writes a memory (memorybank.py:391):

system: You compress interactive-fiction story excerpts into memories. Respond
        with 1-2 plain sentences in past tense stating the concrete facts and
        events (names, places, items, promises, injuries). No preamble, no
        commentary.

user:   Story excerpt:

        <6 actions, joined by blank lines, truncated to 2000 tokens>

        Memory:

Nothing else is passed. Not adventure.memory (the plot essentials), not the NPC names and descriptions the scenario already defines, not the world state, and not the protagonist — because until Phase 1 there is no protagonist to pass.

Two failures follow from that, and they are the two complaints:

Inconsistent framing. The prompt never says what person to write in. The model picks one per call. Across a single bank you get "You entered the crypt", "The player entered the crypt", and "He entered the crypt" describing the same kind of event.

No idea who anyone is. Given You push the door open. She grabs your arm. the only honest memory is "You entered a room and she stopped you." Retrieved forty turns later into a scene with three women in it, that memory is worse than nothing.

The summary inherits both problems, because _update_story_summary builds from the memory bullets.

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Phase 1 — the persona

What already exists, and what does not

stat_schema already gives the player a stat block, and it is already namespaced beside the NPCs:

world.day
player.hp          <- the player's stats, already sectioned
npc.gwen.trust
flags.alarm_raised
milestones.escaped

NPCs carry name, keys, and desc (schema.py, render_reference). The player section carries none of those. That asymmetry is the whole gap: the player has stats but no identity, so the block renders as You: hp 100/100 and reads to the model as a floating global rather than a character.

The paths do not change

player.hp stays player.hp. It does not become kaelen.hp or user.hp.

The reason is _history_text() in context/builder.py. It replays every past turn's stored delta back into the prompt, and those stored blobs contain literal strings like {"player.hp": -15}. A path that carries the persona's name breaks the moment a player renames their character: every replayed block in history then names a path the schema no longer defines, applied_delta renders it anyway, and the model copies the broken form. A rename would also require migrating every stored world_state, every seed scenario, and the EMIT_RULE example text, for no functional gain.

What changes is the label, using the trick NPCs already use — print the display name and the path together:

before:  You: hp 100/100, mana 30/50.
after:   Kaelen (player): hp 100/100, mana 30/50.

The name is visible to the reader, the path stays copyable by the model.

Where the persona lives

Three plain columns on adventures, alongside memory and authors_note:

persona_name: Mapped[str] = mapped_column(String(80), default="")
persona_pronouns: Mapped[str] = mapped_column(String(40), default="")
persona_desc: Mapped[str] = mapped_column(Text, default="")

Not in stat_schema. Two reasons. It has to work for an adventure with no RPG layer at all, which is most of them, and _initials() in worldstate/schema.py treats every dict inside a section as a stat definition — a persona key dropped into stat_schema.player would be instantiated as a stat, rendered as a stat line in the guide, and handed an initial value.

Adventure-level, not scenario-level. Two people playing the same scenario are different characters. A scenario steers the protagonist through its plot essentials, which it already can. Keeping personas off scenarios also avoids having to decide what "Update from scenario" does to a persona the player has edited: the answer is nothing, because the scenario never had one.

Not per-branch. Branches are alternative futures within one adventure; the protagonist is the same person down all of them.

Empty persona_name means the feature is off and behavior is exactly what it is today. That is the entire backward-compatibility story — no backfill.

Pronouns get their own field

One short string: he/him, she/her, they/them. It exists because Phase 2 will tell the summarizer to write in third person. Without a stated pronoun the model infers one from the name, and once it infers wrong that error is baked into every memory it writes from then on and into the summary built from them. A field is cheaper than a wrong guess repeated forever.

Blank is a valid value. When it is blank nothing is rendered, and the Phase 2 prompt tells the summarizer to use the name rather than a pronoun.

Where it enters the prompt

A new static section in build_context, between ai_instructions and plot_essentials:

Player character:
You are Kaelen (he/him). A half-elf ranger, exiled from the northern holds.

It goes in the system block on purpose. The description is user-only and never changes during a turn, so it sits inside the cached prefix and costs nothing after the first turn. This is why "only the user can change it" is not just a product choice — it is what keeps the section free. Anything the AI could rewrite would have to move below the history with the other live sections, and would re-price the prompt on every change.

It is emitted whether or not the adventure has an RPG layer. It is not gated behind has_ws.

Where it enters the world state

worldstate/render.py, two edits:

• render_state_section takes the display name and prints Kaelen (player): … in place of the hardcoded You: …. Falls back to You: when no persona is set.
• render_reference gains one line tying the name to the path, mirroring the NPC header it already writes: - Protagonist Kaelen — stats are addressed as player.<stat>. Without this the model reads "Kaelen" in the prose and invents kaelen.hp.

The persona description is not repeated in the stat guide. It already has its own section, and the guide is about paths.

The AI cannot edit it

Nothing to build. _resolve() in worldstate/apply.py rejects any path it does not recognize, so a delta of {"persona.name": "Bob"} already falls through to "persona.name is not a tracked value", and that refusal already reaches the model through render_refusals. Worth one test to hold the behavior in place.

Setting it, and changing it

At the start. PlaceholderModal (components.jsx) already exists and already opens before an adventure begins — but only when the scenario contains ${...} tokens. It becomes a "Begin adventure" modal that always opens, with the three persona fields at the top and any placeholder fields below.

Placeholders stay independent of the persona. A scenario using ${Name} will ask for a name twice. That is accepted: no scenario in the repo uses placeholders at all (grepped across seed_data/ and starter_data/ — zero occurrences), so the collision is hypothetical. If it ever shows up in practice, pre-filling the Name field from the persona is a few lines in the modal with no backend change.

Later. AdventureUpdate gains the three fields, and PlotPanel gets a Protagonist block at the top. The debounced-save wiring is already there. WorldStateDrawer shows the name as the character-sheet heading but does not edit it — one edit surface, not two.

Files

File	Change
models.py	three columns on Adventure
migrations.py	74, 75, 76
schemas.py	AdventureCreate, AdventureUpdate, AdventureOut
context/builder.py	persona section after plot_essentials
worldstate/render.py	state-section label, reference line
worldstate/__init__.py	export whatever render.py newly exposes
routers/adventures/crud.py	store persona at creation
bundle.py	export key + import read
frontend/components.jsx	modal gains persona fields
frontend/pages/Scenarios.jsx, Home.jsx	always open the modal
frontend/pages/Play/panels/PlotPanel.jsx	Protagonist block
frontend/pages/Play/drawers/WorldStateDrawer.jsx	heading
frontend/api.js	pass the fields through

Tests

File	What
new test_persona.py	create with persona; update; renders in the system block; works with no stat_schema; empty name is a no-op; AI delta at persona.* refused
test_worldstate.py	state line reads Kaelen (player):; player.hp still resolves
test_prompt_caching.py	persona is in the static prefix, above history
test_bundle_v2.py	round-trips; a bundle without the key still imports

Bundle format

No FORMAT bump. The export gains a persona key and the import reads it with .get(), so a v2 bundle written before this change imports with an empty persona — which is the same as not having one.

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Phase 2 — what the summarizer is told

Depends on Phase 1 only for the protagonist's name. Everything else it needs is already in the database and simply never passed.

The cast brief

Build one short block and prepend it to both the memory prompt and the summary prompt:

Cast:
- Kaelen (he/him) — the protagonist. A half-elf ranger, exiled from the
  northern holds...
- Gwen — a loyal ranger and Kaelen's ally. Quick with a bow, dry-humoured.

Setting:
<adventure.memory, the plot essentials>

Sources, in order:

1. Protagonist — the Phase 1 persona. Falls back to "the player" when unset, so the change still helps adventures with no persona.
2. NPCs — stat_schema.npcs: name + desc. Already there, never used outside the turn prompt.
3. Story cards — for adventures with no RPG layer, run the existing _match_cards() over the block being summarized and take the matched cards' names and entries. This reuses the trigger code and yields exactly the entities that appear in that block, not the whole world.

Two rules for the brief

Fixed descriptions only. No live stats. It is tempting to include Gwen: trust 40 (wary). Do not. It makes every memory prompt different, which loses prompt caching, and worse, it makes the same event summarized at two different times come out framed differently — which is the problem being fixed.

The summary gets it for free. _update_story_summary builds from the memory bullets, so better memories produce a better summary with no further change. Pass the brief there too, because that function falls back to raw story text when memory-writing has fallen behind.

The prompt changes

MEMORY_SYSTEM_PROMPT gains an explicit framing rule:

• write in third person, never "you"
• refer to the protagonist by name
• name characters rather than using bare pronouns

Expected effect:

before:  You entered a room and she stopped you.
after:   Kaelen bribed Gwen with fifty silver to hold the north door while
         he went down alone.

Open questions for Phase 2

Existing memories. A bank written under the old prompt will sit alongside new ones, mixing "you" and "Kaelen" in the same context. Options: leave them and let eviction age them out at memory_bank_capacity (80), or clear memory_cursor and re-summarize from the start. Re-summarizing costs one AI call per 6 actions and duplicates whatever is still in the bank, since nothing deletes the old rows. Leaning: leave them. Decide when the framing change is measured, not before.

Retrieval framing mismatch. retrieve_memories embeds the last 4 actions raw — second person, "you". New memories will be third person and named. Embeddings handle paraphrase well, so this is probably minor, but if retrieval quality visibly dips after Phase 2 this is the first place to look. A fix would be to prepend the same cast brief to the query text.

Token cost. The brief adds roughly 100–200 tokens to one call per 6 actions and one per 15. Negligible against a turn.

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Phase 1 as built

Everything above describes what shipped. Three notes on where it differs from the sketch, and what has not been verified.

Decisions taken during the build

The section reads as one paragraph. render_persona joins the sentence and the description with a space rather than SEPARATOR. A blank line inside a two-sentence section about one character reads as two unrelated notes.

Field gained a maxLength prop. The persona name is VARCHAR(80) and the schema rejects 81 characters with a 422. Without the attribute the player only learns that from a toast after typing, so the cap is now enforced in the input as well. Every other Field is unaffected — the prop is optional.

The blank-adventure button opens the modal too. It used to create the adventure immediately. It now collects a persona first, and passes title: 'Blank Adventure' explicitly, because there is no scenario to take a title from.

test_prompt_caching.py's fixture now sets a persona, so every test in the file that guards the static block runs with one present.

Verified

• Migration 73 → 76 on a real pre-existing SQLite database: columns added, the existing row preserved, persona empty, render_persona returns "".
• 593 backend tests pass, including 26 new ones in test_persona.py and 3 in test_bundle_v2.py.
• npm run build is clean.

Still to check by hand

None of this was driven in a browser. Worth ten minutes before trusting it:

1. Start an adventure from a scenario. The modal should open even though no scenario in the repo uses ${...} placeholders.
2. Play one turn on the RPG scenario (seed 04) and open Insights. The persona section should be in the system block, and the world-state line should read <name> (player): hp 100/100.
3. Rename the character in the Plot panel. The world-state drawer heading should follow it.
4. Leave every persona field blank and confirm the prompt is byte-identical to what it was before this change.

A note for whoever runs the tests

tiktoken downloads cl100k_base from openaipublic.blob.core.windows.net on first use, and 182 tests fail with a proxy error where that host is blocked. The encoding is reconstructable offline from the npm package js-tiktoken, whose dist/ranks/cl100k_base.cjs holds the same ranks in a compressed form — decode it, write <base64> <rank> per line sorted by rank, and the result matches the SHA-256 that tiktoken_ext/openai_public.py hardcodes, so the reconstruction is verifiable rather than trusted. Drop it at $TIKTOKEN_CACHE_DIR/<sha1 of the URL>.