u/WizardLizard101

I quit two and a half months ago after smoking/vaping for years. We recently moved and I've been slowly unpacking. A few weeks ago, I found a vape while I was unpacking and instead of throwing it away (like I should've), I kept it. I found it again last night while organizing and I finally caved and hit it. Once again, I didn't throw it away, and I hit it again this morning.

I know relapses are normal. Progress isn't linear. Etcetera etcetera. So, I'm trying not to beat myself up about it. It's just really hard not to. This is the second time I've quit. It was the longest I've managed to quit, too.

The worst part is that it truly isn't as good as I remembered it. It hurt my throat. It tastes like ass. The nicotine buzz lasts for a minute (at most) and now I feel all foggy and sluggish. I kinda want to cry.

I'm gonna throw it away tonight when I take out the trash. I have therapy this afternoon and I'm gonna tell my partner so they can hold me accountable to throw it away. I'm scared they'll be disappointed in me, though. We quit together at the start of the summer and I feel like I've already let them down.

Will the withdrawals be as bad as they were the first time if I only hit it a few times? I'm so scared to go through those again. I felt like I was finally getting over the irritation and bad head fog.

!! Long post warning !!

I know this is a weird recommendation and no one asked for this lol, but hear me out. I, too, have been exceedingly frustrated trying to find a website that gives me the roleplaying experience I crave. I love creating complicated stories, unique characters, yet most of all: I like when the writing isn't dog shit.

If you're like me, you might find yourself between a rock and a hard place. A lot of websites have their pros and cons. Some have lore book capabilities but terrible writing, while others have decent writing but not a lot of options to fully customize your bots. I know I've tried a handful of sites: c.ai, CrushOn, CHAI, janitor, xoul, etc. None of them ever scratched the itch. I'm here to tell you that from experience, Claude has given me a reason to never go back to a website like C.AI again.

Claude is pretty damn good at writing (not once has Claude written: "Can I ask you a question?" or growled at me, pinned me to a wall without reason, or called me a "minx") and it's good at avoiding stereotypes and getting into character .It lets you add more details than C.AI or C.AI adjacent sites, and is great at helping you plan out roleplays and characters. It can point out flaws in your character sheet. For example, it explained why my character was falling into certain tropes I dislike and told me how to fix it: and it worked! Last but not least (if you're into it), Claude is GREAT at writing NSFW content. To try and explain why I love Claude so much for roleplay, here's some examples of outputs I've gotten:

Example starter written by Claude (not the full thing since the OG is too long lol):

The common room of the Gilded Wren ran loud and close, packed wall to wall with bodies glad to be in out of the cold, and Cain had taken the table furthest from the hearth on purpose. The heat of a crowded room sat worse on him than any chill. He kept his back to the wall and his sightline clear to the door, the way a decade of nights had taught him to sit without thinking about the sitting, and he let the noise come at him from a remove, like weather happening to someone else.

There was a cup of spiced wine at his elbow he had no intention of finishing fast. He had asked the girl for honey in it and she had given him a look, and given him the honey, and he counted the exchange a fair one. The sweetness was the one indulgence he allowed himself out loud. The rest of his appetites he kept where they belonged, which was nowhere a stranger could read them.

His book lay open on the boards in front of him, a copy of the Vesperal he had carried so long the spine had gone soft as cloth, and he was not so much reading it as worrying at it, pen in hand, adding a line of his own cramped script into the margin beside a passage he had read a hundred times and still did not trust the common rendering of. The words came to him slow. They always had. He had fought every line he knew up out of the page one stubborn repetition at a time, and the fighting had left him this: a patience with text that looked, from the outside, like scholarship, and was closer to siege. He mouthed the passage under his breath as he wrote, low enough to lose in the din, the shapes of it familiar as breathing.

Example Response:

"Yes," he said. It came out before any of his usual machinery touched it, and he liked how it came out, so he said it again. "Yes. Fuck it. Yes." He tipped back the last of his cup and set it down somewhere the ground agreed to hold it. "For the record, you're correct, I'm terrible. I danced at harvest fairs as a boy, under duress, badly. A girl named, I want to say Berta, kicked me in the shin for cause and I retired at nine years old." He held up a finger. "Tonight I'm coming out of retirement. Lower your expectations into the lake."'

He attempted a spin he had watched the dancers near the fire perform. Sent Rune out under his arm and got him back mostly by luck, and the success delighted him beyond all proportion. The fire smeared into long orange streaks every time he turned his head. The beads clicked on his chest against the pendant, black and purple over the crescent, and an old woman by the cider barrel lifted her cup at them and Cain lifted two fingers back like they were old conspirators. The music went on getting away from them. He stopped chasing it. He pulled Rune in instead, close, hands settling easier now they'd found their posts, the two of them swaying slow to a fast song like the only sober pair in a drunk world, or the other way around. He couldn't tell anymore. Both felt true.

If you are interested in using Claude as an alternative, first and foremost: learn basic prompting. Do some research on prompt engineering and find a simple system that works. LLM's thrive on explicit, direct instructions. The better your prompt, the better the experience.

As for Claude itself: Claude offers a feature called projects. This is where I plan and create my roleplays. The important parts are the custom instructions and the project knowledge. I have two projects for my roleplays.

The first is for planning roleplays and developing my characters. The project instructions include a brief on Claude's job/role (ex: a collaborative writing partner), the goals and purpose of the project (ex: assist in the creation and development of character sheets/project instructions for separate roleplay projects), the boundaries (ex: avoid cliches, never make assumptions, etc.), and additional notes and rules. I use this project to create a plan and the project instructions for the actual "roleplay" or bot itself.

The second is essentially the bot. In the project instructions, I have a detailed character sheet that includes system directives, voice and character, behavioral rules, prose style, example responses, personality and appearance, user character, and notes. The project instructions are like the advanced definition in most chatbot sites. What I've noticed is that you're less limited, and you can ask Claude to condense it for token purposes. In the project knowledge section, I like to add stuff like: world building, lore, mechanics (ex: magic mechanics), scene summaries, relationship status, etc.

The one thing about Claude is that you should separate your roleplay by scenes. Each big scene should be separated into different conversations within the project. However, Claude has a pretty decent memory. You can also prompt Claude to summarize the entire scene at the end, upload it to the project knowledge, and prompt/use it as a reference for future conversations/scenes.

Using Claude itself is a great tool to figure out how to get the best experience out of roleplaying with it for you. It's definitely not the same as Character AI and it takes awhile to get used to the UI, but it's pretty damn good if you like long-form roleplays with detailed prose and are a freak for details like I am. The few downsides are that you can't search for pre-made characters, there isn't really a "community," and it can be pricey once you hit token limits (especially depending on the model you use, I would recommend Sonnet as a base model).

If anyone would like to see more examples, clarity on how to use Claude for roleplays, or would like a more detailed guide, lmk! I've been using Claude for months now and I'm extremely happy with my experience. I absolutely love roleplaying with it.

TLDR; Claude is a great alternative to C.AI if you enjoy creating complex bots and stories. It's good at writing, is great as a collaborative planner for roleplays, can write NSFW with the right prompting, and allows the user to be a lot more thorough than traditional chatbot sites.