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Guides

Your First Scene

Start your journey on the stage

Your First Scene

Building a character — the Identity panel and Casting Card editor in action

This guide gets you from "I have an account" to a live scene with a character ready to play. Everything that happens during a scene — swiping, branching, polishing, persona swaps, image attachment — lives in the Scenes reference. This page is just about getting started.

Two Ways to Get a Character

You start a scene one of two ways. Both end in the same place — a configured scene with a character ready to play.

Path A — Use a published character

Browse the catalogue on Discovery and tap Use on RoleCall on any character card. That hands you off to rolecallstudios.com with the character pre-loaded.

Path B — Import your own

Already have characters from another platform? Drop a SillyTavern PNG card, JSON file, or any of the other accepted formats into your library via the importer. The character lands in your library as a draft you can launch a scene from the same way as anything else.

What happens next

Depending on your account preferences, RoleCall will either drop you into the Scene Configure stepper (a short pre-scene wizard) or take you straight into a fresh scene with the character's first message waiting.

The Scene Configure Stepper

The stepper is a focused screen where you preview and confirm everything that shapes the scene before it opens.

What you configure here

Preset — The AI behavior recipe. Controls which prompts surround the scene, how the AI interprets the character card, and the baseline sampler settings. The creator may have flagged a recommended preset; if so, it's pre-selected. For a first run, stick with the recommended preset.

Persona — Who you are in the scene. Pick an existing persona from your library or create a quick one right here. The stepper lets you create a minimal persona (name + short description) before opening the scene.

Lorebooks — World-info packs attached to the scene. Lorebooks the creator recommends appear here as opt-in toggles; auto-enabled ones are on by default. For a first scene, leave them as the creator configured them.

Model — Which AI model powers the scene. The stepper shows your available models grouped by provider. The preset may suggest a specific model; you can override it here.

Samplers — Temperature, context window, max tokens, and related generation settings. These inherit from the preset you picked. The stepper lets you adjust them before you start.

Content rating confirmation — If the character is rated Late Night or After Dark, you'll be asked to confirm before the scene opens. Any trigger warnings the creator added surface here one last time.

When you're satisfied, click the button at the bottom to open the scene.

The First Message

When the scene opens, the character's first message appears in the main column.

The first message is the opening scene. It establishes:

  • Where you are — the setting, the time, the mood.
  • What the character is doing — what they're up to when you arrive.
  • The tone the AI will mirror for the rest of the scene — pacing, formatting, narration style, vocabulary.

Read it carefully. The AI takes its style cues from how this opening is written. Long flowery prose begets long flowery prose. Short punchy dialogue begets short punchy dialogue. Asterisks for narration, quotes for speech — if it's set up that way here, the AI will keep doing it.

If the character had several greetings configured, look for a small left/right arrow beside the first message header. Those flip through alternate greetings — preview them and pick the opener you want before you send your reply.

Sending Your First Reply

The compose bar lives at the bottom of the screen. Click into it and type.

  • Enter sends your message.
  • Shift + Enter inserts a newline without sending.
  • The compose bar grows vertically as you type more.

A few habits that pay off forever:

  • Match the format of the first message. If it used asterisks for actions and quotes for dialogue, mirror that. The AI follows your lead more than people expect.
  • Give the AI something to react to. Take an action, ask a question, make a decision. "Okay." is a dead-end reply that produces a dead-end response.
  • Don't write the character's lines for them. Stick to what your character does, says, and notices. Let the AI handle the other side.
  • Aim for roughly the same length as the first message. The AI calibrates response length off your last message.

Hit Enter. The AI's response will start streaming in real time. The scene is live.