Good lord that’s a difference. I tried your suggestions and they are SO fast, but were lacking some of the initial pick-up-the-ball-and-run-with-it that the larger models seem to have so I just plugged in Roleplaying and 128k as my model prompts and then fluffed my account up to see what it costs for an evening of debugging my models.
mistralai/mistral-nemo did a fine job. Didn’t lecture too much about spicy content and was endlessly redirectable when it started to stray into wanting to restart the scenario or turn it into a PG hand-holding and imagining the future event. It did seem to like to do odd things with dialogue during explicit scenes, “ I-I-I-I-. . . oh-oh-oh-oh-oh” x20 at times, but was willing to go back to a more creative approach if kicked.
anthropic/claude-3.7-sonnet: EDIT: It was Claude-3.7-Sonnet that worked.. One of the sonnets, I think the 4.0 just flat out refused to play around with a relatively tame isolated-characters-fall-in-lust scenaro. 3.7 did work did an amazing job of being creative, including one long stretch that I’d have had to work on for days to get right, and I like to think that I’m an ok writer with caffeine and my ADD meds on board.
EDIT: Google: Gemini 2.0 Flash initially almost did as nicely as Claude 3.7, but even with a pretty clearly defined scenario it would crash into non sequiturs along with a disdain for english syntax and start creating it’s own sentence structure.
So, thank you for the suggestion to go back and try the models hosted elsewhere. 3 second pause while it queues up, then twenty paragraphs of good content, much much reduced context-locking and not nearly as much lecturing on sensitive topics as I’d expected. All three models I worked with did need a little prompting to get out of extensive thoughts bubbles on the topic of safe, sane and consensual, but once it knew that both characters were ok, they’d run for many narrative cycles before trying to “check in” again.
I likely ran my problematic (as far as overly convoluted prompt problems on my end) scenario for two hundred prompts and my more streamlined scenario for three hundred prompt cycles and it cost me. . . $3.50? I’ll still play with the locally hosted stuff just to see how far I can push it, but the cost/benefit for even the most capable role-play models online is well worth it to me.