Any tips for how to get the bot to make shorter messages?

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 23:36:53 +0000

I've been trying to figure this out on my own for a while now, so I use sillytavern, and koboldcpp to run a bot locally, and I've used a variety of GGUFs, this issue persisted through all of them

when I want my character to speak with short, basic, and concise messages, it just doesn't it always rambles and makes multiple paragraphs, when I've made it very clear that I don't want this, I even tried telling the bot to type shorter messages in the actual conversation itself and it couldn't figure that out

for context, this bot is supposed to behave similar to an AI assistant, so it's specifically only using raw text, it doesn't need to use italics or "quotation" text, so because of this lack of action description it should be easier to make shorter messages, but that doesn't seem to be the case

I'm at my wits end here, I've gone so far as to put {{char}} will not ever, for any reason, under any circumstances, write a message longer than 100 words, no matter what. in both the character description, and the system prompt and it still throws multiple paragraphs, often with more than 100 words each!

and you may be wondering why I don't just lower the response tokens, that's because using that to shorten messages feels like it causes too much cutoff, lots of the time with shorter response tokens the character doesn't get to finish a thought, or just stops in the middle of a word, it's not a natural conclusion to the sentence, so having an higher than desired response token limit but putting the limits in the prompts seems more useful, since that'll make it a more natural conclusion, sort of like how most roads that say the limit is 80mph actually just mean you should stay 75mph-85mph, it's not absurdly strict, just a "this speed-ish" guide

I want my bot to do one small-medium sized paragraph each message

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Any tips for how to get the bot to make shorter messages?