The window at a glance

The parts of the Roller window
The parts of the Roller window
  1. Password: unlocks Roller. See Unlock with your password.
  2. Left column: the Protocol, your worlds with their story, cast, places and games. See Worlds, cast and places.
  3. Model: who runs the model (Local or LM Studio), and which model plays. In Local mode, the folder button opens Roller's models folder. See Models.
  4. Preset, Config and Help: the preset holds settings for how the model writes; Config opens the settings; Help opens this guide.
  5. The stage: the game so far, one turn at a time. See The stage.
  6. Your turn: what you send next: what you say and do, events, and the audience. See Your turn.
  7. Token gauge: how much of the model's memory the game fills. See How long can a game get?.
  8. Buttons: Download, Summarize, Listen, Back, Patch, Pass and Send.

The left column#

From top to bottom:

  • Protocol and Patcher: the instructions the model gets, shared by all worlds. You don't have to touch them. See The Protocol and the Patcher.
  • Your worlds, each with its Story, its Cast (the characters, you and the audience), its Places and its Games.
  • Import world, just above the first world: loads a world from a file. See Import a world.

Next to most items you see a rough length (for example ~28), or empty when nothing is written yet.

You can make the left column wider or narrower by dragging the gap to its right.

The status line#

The line next to the token gauge tells you what Roller is doing: Loading MyModel… 14 s, Reading the play (about 6,400 tokens)… 9 s, Thinking… 120 words · 12.4 s, Playing… 20.1 s, Done in 31.0 s, and so on. Problems show up there in red.

  • Loading … means the model is still being read into memory (the loading window shows how far).
  • Reading the play (about … tokens)… means your turn has been sent, the model is loaded, and it is reading the whole play so far before it starts writing. In a long game this can take a while, even though nothing is being loaded any more. Summarize and Patch say the same while they wait.
  • Thinking… means the model is working on its answer but hasn't started writing the turn yet (with a word count for models that show their thinking).
  • Playing… means the characters' answer is arriving on the stage.