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Notes -
Realistically, I want to achieve something halfway between go-anywhere-do-anything and a rigid tale. Many good authors have the laws of narrative ingrained so deeply that they can write almost on the fly. New ideas are fit into a satisfying framework as they arise, or else rejected. There may or may not be a story plan to follow, and that may or may not be altered as writing continues.
On this basis, I've been trying to develop a 'plotty' roleplaying LLM that can fit events into a classic story structure as they occur, whilst incorporating the user's actions. So, in your Socrates example, the-user-as-Socrates can take actions to try and prevent his death. If he renounces philosophy, you can still make that work as a tragedy: a man gives up what really matters, only to discover that life isn't worth living without his principles. Or Socrates' escape attempts can succeed, and you have yourself a thriller as he tries to escape persecution. Like any dungeon master, it may have to break kayfabe at some point and tell the user, "you can do this if you really want to, but I can't make it work with the story" but in general this should be done silently and behind the scenes.
Unfortunately, I haven't had much luck getting an LLM to think on this level of meta. I don't know if it's a limitation of the finetuned models I have access to, or I'm just not running something big enough. Would be grateful to hear from anyone running >13b models.
Train it on Kal Bashir’s many posts about the Hero’s Journey?
I don't think it would work :) Training on posts about the Hero's journey would (probably) just make the LLM better at writing posts about the Hero's Journey*. I've generally found LLMs to be pretty bad at transfer learning.
*It does the same to me, actually.
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