I might be a bit late to the party, but for those of you that like ERP and fiction writing:
Introducing Pygmalion-2
The people from Pygmalion have released a new model, usable for roleplaying, conversation and storywriting.
It is based on Llama 2 and has been trained on SFW and NSFW roleplay, fictional stories and instruction following conversations. It is available in two sizes, 7b and 13b parameters. They're also releasing a mix with MythoMax-L2 called Mythalion 13B.
Furthermore they're (once again) announcing a website with character sharing and inference (later in october.)
For reference: Pygmalion-6b has been a well known dialogue model for (lewd) roleplay in the times before LLaMA. It had been followed up with an underwhelming successor based on LLaMA (Pygmalion-7b). In their new blogpost they promise to have improved with their new model.
(Personally, I'm curious how it performs compared to MythoMax. There aren't many models around, that excel at roleplay or have been designed specifically for that use case.)
Seems easier with SillyTavern. They've included screenshots with recommended settings for that in the blog post.
TBH my experience with SillyTavern was that it merely added another layer of complexity/confusion to the prompt formatting/template experience, as it runs on top of text-generation-webui anyway. It was easy for me to end up with configurations where e.g. the SillyTavern turn template would be wrapped inside the text-generation-webui one, and it is very difficult to verify what the prompt actually looks like by the time it reaches the model as this is not displayed in any UI or logs anywhere.
For most purposes I have given up on any UI/frontend and I just work with llama-cpp-python directly. I don't even trust text-generation-webui's "notebook" mode to use my configured sampling settings or to not insert extra end-of-text tokens or whatever.
I had exactly the same experiences. I use Koboldcpp and also oftentimes the notebook mode. SillyTavern is super complex and difficult to understand. In this case it's okay. I can copy-paste from screenshots (unless the UI changes).