Operation Veja: Fixing Fundamental Concepts Missing from Modern Roleplaying Training Paradigms

Modern roleplaying models are increasingly sophisticated, yet they consistently fail to capture the essence of believable, engaging characters. We argue this failure stems from training paradigms that overlook the dynamic interplay of a character’s internal world. Current approaches, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), fact-based priming, literature-based learning, and synthetic data generation, are fundamentally limited in their ability to model the delibera tive, value-conflicted reasoning that defines human interaction. In this paper, we identify four core classic concepts essential for character authenticity: Values, Experiences, Judgments, and Abilities (VEJA). We propose the VEJA framework as a new paradigm for data curation that addresses these systemic failures. To illustrate the qualitative ceiling that our framework enables, we present a pilot study comparing a manually-curated, VEJA-grounded dataset against a state-of the-art synthetic baseline. Using an LLM-as-judge, our findings demonstrate a significant quality gap, suggesting that a fundamental shift towards conceptually grounded data curation, as embodied by VEJA, is necessary for creating roleplaying agents with genuine depth and narrative continuity. The full dataset is available at https://github.com/HyouinKyoumaIRL/Operation-Veja