Why the brief cannot be changed
Understand why a chat experience settles its room type, purpose, and briefing at creation, and why different wording means a second experience, not an edit.
A chat experience settles its brief the moment it is created. The room type, the purpose, and the briefing are written in the create dialog and stay as they were written, for that experience and every room opened from it. Knowing what that covers explains why the room shows a lock rather than an edit control, and points you at the one way to put the same characters in front of different wording.
What is settled at creation
Three things are settled when you select Create experience: the room type, the purpose, and the briefing every character receives on joining.
There is no control anywhere in the product that edits a brief. No screen offers one at any point after creation, so the wording a character is briefed with in the tenth session is the wording settled in the create dialog. The dialog says so before you commit to it, in a line under Purpose: "Room type and purpose become the brief every character receives. They can't be changed after creation." The briefing box repeats it: "It is fixed once the experience is created."
How much of the briefing the room type writes depends on how many characters are in the room. In a room of two or more, the room type supplies the sentence the briefing opens with and the rules it closes with, and your purpose sits between them. In a room of one character, that opening sentence and those closing rules are replaced by wording of their own, and the rules chips shown with the briefing read One other person, Stay in character, and Respond when addressed, whichever room type the experience was created under. The room type still decides the purpose you started from and the label the room carries. Both forms are settled at creation, and neither is yours to edit afterwards. See How the room brief is written.
The brief is the part of a chat experience the characters carry. Characters are picked for each session and messages belong to the session they were sent in, so the brief is what makes every room opened from an experience the same experience. The experience's Previous sessions page states the same split: "Each session is its own thread. The brief carries over; the characters and the messages do not."
What the room tells you about the fixed brief
The room offers a lock in place of an edit control. Beside the brief sits a Fixed at creation label with a padlock.
Hovering that label opens a short panel. Its heading reads "Fixed for this experience", and its body gives the reason: "Every session and every character briefing builds on this brief. Editing it here would make the earlier sessions belong to a different experience."
The label appears in three places:
The Room brief section in the room's side panel, above Shared in room
For the whole conversation
The pinned Room brief card in the thread
While the room has nobody in it yet, on a wide window
The brief panel on the experience's Previous sessions page
Whenever you open that page
In the room, the panel that opens from the label also offers Duplicate with a new brief. On the Previous sessions page it explains the lock and offers nothing to select.
What you can still change
Two things about an existing chat experience remain yours to change, and neither touches the brief.
The name. Rename the experience from the three-dots menu on its card or row on My Experiences. The card label and the room's title change; the room type, the purpose, and the briefing do not. See Manage your chat experiences.
Who is in the room. Characters are seated per session, so every room you open is a fresh chance to put different characters in front of the same brief. See Add characters to the room.
Why different wording means a second experience
Duplicate with a new brief is what stands in for editing. It creates a second experience starting from the first: the Create a chat experience dialog opens prefilled from the original, and every field in it is yours to change, because what you are creating is new rather than an edit of what already ran.
The duplicate opens as its own empty room, with no sessions of its own yet. The original is untouched. It keeps its name, its brief, and its list of previous sessions, and the two appear separately on My Experiences.
Where that control sits, and what each field arrives prefilled with, are on Manage your chat experiences.
Related pages
The brief is what carries between sessions, and nothing else does. These pages cover duplicating an experience, replacing the briefing wording while the create dialog is still open, and what a finished session keeps.
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