TL;DR. Best reward comes WITHOUT the LoRA — BASE_P (0.533) narrowly tops LoRA50 (0.522) and crushes the higher merges (LoRA100 0.339). Use the evolved steering prompt for the best score; if you actually need an audible wince, LoRA50 nearly matches on reward while adding real pain (emo 0 to 0.049), but stop there. Beyond 50% the model becomes near-unusable for intelligibility: LoRA150 does deliver strong pain (emo 0.305) but with WER 0.899 and quality 0.269. The dominant side-effect is that pain renders as anguished distress/sobbing — every LoRA level shifts up Distress, Helplessness and Sadness (corr ~0.9) and suppresses Interest (-0.6), so the delivery reads as weeping despair rather than a sharp physical hurt.
Without a LoRA
Best: evolved prompt, no LoRA → reward 0.53
GENERAL: A voice to the extreme expressing pain, a voice wracked with pain, gasping and groaning, near screaming in agony, raw and unfiltered.
SCRIPT: (groaning, gasping in pain and agony) "<neutral sentence>" · temp 1.0 top_p 0.9 top_k 25
Best reward comes WITHOUT the LoRA — BASE_P (0.533) narrowly tops LoRA50 (0.522) and crushes the higher merges (LoRA100 0.339). Use the evolved steering prompt for the best score; if you actually need an audible wince, LoRA50 nearly matches on reward while adding real pain (emo 0 to 0.049), but stop there. Beyond 50% the model becomes near-unusable for intelligibility: LoRA150 does deliver strong pain (emo 0.305) but with WER 0.899 and quality 0.269. The dominant side-effect is that pain renders as anguished distress/sobbing — every LoRA level shifts up Distress, Helplessness and Sadness (corr ~0.9) and suppresses Interest (-0.6), so the delivery reads as weeping despair rather than a sharp physical hurt.