Hmm… I think that quite often, the way a user expects to make a character appear doesn’t quite match how the model/software actually works…:
If by “Forge Neo” you mean Stable Diffusion WebUI Forge Neo, I would not assume yet that it simply “cannot read prompts.” Several quite different failures can all look like that from the outside.
The first thing I would separate is what you mean by “a basic character”:
Those are substantially different problems.
Also, the exact checkpoint/model matters a lot. Forge Neo can run model families with very different text encoders, training captions, prompting conventions, and supporting modules. Its Inference References explicitly preserve the model, prompt, and generation parameters in image Infotext, while its Download Models page shows that newer architectures can use completely different text encoders and VAEs.
So before randomly changing CFG, sampler, negative prompt, etc., the most useful information would be:
With just those, most of the possibilities below become much easier to separate.
A cheap sanity check is to test three different abilities independently:
1. Can this model generate a normal person?
2. Can it follow one simple visual attribute?
3. Can it recall the particular named character?
For example, keeping the same checkpoint, modules, seed, batch size, dimensions and other settings:
a girl
versus:
a girl with bright green hair
If the second prompt reliably changes the hair, then the prompt is clearly affecting generation at some level. If simple attributes work but a character’s name does not, I would look much more closely at the checkpoint’s character knowledge, naming/tag conventions, and recommended prompt format.
So, with the information currently in the post, my first guess would be some mismatch between the way you expect a character to be invoked and what that particular checkpoint/software setup actually expects, rather than “prompts have no point.”
But there is not enough information yet to say which mismatch it is.
If you post only these three things:
the exact checkpoint/model, the exact prompt, and one output/PNG Infotext
—and clarify whether “character” means a specific known character or merely a person with particular features—that should already make the next step much more concrete.