Can't get Roleplay / casual conversation to work

I've spent two days in LM studio downloading various models like qwen, Gemma, Mistral.

I just want a basic character to talk to with some light roleplay. But every single one has issues such as acting like an assistant "Is that good? do you want me to do anything else?" acting completely unnaturally, i don't even know how to describe that? hallucinating, not understanding it's environment.

To be clear I'm not using complex scenes or system prompts I'm just asking basic questions and expect it to react like a normal bot.

I have like 8GB VRAM and i realize that might be an issue but 12B models are acting like they're straight out of a lobotomy here.