Additional examples of Characteristics

[bobRaskoph]

I’ve been looking through the Dramatica Analysis pages and blogs for a few years now, and as far as I know, most people focus on the Story Forms to the exclusion of the Character Building stuff.
Apart from some mentions here and there on discuss, storymind and narrativefirst (and even then it’s mostly just problem, solution, focus, direction and/or crucial elements), you won’t find much about it. I assume that there simply isn’t enough reward for the time and effort required to somewhat-accurately determine these elements.

Additionally, there is the idea that these character elements are not “characteristics” as much as what the characters “represent” in relation to the goal / inequity from an “objective” perspective (explaining why Severus Snape could be the “Help” character).

A quote from narrativefirst.com:

[quote]And that’s when you need to realize that the character elements found in the Overall Story Throughline represent facets of the Storymind as a whole—NOT individual character traits to be doled out as if at the start of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

(…)

Dramatica sees story as an analogy to a single human mind trying to solving a problem. Protagonist, Antagonist, Skeptic, Guardian, Sidekick—these characters stand in for aspects of the mind at work. The Protagonist represents our motivation for initiative, the Antagonist our motivation for reticence.

When building characters by dragging and dropping avatars in the Build Character window, the Author assigns facets of the mind at work to these individual players. Thinking individual traits describe these characters is inaccurate; rather these characters represent individual traits of a single mind in the process of solving a problem.[/quote]

Another quote:

@jhull

Look to the Story Goal. Once you know what that is, simply “tag” the characters in your story with Elements that refer to the Goal.

For instance, a story about Earning the Admiration of the Scientific Community:

George:

Pursuit: As head of the project, George motivates everyone to push harder to earn the respect and admiration of the scientific community.
Test: Never one to settle for anything less than perfect, George constantly challenges every idea and approach the team comes up with
Perception: George could care less about how much they really deserve the admiration; as long as everyone perceives his team as worthy, he’s quite satisfied
Acceptance: At heart, George is a people-pleaser, and will do anything, even if it mans cheat, to be accepted by his peers.

You go ahead and do this for all your characters and always think of the Element in reference to the Story Goal. This will keep your story honest and consistent.

Ignore the Archetypal Characters and the settings they suggest within the application. They do more harm than good as they confuse the way these Elements work in a story.

For instance, you could assign a character as the “Skeptic” because they’re skeptical…even though they might fully support and believe in the Story Goal. You can’t just be a “skeptic” to anything when it comes to artfully crafting a narrative. It needs to have purpose, and the purpose of the Overall Story elements is to show the relative appropriateness or inappropriateness of these elements in the efforts to resolve the story’s central inequity.

My personal grievances with Myer-Briggs and such aside, the problem is that they try to determine a static description of someone’s personality while the character elements of Dramatica are about characters’ relation to the story goal/inequity. Meaning, they could change from story to story. See Han Solo in Star Wars IV.