Struggling with something I’ve been working on, I’ve stumbled on a question I wanted to ask the good folk of Dramatica. Is the story of Faust a story, or a tale?
Here’s an overview of Faust taken directly from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust
Faust is bored and depressed with his life as a scholar. After an attempt to take his own life, he calls on the Devil for further knowledge and magic powers with which to indulge all the pleasure and knowledge of the world. In response, the Devil’s representative, Mephistopheles, appears. He makes a bargain with Faust: Mephistopheles will serve Faust with his magic powers for a set number of years, but at the end of the term, the Devil will claim Faust’s soul, and Faust will be eternally damned. The term usually stipulated in the early tales is 24 years; one year for each of the hours in a day.
During the term of the bargain, Faust makes use of Mephistopheles in various ways. In many versions of the story, particularly Goethe’s drama, Mephistopheles helps Faust seduce a beautiful and innocent girl, usually named Gretchen, whose life is ultimately destroyed. However, Gretchen’s innocence saves her in the end, and she enters Heaven. In Goethe’s rendition, Faust is saved by God’s grace via his constant striving—in combination with Gretchen’s pleadings with God in the form of the Eternal Feminine. However, in the early tales, Faust is irrevocably corrupted and believes his sins cannot be forgiven; when the term ends, the Devil carries him off to Hell.
If the bargain the main character strikes can only have one outcome, if he’s dealing with a power of absolute evil, does it mean the Issue lacks a Counterpoint, that there’s nothing to balance the argument with?
Does that make sense? Am I asking the right question? 
Thank you for any insight.
But if you give that same character a Purpose of Equity, a Motivation of Control, and a Means of Evaluation of Process, suddenly we have a much more interesting character. (Who, by the way, is completely different from Aware/Control/Process, Equity/Support/Process, or Equity/Control/Cause.) That’s really what makes Dramatica so effective. You can hate the villain’s methods all you want, but at the end of the day, is Equity so wrong? Or haven’t you ever been driven by Control? Or haven’t you been stuck measuring things through Process? Characters of all shades of morality are most effective when we understand why they think the way they do. That doesn’t mean they can’t be unquestionably evil, but they are understandable.