From Another Dimension

Recap

In the last post, I played around with the ideas of swapping Motivational Elements between archetypal characters to produce more interesting and believable people to populate my story.  This is especially marked if we swap Action elements between opposite pairs of story roles, to provide characters who have internal conflict between what they do and what they decide. 

However, if we were stuck with only the sixteen elements, this would produce a fairly low number of combinations, especially since many of them do not make any narrative sense.  This is not usually enough to make truly novel and unexpected characters. Luckily Dramatica has other ways to characterise the roles in the story, four in total.  These it calls Element Sets, or Character Dimensions.


Before we delve into the other dimensions...

Dramatica gets quickly complex at this stage.  Already we have sixteen Motivational elements within the Motivation Set (dimension), and when trying to ascribe certain elements to certain characters in my story it was taking half a page or more to get them down on paper.  If we're going to add another three dimensions, each with sixteen elements of their own, then it's going to get messy.

Luckily, Dramatica comes with a table format to encode the elements which makes them take up less space on the page.  Let's encode the Motivational Set in this new table format:

Consider	Logic	Pursuit	Control
Feeling	Reconsider	Uncontrolled	Avoid
Faith	Conscience	Support	Help
Temptation	Disbelief	Hinder	Oppose

You can see from the sixteen squares that we have shorthand for the sixteen Motivational Elements.  They have been arranged so that diagonal pairs at the edges are in conflict, so that Consider is pitted against Reconsider, and Feeling against Logic, and so on. 

Another important thing to see is that the grid splits into four parts.  The top half and the bottom half are the split between Driver Characters and Passenger Characters.  The left half and the right half represent the split between Action and Decision characteristics.

If we want, we can allocate the eight Archetypal characters onto this grid, so we can see the relationships:

Consider Protagonist	Logic Reason	Pursuit Protagonist	Control Reason
Feeling Emotion	Reconsider Antagonist	Uncontrolled Emotion	Avoid Antagonist
Faith Sidekick	Conscience Guardian	Support Sidekick	Help Guardian
Temptation Contagonist	Disbelief Skeptic	Hinder Contagonist	Oppose Skeptic

You can see that the Archetypal characters map very evenly into the pairs of the Element Set.  If we wanted to swap some of the motivational elements, we would just move the names of our characters from one box to the next, having no doubles and no empty boxes.  This is a lot easier than writing it out long-hand.  Let's do that for Fiend with the set-up from yesterday's swaps:

Archetypal characters from Fiend Consider Jacob Logic Thomas Pursuit Jacob Control Thomas Feeling William Reconsider Fiend Uncontrolled William Avoid Fiend Faith Peter Conscience Katie Support Peter Help Katie Temptation Elaine Disbelief Bobby Hinder Elaine Oppose Bobby

With the element swaps from yesterday Consider Jacob Logic Bobby Pursuit Jacob Control Thomas Feeling Thomas Reconsider Fiend Uncontrolled William Avoid Fiend Faith Peter Conscience Elaine Support Peter Help Katie Temptation Katie Disbelief William Hinder Elaine Oppose Bobby

First we plot the Archetypal Characters from our first stab at character creation on the left grid.  This makes it easy to see that not only have we included all necessary motivational elements, we have placed them all in the correct places for the archetypal pattern.

Now, if we want to play around swapping elements to get complex characters, instead of writing them out longhand, it is very easy just to swap pairs of character traits to give believable combinations.  I re-do the decision element swaps we tried yesterday to give the grid on the right, with the changes highlighted in red.

We can now quickly see that, for example, Katie is now Help-but-Temptation.  If we want to try out other combinations, we just swap character traits until we get a set of characters we like.  This is much quicker and easier than writing it out long hand. 

There are only three rules when doing this:

1. No character can serve two masters.  Each character has to appear twice in the grid, but they can never be opposite each other in a 4x4 grid.  For instance, a single character cannot ever pursue and avoid at the same time.  Or help and hinder at the same time. 

2. Each character must appear once on the left and once on the right, this is because the grid is split left-right between Action and Decision, and you must have one of each.  You cannot have two approaches (actions) to a problem, or two different attitudes (decisions) to a problem. 

3. Where each character appears vertically changes how important a character becomes in terms of passenger and driver aspects.  When you move a character element towards the top, you are changing that character from a passenger to a more of a driver.  Be aware of this.

When you 'roll the model' you basically look at different configurations of character elements until you get a set you are happy with.


Progress

That is quite a lot to consider, so I think I'll leave it there for now.  Yes, I know I keep promising to talk about Purpose, but I had to introduce the quads before going there.. In the next post, I promise!