Track Character Motivations Through Time

[b-camphart]

🚀 Feature Request

📝 Description

Character motivations should be moved from scenes to story events.

✨ Describe the solution you'd like

Currently, scenes keep track of character motivations, but it would make more sense for story events to do so. Characters would have a motivation that can be changed within a story event. Each subsequent story event that includes that character would then inherit that motivation, up to the next story event that changes that character's motivation again. This is currently how scenes behave, but it would make more sense for it to happen in story events.

The difference between scenes and story events handling this is that scenes are ordered and cannot share a position in the story. Story events can happen at the same time, so there would need to be a soft requirement that a character cannot be included in two separate story events at the same time. Instead of outright preventing the user from doing this, the system could automatically detect such a scenario and warn the user that they have a potential logical problem in their story. They can then choose to either: combine the two story events into one, remove the character from one of the story events, or ignore the warning.

This also means that a ramifications report would need to exist for story events being moved or removed because they could impact the inherited motivations of characters in other story events.

✍️ Describe alternatives you've considered

Keeping the motivation in scenes doesn't make sense anymore since a character's motivation "exists" independently of if the audience is made aware of that motivation.

[ryanreso1993]

Copied from Discord:

"I would love to play with this feature by taking a longform story like Better Call Saul, plugging in all the story events where, say, Kim Wexler is present, making notes of the actions, but also tracking her motivation from event to event. I feel like I'd better understand her character, which is an awesome feature of our program
How would you handle a flashback? There's a scene in Season 5 BCS where a young Kim walks home from school because her mother's drunk driving. Her motivation is obviously paralleled by her motivations in the actual story time, but it kind of breaks the chain from the previous story event and the next one which are chronological story time. It's more of the author's motivation of what the story accomplishes by putting this flashback inbetween two chronological story events
I would say a GOOD story, when it does a flashback, is showing a time when the character had a similar motivation when they were younger, to give dimension to that motivation, so it could still make sense to inherit the previous motivation. But it could also be a flashback when they had an OPPOSING motivation, and by the end they wound up having the motivation from the previous story event, so it wouldn't make sense to inherit the motivation, but it would still be continuous because the two chronological story events would still respectively end and begin with the same motivation.
E.g. *
Congruent Story events with flashback*
Story Event 1
Kim wants to be autonomous despite challenge from her employers.

Story Event 2 (Flashback)
Young Kim wants to be autonomous despite challenge from her mother.

Story Event 3
Kim challenges her employers to bolster her autonomy.

Incongruent story events with flashback
Story Event 1
Jimmy ponders how to cut corners with a client to win a case, involving taking advantage of someone.

Story Event 2 (Flashback)
A young innocent Jimmy sees his father get taken advantage of at his dad's old shop. Jimmy learns he has to be a "wolf not a sheep"

Story Event 3
Jimmy acts like a wolf in order to win the case with his client by taking advantage of someone."