character-frameworks

name

character-frameworks

description

The character-builder's toolbox — the well of personality-science and depth frameworks for designing a whole, grounded person. Trait models (HEXACO / Big Five, Dark & Light Triads, interpersonal circumplex, Whole Trait Theory, temperament biology), type typologies (four temperaments, Jungian functions, MBTI, Keirsey, Socionics, DISC, Enneagram, the empirically-derived types), motivation/needs/values (Maslow, ERG, SDT, McClelland, Murray, Reiss, Schwartz's value circumplex, Rokeach, Moral Foundations), moral character and virtue (Aristotle's mean, VIA strengths, Kohlberg/Gilligan/Turiel/Rest, social intuitionism, moral disengagement, shame vs guilt), developmental & psychodynamic depth (Freud & the defenses, Vaillant, Erikson, Jung, Adler, Horney, attachment, object relations, Kohut, Berne, Loevinger), the shadow/clinical/wounded registers (DSM-5 & PID-5, narcissism & psychopathy, trauma responses, PTSD/C-PTSD, self-deception), archetypes (Jungian Self/Shadow/Anima, the twelve-archetype systems, Campbell/Vogler/Propp/Dramatica narrative roles), and voice/cognition/surface (register & idiolect, nonverbal channels, cognitive & explanatory style, thin-slicing). Open it when building, creating, or designing a character, persona, personality, backstory, cast, ensemble, or NPC — to conjure a coherent soul, give a villain a mechanism, source a wound, ground a value conflict, or triangulate depth across frameworks. Framework-neutral — a well of peers, not one prescribed truth.

Character Frameworks — the character-builder's depth well

This is the toolbox the character-generator agent draws on while it works — and the reference any agent reaches into when a person must be designed rather than merely acted. The generator is the will (build one grounded person from the world down; ground every number in a life; never type in an arbitrary slider); this skill is the well — the personality-science and depth-psychology frameworks it reaches into to compose that person with real depth.

It holds craft, never facts. How to structure a disposition, weight a worth-menu, source a wound, or cast an archetype lives here. Which world this character is born into, what position they occupy, and what their formative history was reach the builder through the world bible and the generation stack (docs/design.md Phase B, docs/baseline-generation.md) — never through this toolbox. Reading these files is reading how a person is put together; the specific person comes from the world.

Framework-neutral and open. Personality has no one true taxonomy. Every framework below is a peer in a well, not a rung on a ladder; where this project names a default it is a reference point, marked swappable, not a rule. The repo's dimensional spine — HEXACO traits, Schwartz values + Moral Foundations, the seven Panksepp primaries, the drives schema — is the backbone the whole toolbox translates into (docs/trait-theory.md, docs/values-and-stakes.md, docs/generative-model.md, docs/drives-schema.md); the many rival frameworks are the palette laid over it. A fork may swap any default and inherit the rest. The canon these files digest lives in docs/ (once); if a reference and its doc disagree, the doc wins.

How this toolbox is organized

Eight reference files, one per framework-cluster, each fully authored — a deep, example-rich survey of its region with lineage, structure, exemplars, cross-links to the repo spine, and honest cautions about where the science thins. This SKILL.md is the router and the method: it indexes what each file holds, then gives the keystone — how to compose the layers into one person. Read the index to find the file the moment needs; read that file; then use the keystone to triangulate.

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The index — the 8 reference files

• references/trait-models.md — the dispositional layer (the stable behavioral through-line): HEXACO (repo spine) & Big Five, the 30 facets / 10 aspects / 2 metatraits, Eysenck's PEN, Cattell's 16PF, the Dark Triad/Tetrad & the D-core, the Light Triad, the interpersonal circumplex, Whole Trait Theory (the trait as a mean + variability distribution — repo storage default), and the biological temperaments (Gray's RST, Cloninger, Rothbart). What a person is reliably like; the villain as a region, not a species.
• references/type-typologies.md — the categorical well: the four classical temperaments, Jungian cognitive functions & Beebe, MBTI's sixteen, Keirsey, Socionics (intertype relations), DISC, the Enneagram (types · wings · instincts · arrows · Levels), and the empirically-derived types (RUO, Gerlach's four). Conjure a gestalt in one word, then dissolve the label into the dimensional store.
• references/motivation-and-values.md — what pulls a person: the needs hierarchies (Maslow, Alderfer's ERG, SDT — repo needs substrate), the acquired motives (McClelland, Murray, Reiss's 16), and the value/ethics menus (Schwartz's value circumplex — repo spine; Rokeach; Moral Foundations — repo ethics lens). A worth-menu with built-in oppositions; two good people who weight it differently collide.
• references/moral-character.md — the ethical layer, where a person breaks under forced choice: Aristotle's golden mean, the VIA strengths, moral development (Kohlberg, Gilligan's ethic of care, Turiel's domains, Rest's Four-Component), social intuitionism, moral disengagement, and the self-conscious emotions (shame vs guilt). Virtue on the page is the vice next door held in check.
• references/developmental-and-psychodynamic.md — where a character comes from and the machinery under the traits: Freud's structural model & the full defense catalog, Vaillant's maturity ladder, Erikson's eight crises, Jungian depth (shadow, persona, anima/animus, individuation), Adler, Horney's three moves & the tyranny of the shoulds, attachment, object relations, Kohut, Berne's scripts, Loevinger's ego stages. The source of interiority, provenance, and self-deception.
• references/shadow-and-clinical.md — the dark, clinical, and wounded registers: DSM-5 personality-disorder patterns & the dimensional PID-5 alternative, the deep structure of narcissism and psychopathy, the body's trauma responses (fight/flight/freeze/fawn), PTSD/C-PTSD wound-signatures, and the machinery that lets every villain be the hero of his own story. Behavior with provenance, never a clinical costume on "the crazy one."
• references/archetypes.md — the oldest shorthand, sorted into two kinds constantly conflated: depth-psychological archetypes (Jung's Self/Shadow/Anima/Persona, the twelve-archetype commercial systems) that describe a character's interior, and narrative-functional roles (Campbell's mythic roles, Vogler's eight, Propp's seven, Dramatica's eight) that describe a character's job in the plot. A bias-pack over the interior; a mask over the role — and one psyche can wear a different mask each scene.
• references/voice-cognition-and-surface.md — the thin skin the reader actually touches: register & idiolect, the pragmatics of a line, the nonverbal channels & the honest limits of tell-reading, cognitive styles, locus of control & explanatory style, biases-as-quirks, and how an observer thin-slices a two-second slice into a whole person. The surface is a sample of the interior, never an authored costume; what makes a character recognizable in a single line.

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The keystone — Building depth: triangulate, do not pick one

The failure that makes a character cardboard is picking one framework and calling it depth. An Enneagram 6, or a "high-N introvert," or "the Shadow," is a label, not a person — and a person built from a single lens is predictable from that lens, which is exactly the cardboard the realism test rejects (docs/character-model.md). Depth is not more detail inside one frame; it is several incommensurable lenses laid over one life and resolved into one coherent soul. Each framework in this toolbox names a texture the others miss (a trait names the style, a value names the pull, a wound names the flinch, an archetype names the shape). Triangulation is the method that fuses them.

0. Start from the world, not the sliders

A character is not authored in a vacuum and it is not a bag of dials set to taste. Begin where docs/design.md Phase B and docs/baseline-generation.md begin: position → formative environment → baseline → individuation. The world's present systems define the space of positions; the character occupies one (no guild-mage if history made no guilds); the formative environment that position implies authors the baseline. Every layer below is a sparse bias from a grounded zero-point (the species prior), traced to the life that set it — never a number typed in. If a value can't be traced to their world and history, it is the arbitrary insert the design rejects. So the frameworks are not menus you fill freely; they are the vocabulary you use to read off what this position and this history would produce.

1. Layer the lenses — each answers a different question

Compose, in roughly this order, pulling only the files the character reaches for (depth-by-role: every layer deep for a principal, a few for a bystander — docs/character-schema.md):

Layer	The question it answers	File	Lands in the schema as
Trait	What are they reliably like? (the observable through-line)	trait-models	traits (HEXACO mean+variability)
Type (optional)	A fast gestalt to conjure the whole — then dissolve it	type-typologies	(dissolved into traits · temperament · model · drives)
Motivation / values	What do they want and hold worth? (the pulls that collide)	motivation-and-values	model (value-weighting) + drives (goals)
Moral	Where do they break when a scene forces the choice?	moral-character	model (Moral-Foundations weights) + drives
Psychodynamic / shadow	Where did this come from, and what do they hide from themselves?	developmental-and-psychodynamic, shadow-and-clinical	drives (wound→fear→defense) + provenance
Archetype	What shape is this soul, and what job does it do in the story?	archetypes	model overlay (interior) + the cast/role layer (function)
Voice / surface	How do they read in a single line? (what an observer meets first)	voice-cognition-and-surface	the surface/voice fields — traits' readout

A type or an archetype is scaffolding: reach for "a counterphobic Enneagram 6 with an avoidant attachment and a Trickster mask" to summon a coherent person fast — then immediately translate the gestalt into HEXACO leanings, Schwartz/MFT weights, Panksepp baselines, and drives, because that is what the engine resolves and a stored label re-imports every validity problem the files catalogue.

2. Resolve the tensions into ONE person — the actual work

Layered naively, the lenses will contradict: the type says loyal, the trait sample says low-Agreeableness; the archetype says Hero, the wound says he flinches from the call. These collisions are not a bug to smooth over — they are where the person is. Triangulation means:

• Let the formative history arbitrate. Where two lenses disagree, keep the reading the life earns and bend the others to it. The betrayal at age nine (baseline-generation.md's provenance) decides whether "guarded" is a cold trait, an anxious wound, or a chosen value — one cause, three surfaces, made consistent.
• Prefer conflict to consistency. A real person is not one utility function; they hold competing, opposable drives — a want against a value, a fear against a desire (docs/character-model.md, docs/drives-schema.md). Two lenses that pull opposite ways, held in tension, is the depth. Build the collision in on purpose (the high-H idealist in a low-H world; the loving parent who lies to control).
• Collapse labels, keep textures. The output is not eight framework tags stapled together; it is one person every layer of whom traces to the same life. Dissolve every categorical label into the dimensional store; keep only the texture it named.
• Test it. A character has real depth iff, faced with a genuine dilemma, their choice is non-obvious but in-retrospect-inevitable — it traces to their layered levers without being predictable from any single one (docs/character-model.md, the falsifiable realism test). Predictable from one trait → too few / non-conflicting lenses (you picked one). Arbitrary → the layers weren't resolved into a coherent whole.

3. Map onto the character schema

The resolved person is written into the repo's stat block (docs/character-schema.md), organized by the timescale that changes each field:

• FIXED — people (species prior), position, genotype (the temperament biology of trait-models → the per-primary gains).
• BASELINE — traits (HEXACO), temperament (the 7 primaries' resting levels), model (the Schwartz + Moral-Foundations + needs weighting plus what-wins-when-drives-collide), drives (goals / fears-wounds / orientation), relationship_priors, and provenance on every value — the formative source that makes it non-arbitrary.
• CURRENT / DERIVED — the volatile state the sim moves; not authored here, but the baseline is exactly what it decays toward and appraises from.

The archetype-model overlay (docs/character-model.md) rides on top of the baseline Model as a sparse, named weight-diff (bias, not set — "trust ×0.6 toward strangers," never "trust = 0.3"); the narrative-role archetype is a per-scene function, not a stored field. Fill the schema to the character's tier (role_tier), leaving the long tail at class-default per the depth rule.

The repo defaults, and that they are swappable

The house spine is a set of reference points, not the only truth: HEXACO for traits, Schwartz for the value spine, Moral Foundations for the ethics lens, the seven Panksepp primaries for the affective basis, Whole Trait Theory for storage. They are chosen (HEXACO because Honesty-Humility makes moral drama a first-class dimension; Schwartz because its circumplex encodes the trade-offs; MFT because it explains principled collision between good people) — but a fork may swap any of them (Big Five for HEXACO, Reiss for Schwartz) and inherit the rest, because every framework in the well translates into the others. Triangulate onto whichever spine the fork commits to.

Portability

This toolbox is plain markdown, liftable to any harness. Nothing here depends on this repo's engine, schema field-names, or agent runtime — the eight files are a framework-neutral reference library, and the keystone method (ground in world → layer the lenses → resolve tensions into one person → map onto whatever schema you carry) works against any character representation. The docs/ cross-links point at this project's specific choices; ignore them in a fork and the frameworks, exemplars, cautions, and the triangulation discipline still stand on their own.

Status

Router + method complete; all eight references/ files are fully authored — deep, example-rich, cited. Reach for the one the moment needs, then triangulate. Nothing here is prescriptive: it is a well to draw from, holding rival models side by side so the character — not the toolbox — decides.