Cross posted from a comment response on my LJ:
Character goals are largely factional – there are a few common goals however (often shared in a faction):
1) Spread of a given philosophy or worldview (believing makes it so) – to craft a specific utopia (i.e. gather of comrades, so hence group/view Coherence).
2) Gathering of coherence through adversity view (basically terrorism… the more people see/fear them, the more they are confirmed)
3) Gathering of energy/resources to achieve group or personal goals. Often energy or resources are in other planes/times – bringing it back is the trick, but artifacts of power are great ways of storing energy in something that’s easy to believe in / observe across shifts.
4) Gathering for collection purposes (either vanity or to power 1,2,or 3) – for example collecting the souls of the 100 Asura (demons) from the plane of Sumeru
5) Worldcrafting – basically you can never affect your own timeline – anything that happens in a time causes another probability fork/split in the tree (actually doesn’t cause it, just sort of strengthens the observation of it) – including these future beings shifting in. However, if one were to go back in time on a timeline, strengthen the path where something happened, then all branches of this ‘new’ tree are now strengthened, making them easier to shift to. Then go to one of the new branches, making another new branch and make something else happen. Rinse, repeat, until you have what you want (either a nice summer getaway location, or some meticulously crafted artifact or technology or world to harvest). Generally this works best with larger groups, as if a single person does it, the coherence of the new branch isn’t very strong (what if they forget/die?).
6) Pure destruction
7) Pure hedonism
8) Personal Growth through varied experience
The archetypes have innate conflicts, kinships and rivalries. There is a skill that will allow you to ’see’ what general archetypes someone applies to (basically an aura sight). Most of it is personality conflict. The real conflicts are typically amongst factions, based on philosophy/goals not personality, though philosophies tend to attract those of the same archetypes.
There are also skills called “Puppeteering” (which are a bit higher up), that allow a player in the Mainline to control more than one form at once, generally with a weaker coherence or ability for each. This can be extended to controlling them across different planes or times at once, but this takes far more resources (multiple umbillicums, etc).
Additionally, I’m looking into the idea of having your archetype and skill ranks have ‘observed’ and ‘real’ ranks. Basically, you spend karma to up a rank 4 of say, Warrior, to rank 5. You have rank 5 in ‘real’ now. However, next jump, you can shift a number of ranks around. But the highest rank you ever had in something is the ‘observed’, which is easier to shift back to.
Looking into skills that improve the amount you can shift, and possibly some things affecting when karma becomes effective (for example, when you ‘buy’ a new skill, you only observe the new rank, you don’t have it on this jump).
Eventually, a single player could probably ‘observe’ every rank, and gain a high enough skill in rankshifting and puppeteering that they could play 5 totally different characters who encompass totally different archetypes and skillsets. These characters are probably rare and basically Methuselah / Level 20+ in D&D.