We need to decide what special abilities each character should have. Post your ideas here. Feel free to post abilities even if you don't know which character should have them; we can then discuss how to fit them in. Be sure to read up on the characters for ideas.

Try not to get too far into the exact mechanics of your ideas just yet. Explaining how they might be used in a puzzle is good, but there's no need to develop mathematical equations for computing damage or anything like that.

Here's a summary of ability ideas we already have for each character. Feel free to further discuss any of these to flesh them out.

Syne

• Group Management: When multiple chacters are selected and Syne is one of them, several AI helper algorithms will kick in to make the group coordinate their efforts.

Dell

• Flight: Dell can fly.

• Eumonetics: Dell can use eumonetic techniques, though he does not learn any until later in the game. His affinity starts out close to air, but shifts towards water late in the game.

Enna

• Ranged attack: Enna can shoot enemies and objects with her bow and arrows.

Cade

Rheya

• Eumotech: Rheya can design and construct eumonetic devices.

• Eumonetics: Rheya can use eumonetic techniques, though her power is relatively weak. She's more effective when she makes use of eumotech. Her affinity is between air and fire.

Ko

• Pets: It was suggested that Ko could tame and train pets, although this was still pretty up-in-the-air.

Brooke

• Morph: Brooke can morph herself or another person into an animal which she is closely familiar with. (IMO, we need to place some serious limitations on this ability.)

• Eumonetics: Brooke can use some eumonetic techniques, with an affinity for earth.

Rush

What I recall about Brooke's morph:

• She can morph herself, or another person by touch.

• When she morphs another person, she must touch them again to un-morph them.

• She can only morph people into a creature with which she is closely familiar. Gaining this familiarity requires living together for some time.

• She can only morph one person at a time.

I still think this ability is over-powerful. Tyrus uses the same ability to morph himself into an Antarean; specifically, one which he had captured and lived with for some time. More specifically, Dell, IIRC. If that's possible, then it should be equally possible to morph yourself to look like any of your family members, which doesn't seem right.

If the morph ability is a eumonetic technique (which it would have to be, because eumonetics are the only way such a thing could work), then there must be a specific statement used to carry out the technique. As we know, Proteans do not know the language, so the statement has to be identical for all Proteans. We could use this to explain why the limitations exist.

Perhaps "Morph the person whom I am touching into the shape of the animal I am most familiar with."? Or, "have most recently studied"?

Normally "animal" would prohibit morphing into other people, but perhaps Tyrus' contempt for Antareans is so great that he really believes them to be no more than animals, or something.

Do we want Brooke to be able to study new creatures over the course of the game?

Funny side note: Eumonetics cannot create or destroy matter. So, morphing Ko into a skunk would have to create a large rock or something as a side effect, and morphing him back would have to steal a chunk of matter out of the ground.

In purely theoretical terms, arranging matter does not cost much energy. For example, it should theoretically cost no more energy to rearriange the atoms from a rock into a PC than it would to simply move the rock a few feet to the left. That is to say, complexity does not necessarily require energy.

However, eumonetics may arbitrarily require more energy than basic phisics necessarily needs, just in order to make things interesting. So, we can say that morph requires more energy for larger beings and don't really have to justify that. (Excess energy becomes heat.)

Note that the person performing "morph" does not need to know the exact internal structure of the animal. Since eumonetic techinques are arbitrary requests spoken in a certain language, simply naming an animal defined elsewhere is sufficient. Of course, Proteans do not know the language or the names of any animals, so they're stuck with a static phrase. Perhaps when the technique was originally invented, the inventor intentionally named the animal as "the animal which I have studied" in order to build-in a limitation.

The reason I am concerned about limiting it is because all Proteans are supposed to have this ability. If it's too powerful then it begs the question, "Why have the Proteans not won the war with this?".

Regarding the Cade and Rush ideas: I just don't see cutting down bushes as an ability that would be very useful or easy to integrate into puzzles. First aid might be ok, but it wouldn't be useful in puzzles at all, and might overlap too much with the eumonetic healing abilities of other characters.

I already covered that:

You're right. Creating matter would take far, far too much energy. Creating even a gram of matter would take energy on the order of a nuclear bomb. Thus, when morphing into a larger creature, matter would have to be borrowed from the ground or elsewhere.

However, there's a hell of a lot of ground out there and not very many people trying to morph, so I don't see this as a huge limitation. If they consumed an entire mountain morphing themselves into larger creatures, for instance, that would be far, far more than enough to make their army unstopable by any force. Doing some rough calculations here, the average mountain probably contains far more mass than all the people on the planet combined.

Assuming for the moment that dragons are the largest creatures that exist in our world (probably true), a Protean that wanted to turn into one would then firstly need to study a dragon (whatever "studying" entails), and secondly would need a proportionate amount of earthly-charged eumonite to do the morph. Even if they had access to more eumonite--beyond what every Protean receives during their pilgrimage to the labyrinth grove--a Protean would have to find a dragon willing to be copied...

<tangent> ... well now there's a thought. Perhaps the studied animal form has to be willing? Does this mean that Proteans can only morph into creatures that can be willing in any sense of the word? i.e. is it possible to measure the will of a mosquito? </tangent>

It's probably safe to say that most Proteans have not had encounters with any dragons, given their rarity, let alone submissive dragons. The sympathetic relationship between Kydran and Aequus might have been our exception. This would mean, in fact, that the "sapphire dragon" into which Kydran morphs at the end of Part I isn't sapphire: it's Aequus' form. That might be funny in a way, since a smart player would deduce that the dragon they encountered in Chapter One (who really was Aequus) is actually Kydran--and this, of course, would all get cleared up in Part IV.

Form being willing would definitly turn it into a more "summon-esque" event, not every creature is going to be willing.