POWERS BRAINSTORMING

[larkers]

> POWERS BRAINSTORMING

Hello everyone! One of the major goals we have with Meadowlark is customizing and tailoring the game experience to the characters themselves, and one of the main ways we hope to do this is with characters' powers. However, we know this may be a little difficult from the initial application phase, so we thought that having a powers brainstorming post could help everyone out! To reiterate what our application page says: This power should be complementary of your character's personality or self, such as a character with a strong motivation towards helping people finding themselves with a shielding or healing power. It should be unique to your character. By this we do not mean that only one character in game may have a fire power, but that the form or starting level of those fire powers should be specific to your character, such as one character's power first expressing as the creation of small flames on their hands, while another's first expresses as fire resistance. Please bear in mind that we don't expect anyone to have their character's full power development trajectory figured out from stage one. We want this to be something that evolves and changes according to the character's experiences and development in game, so what you start with here may evolve some months down the line. This post is primarily to provide a venue for interested applicants to brainstorm and use one another as a sounding boards. Please fill out the form below to give everyone a starting point! <b>CHARACTER NAME</b>: <b>CANON</b>: <b>SOME CORE CHARACTER TRAITS</b>: <b>ANY POWER IDEAS</b>: <b>ANY POWERS YOU'D PREFER TO AVOID</b>:

Comments

[frostedplum]

CHARACTER NAME: Mei-Ling Zhou
CANON: Overwatch
SOME CORE CHARACTER TRAITS: helpful, sweet, apologetic, unfailingly positive, determined, resourceful, genius
ANY POWER IDEAS: So in her canon, she's associated with ice. She has an ice weapon, can build ice walls, put herself in an ice block, was cryofrozen, and stationed in Antarctica. When I was thinking of how to apply this to her personality, I thought what about having her help others through thermal manipulation? That way she can use both heat and cold to aid people. In the long term, things like ice bridges to get people to safety, warming the homeless stuck out in the cold, resourceful stuff like that. The first stage would just be heat or cold coming off her fingers, and these fancy manipulations would build with time. I'm open to other suggestions, but it's hard to get away from the ice motif with Mei.
ANY POWERS YOU'D PREFER TO AVOID: None I can think of offhand.

[warfares]

i think thermal manipulation is a great way to incorporate the ice motif without going straight for cryokinesis or some variant, and it will also be able to be developed in a lot of interesting ways. ultimately you want something that will be fun to use, right? and while something more generic might not be fun and useful this is something that seems pretty workable while also being a little different.

[frostedplum]

That's what I'm hoping for! I was scratching my head for a bit trying to pick something, because ice powers seem more like something a "cold" personality would have, but having it being used to aid others, plus the addition of heat powers with it would hopefully be more Mei-like.

[warfares]

as to how it'd manifest, i think your idea about mei's body temperature being noticeably hotter or colder than it should be is a great way to start. subtle too. you could potentially build it up a little more before she even necessarily realizes something's up.

[frostedplum]

Oh, yeah! Like she feels overheated or freezing and maybe thinks she's sick or something. Then her fingers frost over and she realizes Things Have Escalated.

[secondnature]

What you've described reminds me of an X-Man: Here! It might lead to seeing some cool (hah) ways she used her powers.

[frostedplum]

Oo, thanks! I think she was shown on the Wiki page I linked, but I didn't click on her to learn more. I could definitely add some of this to Mei's power.

[dirtyredneck]

I really like the power idea, but I'm a little worried the ice-end of it will be too close to her canon powers for the mods to approve. I think the version that's more similar to the X-Man you were linked would be better. Where the character needs heat to make ice and cold to make fire, so it's more distinct from her canon powers on the ice end.

[frostedplum]

I don't think I explained myself very well, because Mei doesn't have ice powers. She has a weapon that she built that can produce these ice related things, but take away the gun and she has no control over ice at all. She's baseline human.

[dirtyredneck]

Oh, yeah. Then that is very different. The way it's written it sounds like the ice powers are hers. I'm really not familiar with Overwatch, either. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

[frostedplum]

Nah, it's okay! It was bad comma use on my part!