Metamorphmagus Limitations

[Katherine Alicastell]

Hey hey,

By HNZ standards, what are the hard limitations of a metamorphmagus? Opinions seem to vary and I don't know to what extent I can roleplay the ability. From canon we know they can alter the colour of parts of their bodies, appear older or younger, and take on animal characteristics. What I don't know is if height is affected, though I'm assuming it would be to some degree if a metamorph can extend their face into a ducks bill or push it back into a pigs nose. Then there's questions like, to what extent can a body part be altered? While it's accepted that they can't transform into another animal entirely, could a character say, give themselves chicken feet, or flippers? Can they grow gills or alter their bodies to adapt to situations. Can they grow claws, or change their skin into a harder substance or structure, like scales, so on. Can they grow a tail? Horns? Can they extend their tongue like a frog, and so on.

Thanks you!
​

 

[Nicolas King]

Hey Jesse - thanks for this question, too!

We don't necessarily want to create hard limitations on this, because we all know what JKR has been prone to do with the canon.
Roughly, this is what the admin think:
In the books, we see Tonks frequently change her nose to mimic others' noses. However, while her nose is made to look like a pig's snout (like Dudley's) - it does not become a pig's snout. Similarly, the whole duck-bill thing was a movie adaptation.
We would say they can alter their human features within reason. They cannot change races (to Centaur, say). They cannot become animals. They cannot become inanimate objects.
They can change the features they have in size, general shape, colour. Maybe some metamorphamgi are better at changing different parts of their body than others are? Tonks seems to have mastered noses and hair, especially.
From Tonks, we also know it takes concentration and when she is distraught she finds it difficult to change her appearance. Tonks also said that she excelled in disguise because of this ability - so she can be unrecognizable; but we want to say unrecognizable is still human.
With all the undefined freedoms for changing human features into different shapes/sizes/colours of human features, we want to encourage you to use some sense, too, and not go crazy. If we start having troubles with metamorphmagi saying they made themselves 100 feet tall, we might have to make things stricter than we'd like.

Hope that helps again!

 

[Professor Geovanna Adler-Cade]

Just throwing in my two cents..

I like to think of it as a personal polyjuice potion. Met's don't need the Potion to turn into another human/variation of themselves, but when Hermione accidently "turned" into a Cat, it didn't really work. As we see from the films, Tonks can change sections of herself into animal form, but I think a full morph is bending too far into an Animagus. I feel like so long as it says in the realms of what a realistic human could have, it's relatively interchangable.

 

[Nicolas King]

Hey Phoebe,

In my post above, I suggest we're sticking to the books and not the movies. Things which look akin to animal parts (like a snout-ish nose) are okay, your face becoming a bill is not.
Even saying it's a personal polyjuice goes further than I think we're comfortable with - as Tonks makes it clear she must concentrate to transform, and her disguises are fairly simple. We do not see her ever wholly mimic another person. She may look unlike herself, but not necessarily entirely copy another (at least not without a lot of studying, practice, and probably regular interaction - at which point, why not just polyjuice it?).