Well the water one is easy. If evaporated, you would be forced into a steam elemental form. Except less cohesive. Kind of like what Dragyn said about stasis, but the idea is you'd be in danger of dispersing beyond recovery. With an effort of will you can keep yourself from drifting further apart and could even theoretically pull yourself back together with enough willpower. Similarly being frozen renders you immobile until you remelt yourself. Same thing with willpower applies for getting yourself moving. For case to case basis I will final decision on just what happens in such cases, though they will rarely be fatal. Fire doused with water would not die but be more like extremely low blood pressure, feeling faint and weak.
On another note, I'm actually kind of surprised by how many non-animal examples I'm getting here. (Woah, totally forgot I just said this last week XD) So here's what I'm going to do. I won't make forms unlimited, but I won't limit to just a few. Basically each character will get an affinity and can take any form so long as it's related to that affinity. I may be lenient on unrelated stuff, but antiaffinity would be a complete no-no.
General examples- Life affinity for example might be able to take the form of any animal or plant (in particular ones you'd find in a forrest), but not anything like fire, water, lightning, etc. Anything related to death (bones, scavengers, poison, etc would be right out.)
- Fire similarly would be able to do fire (obviously), lava, sand, most desert creatures, steam, etc. However such an affinity would not be able to touch anything having to do with cold.
- You don't have to choose typical elements either. You could choose an emotion like fury (and always have an attitude problem) which would let you go with the more violent elements such as fire and lightning as well as more violent animals such as tiger, shark, etc. Trying to be a bunny would probably give you a heart attack though.
- Storm would give rain, lightning, snow, wind, and also birds of prey, as well as a few other things I can't think of just now.
- You could even try linking with concepts or archetypes such as freedom or wizard.
I highly encourage creativity, but I also highly encourage reasonability, so you can come up with just about anything, explain the limits and possibilities and I'll let you know if it's okay. If you try something in the RP itself that I think doesn't work, I'll let you know and you'll just have to try again.
The RP itself...My RP is going to be a little less strict than DV's as I will be encouraging you to create your own interactions and environments to an extent. I'll shepherd from the side with plot devices, events, and maybe a character or two. I'm not quite sure how this will work but if need be I can change the way I do this later.
As for the environment itself, I'm going to say everyone can shapeshift, but not necessarily well. It depends on how in tune you are with your affinity. The less in tune you are, the less you'll be able to do anything. On the other hand, the more in tune you are, the more affected you are by it. Things that oppose your affinity will make you uneasy and may even harm you if you're not careful. You can always tell someone is strongly in tune with their affinity by a kind of aura they have around them. You can tell they're not quite normal. If your character is like this, I WILL expect them to be strongly influenced by it.
There, I've created the general science/setting. Now just for a place, a time period, and a plot. Time period I'm thinking is definitely not going to be space age. I'm used to this sort of magic happening in a medievalish setting, but it may be interesting to see how it plays out in a more modern era.
