I will be having a villain fight my players that has Power Dampening Field and Brainwashing Aura upgrades. I will probably make and print out altered character sheets for my players based on what penalties they have.
The villain is an Enlightened Madness Kung Fu Clown reality warper- “The world is just a joke, and we are the punchline” since he thinks nothing is real or serious he makes the world around him less real and less serious. what type of “turned into a cartoon” shenanigans might best represent loss power & loss quality, only loss power, only loss quality?
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With Power Dampening in effect, the obvious thing would be to take dangerous-looking powers and shift their appearance to something more “family friendly” or humorous. Signature Weapons might become outright cartoony like the revolver in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or at least shift to firing generic “lasers” that never seem to seriously injure living targets or even score direct hits, ala GI Joe. Flight might give you absurd little angel (or demon) wings, perhaps on one’s ankles if you want to go Full Namor with it. Tech in general might look more cutesy and “toyetic” - a fine term borrowed from Freakazoid. Come to think of it, just watching some freakazoid might inspirational.
Brainwashing Aura is a bit harder unless there are obvious physical “tells” for Qualities already, but could modify the way those qualities manifest. Stealth might consist of pulling the “stand behind a lampost” trick, or literally carrying around a fake bush to hide behind. If there’s a campy martial arts aesthetic in place due to the villain already, using a quality that involves physical combat training might involve shouting out your named attack moves in advance. Perhaps lean in to Kung Fu Theater tropes altogether and have social qualities manifest along with awkward translations and obvious dubbing. You could also go with an anime/manga vibe and crib the visual shorthand from there to use as real-world manifestations of being affected by the aura - there’s a whole wiki page on the subject and volumes more material discussing those norms online.
That said, be careful about using that combo of upgrades. I’ve tried it myself and had to labor under them as a player, and they can be really oppressive in practice. Having both of them active leaves PCs with dice pools that rarely include more than one d10, and often you’ll be looking at d8, d8, d6 or worse. That makes Overcomes to clear those upgrade effects very difficult to pass on 8+, so they’ll suffer twists that further limit their dice pool options until the job is finished - or they’ll just waste actions accomplishing nothing at all. It can easily get frustrating, and at the very least you’re almost guaranteed to cost the team as a whole six actions or more early in the scene trying to scrub off the effects. If there’s anything throwing around penalties things get even worse, because the odds of rolling Major Twists and even outright fails on zeros shoot through the roof.
Some groups will enjoy the challenge, but others will flip out at the dual nerf. It also hits some hero builds much worse than others - having strong Green status die is great for once, but if you’re Red-strong you’ll really be in bad shape for a while - even more so for those outlier arrays that give you d6/d6/d12 status dice. Not even having a d8 in Yellow is agony if both upgrades are still active.
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He is going to use “Mantis style” against them
by calling out the video games I know they play because of discord/steam
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