Psychodrama introduction quest

Kiradawea

So lately I've been making yet another shot at trying to get people to play Psychodrama, and often I'm rebuffed with them having a sore lack of Ikons. And I suppose it doesn't surprise me. Getting Ikons is hard, and it'll take a lot of dedicated questing on your own before you'll have enough Ikons to even have a basic gestalt of one Character, one Prop and one Scene.

Therefore I have a suggestion. Create a quest that, when completed for the first time it gives you a package of Ikons, all from the same set that contains 3 characters, 3 props and 3 scenes. This will give them enough Ikons to participate in the game and actually be able to alter their gestalt effectively if they don't yet have a high level of gestalt. Perhaps on repeat the quest will hand out an ikon from a random group, but that's not too important. The important thing is having a "starting pack" of Ikons available. At least in my mind. I love Psychodrama and want to have a lot of other opponents to play it with.

Eritheyl

The problem for me isn't the lack of Ikons, it's the lack of Dramatics training to make playing worth looking into. I'm not going to seriously pit my four Ikon gestalt against someone's nine, it just isn't feasible with my collection at the moment.

But I do rather like the quest idea.

Kiradawea

I'll maintain that a 4 Ikon Gestalt can still beat a 9 Ikon gestalt. I just saw a 6 Ikon gestalt beat a 9 one, and I've been very close to losing against a 4-5 Ikon gestalt myself. Sure, it's an advantage to have 9 Ikons in your Gestalt, but strategy, prediction and to some extent good Ikons make a whole lot of difference.

Moi

Kiradawea speaks the truth. A well build 3 ikon deck can beat a 9 icon if proper tactics are used.

Kiradawea

Indeed. A character neutralizing prop of 0 cooldown, a character of 0 cooldown and a damage boosting appropriate scene of 0 cooldown can take you quite far. Once you have enough Ikons you can also work on making your gestalt unpredictable. I can build a gestalt to shut down spirit damage quite well. Yet at the same time I'll suffer a lot if that same gestalt makes use of time scenes, so I'd want to put in something to neutralize scenes, but then I'd miss out on the defense from my prop and... see where I'm going? More Ikons allows you to prepare for more eventualities, but the gestalt will still have an exploitable weakness.

Neraiche

I agree as well! Considering the randomness of getting Ikons through other means, most people are uninterested. It would be wonderful if we could just introduce someone and get them started.

And my 9 ikon deck loses to 4s. Shame.

Xenthos

My issue is: I can't be bothered to go hunt people down to deal with it.  I love psychodrama battles, but just playing it against random other people doesn't really interest me much, and in order to compete, that's what I'd have to do- that, and avoid challenging anyone who could potentially beat me.

If the folks I hung out with all the time were really into it, I feel like I'd be much more involved in the whole process- win or lose.  When you're only really playing against "competition" there's a lot more drive to min-max the thing, imo.

So, just allowing more people to have access to ikon sets that they like would probably help out a bit.  It does take way too long to grind the things, and I think most people have given up at this point.

Lerad

I have 6 Glomdoring Ikons. I grinded them up in the span of two weeks, roughly. My dream is to make a glomdoring-only set and play semi-competitively. I've not been grinding them for a few weeks too, lost track.

I can't exactly blame everything on the ikons being hard to get. I mean, aiming to make a semi-competitive deck out of only 1 type is cool and nice, but also a little unreasonable. But I can assure you part of the reason I stopped bothering to try was because of the sheer grind that's involved. I think I did well to last 2 weeks.

Xenthos

********************************[ Your Ikons ]*********************************
Id      Group     Quality   Type      G  Name                                  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
701     Glomdorin common    character    Lord Beetle                          
1022    Glomdorin common    prop         a rose petal gown of Night           
1571    Glomdorin uncommon  prop      X  the Black Circlet of Crow            
1572    Glomdorin uncommon  scene     X  before the Master Ravenwood          
2282    Glomdorin epic      prop         the Crown of Gloriana                
2403    Glomdorin uncommon  prop         the Medallion of the Messiah         
2410    Glomdorin common    scene     X  the Swampghast's lair                
2411    Glomdorin common    scene        the Shadowmaze                       
2437    Glomdorin common    character    a black-feathered harpy              
2453    Glomdorin uncommon  character X  Brother Crow                         
2463    Glomdorin rare      character    a giant black widow                  
2595    Glomdorin common    character X  a shadow faeling ritualist           
2624    Glomdorin uncommon  scene     X  before the Drums of the Dead         
2746    Glomdorin common    scene        the Glomdoring River                 
3154    Glomdorin rare      scene        the Manifestation of the Nexus       
3264    Glomdorin common    character    Lord Bat                             
3352    Glomdorin epic      prop         the Crown of Gloriana                
4567    Glomdorin common    prop      X  a Fingerblade of Shathra-Kael        
4694    Glomdorin common    character    Lord Beetle                          
4968    Glomdorin common    character X  an illithoid scourge                 
4986    Glomdorin common    scene        under a dark root                    
5494    Glomdorin common    character    a shadow faeling ritualist           
5515    Glomdorin common    scene        the altar to the Wyrd                
5577    Glomdorin uncommon  prop         the Medallion of the Messiah         
6234    Glomdorin common    scene        the altar to the Wyrd                
6238    Glomdorin common    character    a shadow faeling ritualist           
6483    Glomdorin common    scene        the spiders' larder                 
6656    Glomdorin common    character    Lady Wasp                            
6748    Glomdorin uncommon  prop         the Medallion of the Messiah         
7407    Glomdorin common    character    Lord Bat                             
8256    Glomdorin common    prop         a nut from a ravenwood tree          
8276    Glomdorin common    scene        the Shadowmaze                       
8441    Glomdorin uncommon  prop         the Medallion of the Messiah         
8447    Glomdorin uncommon  prop         the Rod of the Wyrdling Way          
*******************************************************************************

That's what I managed to grind up / trade for, but I just can't be bothered to delve through them all any more... I have too many ikons now.

I'd really like more Ikon commands, like the following:
1) The ability to set up at least 2 gestalts.  One, your influencing gestalt (strongest selected pieces), and the other your game gestalt.
  - Sure you can make aliases to keep changing them, but why should you have to?  Mix and match your game gestalt as you want, but it shouldn't affect your influencing one since they are completely different.
2) The ability to put ikons in self-created categories.  I'd love the following categories:
  i) Unique Glomdoring Ikons
  ii) Unique Non-Glomdoring Ikons
  iii) Duplicate / Extra Ikons
  - This way I can IKON LIST CATEGORY NONE to see anything that is ungrouped, have a command available to see if that ikon already exists in a category (ie IKON LIST CATEGORY GLOMDORING *filter on ikon name*), and thus be able to have more control over my lists.
  As you can see from my Glomdoring ikon list above, it's just... I have to dig through that to find the ikons I want to use and rotate around, with multiple duplicates.  It's more tedious than it could be.

Dys

The unique/duplicates would be nice. Maybe have an option that gives an extra field that shows the number of each you have rather than listing all individually, and only show the first ikon number.

At the moment I dump everything into a spreadsheet, dedupe and sort, and try to design gestalts from there.

I've been giving ikons away to teach people, and had good interest. Only for practise matches though as tournamenting new players seems a bit mean.

It's a great game, and fortunately Rolan will always play with me!

The tournament prizes aren't big, even third place is just one or two ikons, quite similar to doing a quest. Maybe people will start to relax a bit more about the prizes and just play for fun?