What makes your gaming group different?

[Velaryon]

I've been thinking about posting a topic like this for awhile, but I wanted to make sure I explained my meaning right.

Basically, each gaming group is unique for a variety of reasons, including (but not limited to) house rules, the personalities and game preferences of the players, situational and environmental factors, and a host of other things that can make the game different. This topic is aimed at finding out what makes your group different from whatever you perceive as "the norm."

This is not a house rules thread, but rules that you feel change the gaming experience can be relevant to this topic.

I'll get things started.


-I don't use a GM screen. Neither do the other people I game with. I tried it, and found that they got in my way more than they helped me keep things hidden. Since we usually use miniatures, I found myself having to lean over the screen to reach the battlefield, and sometimes I would accidentally knock it over, so I just got rid of the screen. As a result, most dice are rolled in the open. However, we have a side table by the GM's seat where the GM can keep books, character sheets, laptop, etc. and I will sometimes roll over there if I need to keep a roll secret.

-We usually have music during the game; exactly what kind depends not only on the game we're playing but also who is providing the music. I have one friend who always puts on symphonic and power metal while he GMs, while I tend to prefer instrumental music like movie soundtracks for the most part. On the other hand, with certain people in the group I will sometimes play hilariously (to us) inappropriate music, usually running jokes within the group or something like that.

-The majority of the players in my D&D group don't enjoy dungeon crawling, so our games tend to be light on the dungeon exploration and heavier on wilderness or urban encounters. As a general rule, traps are a small part of the campaign. Do you remember this joke about how parties only have one random encounter before the players get bored and move the game along? That's pretty much how most of us feel about exploring trap-laden hallways and such. In game terms (we play 3.5 primarily, though we're also playing 5e sometimes), that leads to people taking a lot less of skills like Disable Device, Search, etc. and putting more into social or combat-related skills. And just about every class with a trapfinding skill gets traded out for an alternate class feature if there's one available. We might mix one (generally brief) dungeon crawl into the game every now and then for the sake of variety, but they're the exception, not the norm.

-Everyone in my group hates point buy. I've suggested trying it out a few times and the idea has always been unanimously voted down.

-We also like to play powerful characters. I myself am not satisfied with an ability score array if I don't have an 18 starting stat before racial modifiers, level-based increases, items or spells, and will sometimes ask to reroll even if my array is otherwise good. Since we all seem to want characters who are really strong, we usually end up with something like 4d6 drop the lowest, reroll all 1's, roll 7 stats and keep the best 6. This results in an average stat closer to 13 or 14, rather than 10 or 11, and negative modifiers are rare (though they do happen). Important NPCs generally get made the same way, though I at least will usually just choose appropriate stats rather than roll, most of the time.
A side effect of this rolling system is that we tend to have a smaller distribution of stats, meaning less imbalance between characters (on average). Also, classes with MAD tend to be more viable than they might be in a game with more standard ability score generation.


I've got more, but that's plenty to get the ball rolling.

[Talion]

The big things that set my group apart from others are:

-Our Roleplay Experience system. Whenever someone would do something that would earn them Roleplay Experience (a crowning moment of achievement) we get a small allotment of it, between 5 to 20. This is not added to our character's experience pool, but rather tracked separately and carries across characters and campaigns. It can then be spent on rerolling dice and a few other bonuses, effectively making it a brownie point system. It usually works out pretty well (though, despite my atrocious rolls, I've managed to accumulate a few hundred spare points).

-Our Player Perk system. With this one, if a player manages to get their characters to do something really outrageous on 5 separate occasions, they get a relevant bonus on that character and can pay Roleplay Experience to unlock it on other characters. For example: for whatever reason, I tend to get a lot of equipment that spontaneously achieve sentience over the course of a campaign. When it happened for the 5th inexplicable time, I unlocked the player perk "Meister"....which basically made it easier for it to happen. Another one I've unlocked is "When It Works". Due to my atrocious rolling, I have to speck pretty hard to get the same effect of luckier people. So naturally when I actually roll a critical, it's significantly more effective. So, naturally, when my luck critical saved the party's bacon for the 5th time, I unlocked "When It Works", which grants me an additional bonus...if and when I roll a critical.

-In that same breath, we also like to give out titles. These don't actually do anything, but they are amusing. I earned "Crab Chef" after cleaving apart a few giant crabs, while another player earned the title "Bear Bait". Three guesses what happened then

[RedCloakLives!]

Maybe demographics. ~50-50 gender split. 4(?) decade age range.

I'm not sure it actually results in any particular uniqueness, other than I just tried imagining playing in a group without women, and it seems like that would be weird.

I guess demographics could be thread of its own.

[rooster707]

Mostly, the only thing that makes my group unique is that none of us have any idea what the heck we're doing. :P

Also, I don't use a screen either, mostly because I just don't have room.

[mikeejimbo]

My group members were all friends before playing D&D together. Well, the core of the group was. I joined in as an outsider. But that was a decade ago so I am pretty much as much a member as them. We get off-topic a ton. We don't have rules about PVP but it's rare and when it does happen, we tend to find it either amusing or an interesting plot development. We usually play morally-grey characters.

[JenBurdoo]

Mine is definitely an environmental factor: I game at work.

Yes, I get paid to game.

I'm a teen librarian, running a weekly "tabletop gaming" program which is currently a mostly-homebrew fantasy RPG campaign. My group currently consists of me, a 30-something female librarian; one 20-something teen-mentor also working at the branch, who helps keep everyone in line and on track; and six high-school-aged boys. I'm the only person in the branch who's ever played tabletop rpgs before. A dozen or so total, including one teenage girl and one other female librarian, have expressed interest and played "drop-in" characters from time to time. Since I'm working with fickle teenagers, I'm always scrambling to, on the one hand, keep the interest of those already there, and, on the other, find ways for "drop-ins" to contribute. Two to three hours a week are spent in the game session proper; I hastily plan the next during quiet moments at my other posts (reference and information desks).

We keep the momentum and justification going by having fantasy book discussions for extra xp, doing art (right now they're designing their own cardboard miniatures and painting shields with personal sigils) and tech-stuff (vlogging the game, though it's not in viewable form yet).

[Draconium]

The fact my group rarely can get down and do a multi-session campaign - we all keep having different ideas from session-to-session about what we want to do, so we've only ever done campaigns with overeaching plot arcs a few times. As a result, however, we kind of have an unofficial, unspoken houserule that most of these games take place in the same world, so if we want to keep playing a certain PC, we can simply do so, and have them join up with the new group.

[Tiri]

In my group, I think it's probably the large age differences. We have a 7 year old player and a DM in his late 40s. The 7 year old actually does a remarkable job staying focused most of the time. The DM also doesn't bother remembering half the rules, so I end up having to.

[Fri]

I suspect each of them to be actually three cats in a long coat pretending to be human. Well, to be fair, one of them might be 5 squirrels instead of three cats.

[rooster707]

In my group, I think it's probably the large age differences. We have a 7 year old player and a DM in his late 40s. The 7 year old actually does a remarkable job staying focused most of the time. The DM also doesn't bother remembering half the rules, so I end up having to.

That sounds exactly like the game I'm playing with my family right now.

[mikeejimbo]

Mine is definitely an environmental factor: I game at work.

Yes, I get paid to game.

That sounds awesome! I'm actually at my local public library right now for volunteer work tutoring people in computer use (though I have no one signed up at the moment). If this library did something like that I'd jump at the chance to do it for free.

[Knaight]

• We are exceptionally terrible at game logistics, starting quickly, and other things like that. I suspect this is less unique than I might like, but it stands out.
• Most of the players actually weren't introduced to the game through D&D, mostly because I introduced most of them through something else. A lot of the D&D standards that most people are so used to just feel alien.
• We generally have a few concurrent games, as our solution for logistics pain is to have one game per missing group member, plus one game when everyone is there.
• We switch genres a lot. Just looking at what I, personally have run recently there's been space opera, superheroes, steam punk/cyberpunk*, extremely low fantasy, fairly high fantasy, and a bit of hard sci-fi.
• We switch systems a lot. There are currently active or semi-active games** in Riddle of Steel, Fudge, and WR&M. D&D 5e, Torchbearer, Dune, and Rivers and Lakes were all used fairly recently, though none of them were well liked enough by the group as a whole to continue (though in the case of Rivers and Lakes, only the GM disliked it).

*It was a weird hybrid, but it worked.
**Logistics issues again.

In my group, I think it's probably the large age differences. We have a 7 year old player and a DM in his late 40s. The 7 year old actually does a remarkable job staying focused most of the time. The DM also doesn't bother remembering half the rules, so I end up having to.

Does the 7 year old do a significantly better job than the older members? I've seen exactly that happen. Back in high school, my standard group was me as a GM, some friends, and then occasionally a younger sibling or two of someone in the group, occasionally with a pretty huge sibling age gap. Almost without fail, they were better focused.

[Aetol]

Our DM is a big believer in keeping OOC knowledge to a minimum. This means going out of the room whenever something happens that your character can't see, including when you drop to 0 HP in combat.

[Velaryon]

I'm not sure how common this is, but there are four different people that are frequent GMs in my primary gaming group. When life gets too busy for one person to run a game, there's usually someone who can step in to fill the void and keep things going at least semi-regularly. Or, as sometimes happens, we have three or four permutations of the group doing different games at a time. One might be running Star Wars while another is running D&D 5e, a third is taking a break from running 3.5 D&D, and the fourth is trying to put together a game using a new system we haven't tried before.

Mine is definitely an environmental factor: I game at work.

Yes, I get paid to game.

I'm a teen librarian, running a weekly "tabletop gaming" program which is currently a mostly-homebrew fantasy RPG campaign. My group currently consists of me, a 30-something female librarian; one 20-something teen-mentor also working at the branch, who helps keep everyone in line and on track; and six high-school-aged boys. I'm the only person in the branch who's ever played tabletop rpgs before. A dozen or so total, including one teenage girl and one other female librarian, have expressed interest and played "drop-in" characters from time to time. Since I'm working with fickle teenagers, I'm always scrambling to, on the one hand, keep the interest of those already there, and, on the other, find ways for "drop-ins" to contribute. Two to three hours a week are spent in the game session proper; I hastily plan the next during quiet moments at my other posts (reference and information desks).

We keep the momentum and justification going by having fantasy book discussions for extra xp, doing art (right now they're designing their own cardboard miniatures and painting shields with personal sigils) and tech-stuff (vlogging the game, though it's not in viewable form yet).

As a librarian myself, I have so many questions about this that it would probably sidetrack the topic. Would you mind if I PMed you?

[woodlandkammao]

We are a 60 strong university club with over 12 weekly campaigns, a board games lounge, and an MTG lounge running simultaneously, as well as one-shots, and charity fundraising campaigns where lethality is super high and rezzing or replacing a PC costs $2. We also have a small cafe/pile of food with prices taped to it. We're awesome.

[woodlandkammao]

Also, we hang out for 20+ hours a week so we're all great friends, which means we have no OOC issues to ruin IC interaction. Thus, we have reached the 'totally chill with IC hate' zone.

Spoiler: The advantage of gaming with best friends

Show

Everyone hears about passive aggressive players and being offended by IC actions. My Arcane trickster pickpocketed the ranger and casts prestidigitation on his food to make it taste of manure because he's a drow. And we're buddies OOC.

[Chijinda]

For one thing, not only does our group not use a GM screen, we don't even necessarily use a table so-to-speak. We have the table where we've set our stuff up, but that just kind of serves as a point to put the food and use as a base of operations when we need to check stuff. More often than not we just kind of pace around the house, carrying our dice with us. We can and have used an entire house just through pacing around for changes of scenery with the occasional run back to the table to check up on some rule or another.

Also, we don't tend to have structured sessions, since we're all good friends, so we really just tend to mix our sessions into our general hangouts. Also, since we're good friends we don't have as many OOC issues and are careful about the IC issues we set up.

[DigoDragon]

Ours is a PbP tat's been going strong for 20 months? Maybe not a grand accomplishment but personally that's a pretty long time for PbP.

[Honest Tiefling]

Maybe demographics. ~50-50 gender split. 4(?) decade age range.

I'm not sure it actually results in any particular uniqueness, other than I just tried imagining playing in a group without women, and it seems like that would be weird.

I guess demographics could be thread of its own.

...Do we share the same group? Many of my groups have more women then men, actually.

I suspect each of them to be actually three cats in a long coat pretending to be human. Well, to be fair, one of them might be 5 squirrels instead of three cats.

...Never mind, I think I share some friends with Fri.

[YossarianLives]

Except me, everyone in my group at best will play chaotic-stupid murderhobos, and at worst psychotic monsters who I'm not even comfortable playing with.

I'm not sure how unusual this is.

[Pex]

We don't resent what another player's character can do. We all get our turn to shine, but if the spellcaster can end the encounter with one spell early we're all happy about it.

We will use magical healing in combat. It's an effective tactic depending on the situation.

Spellcasters do not resent buffing the warriors and let them do their thing. It is often the better option than whatever other spell that could have been cast.

We do tend to be very stickler of the rules, not counting house rules. A DM is just as likely to defer what's written in a book a player takes the time to look up than just to make a ruling right then and there and figure it all out between game sessions. This method has its pros and cons.

We're loose with splat books. If it's Paizo published and someone has the book, it's available for use as soon as it's published even in the middle of the campaign. Characters can be ret-conned if need to be, such as the barbarian updated to the Unchained version or a feat switched if errata changes it to something the player doesn't want. (Guilty vis-a-vis Divine Protection. Changed it to Silent Spell. )

For some odd reason when we order dinner we never get drinks (soda/juice). You have to bring your own, though one player is generous in bringing a couple of cases of flavored bottled beer for everyone every game session.

[Quertus]

Hmmm... at one point, I was in 6 games a week, with several different groups. Some of the things that stick out in my memory as unusual (good, bad, or just different) from various groups I've been in:

Most (including any I run) have no DM screen (although I must admit I tend to hide certain rolls behind my books to keep from giving the party information OOC that could influence their IC actions).

Two groups have multi-decade age ranges (I think the youngest player was 7 when she started; she's now 17, and I'm currently in a game with her). Hmmm... probably odd that most of my groups consist almost exclusively of players that stick with gaming for an extended period of time?

Most of my groups don't fear "playing with every splat book", psionics (D&D), Dragon Magazine (D&D), Great Net Spellbook (2e D&D) or much of anything. Some allow custom builds (occasionally disastrously) or custom D&D items. Most of the WoD games I've been in have been just that; ie, not Mage or Vampire or whatever, but crossover WoD games.

I've been in groups with rotating DMs, and even rotating gaming locations. I've played with groups that stuck to a single system, groups that experimented, and even groups with homebrew systems. I've played several of my characters in more adventures / stories and under more DM/storytellers/whatever than I can count. I've even been in groups where my character existed under several different systems. One group had the goal that the party would spend (at least) 1 session in each published system. One of my favorite characters travels between worlds, researching the strange differences in realities. I don't think I've ever played a 2+ year campaign under a single DM, and I don't know if any of the groups I've played with has ever had such a campaign (other than perhaps one I ran once - I can't remember how long that lasted).

Although it is (sadly) fairly common for games to sometimes use the players' skills instead of their characters' skills (social interaction being the most common; IC vs OOC knowledge probably being the most hotly debated), I've been in several (!) groups where initiative was handled by whoever shouted out first.

I think it's fairly normal that I reuse material - there are several adventures that I have run (with very different results) in several different groups. However, one thing that strikes me as odd is that one group I was in had an adventure that the same group of players had run through multiple times.

Most 3e groups have a very strong sense of game balance in terms of equal levels and wealth by level. I was in one D&D 2e group with the rule "everyone starts at 1st level". I entered the party at 1st when most of the party was 7th; I was 14th or so when the last 1st-level character joined the game.

I think the largest group I've been in usually had about 10-12 people present at any given time. What was craziest was, that was also a group that allowed people to play multiple characters - so there could be 30+ PCs in the party!

I've never seen a DM (myself included) who claimed to care about game balance / screen time / whatever who was any good at propping up the weak rather than slapping down the strong (for clarity, I just care about people having fun, which approximately equals, in my experience, getting to contribute - and my best efforts to fix such problems are to talk to people about it).

As I've mentioned above, usually DMs who care about game balance are trying to smack down the strong. Despite this, I've been in groups where the DM encouraged me to bring stronger characters - even, in one instance, where I was already running the strongest character in the party.

I've been in D&D 3e groups where... it was somehow the case that... the party MVP was a) a monk; b) a bard; c) a monk. I'm told that probably shouldn't be possible in games where the players aren't being limited. (To be fair, "I'm just that incompetent at running Tier 1 spellcasters" / "I enjoy running incompetent Tier 1 spellcasters" may help account for at least one of these cases of aberrant class in the choice of party MVP)

I've been in groups with some very different opinions about the rules. My least favorite: Mage game, where everything was "Storyteller Fiat". Couldn't even use rotes straight out of the book, because the storyteller didn't believe the spheres could do that (basically ran as a totally railroaded story, where the spheres did whatever furthered the storyteller's story). My favorite (in terms of how they handled the rules): D&D 3.5, playing with the most knowledgeable DM I've played with, who is also totally cool with players pointing out where he was wrong (the party would always groan when I did so, as they knew I didn't care whether the rules correction helped us or hurt us); playing with my brother, where a 4-hour rules debate was considered a very good game (no one else at the table agreed, of course). But perhaps the most memorable was the 2e D&D group that, because I brought Duplex cookies one day, implemented the following rule regarding rules debates: If a rules question comes up, everyone has 5 minutes to research the rule using whatever materials are on hand, make their arguments (including "if you allow X, they Y will be a problem"), etc. If no conclusion has been reached after 5 minutes, the DM flips a Duplex cookie. If it lands white side up, the rule works however works best for the party at the moment, and becomes a house rule; if it lands black side up, it works the way that works worst for the party at the moment, and becomes a house rule. That group may have had some crazy rules, but the games were internally consistent, and everyone had fun (except, perhaps, the Duplex cookie, which was consumed immediately after acting as the agent of fate).

[BWR]

Many of the things listed here apply to one or more of my groups. I can't really think of any special combination of elements that makes us different. I mean, I'm sure I could find enough details to determine we were different from any other given group but I'm not sure we'd be 'different'.

The greatest difference I can think of is that the Ars Magica group makes "'Allo 'allo" jokes and references rather than Monty Python.

[Sir Chuckles]

I, the DM, bake several loaves of bread before each session.
Usually tomato-basil, but sometimes parmesan dinner rolls will do.

I often hurl these at misbehaving players. I vent my anger, my players get quality, home baked bread. Everybody's happy!

[Tiri]

Does the 7 year old do a significantly better job than the older members? I've seen exactly that happen. Back in high school, my standard group was me as a GM, some friends, and then occasionally a younger sibling or two of someone in the group, occasionally with a pretty huge sibling age gap. Almost without fail, they were better focused.

Not always, but sometimes he does better than his older sisters, who once spent half a session trying to figure out what their spells did.

[Cluedrew]

My currant gaming group is solely or even primarily a role-playing group. We actually get together as hobbyist game makers so we usually play whatever prototype has been brought in. So over the past 6 months we've played 3 different role-playing games made in house (and versions there of), three or four card games and whatever comes out of a nearby game jam or hackathon. Also we are an organized club so we have scheduled events relating to games and game making.

[rooster707]

I, the DM, bake several loaves of bread before each session.
Usually tomato-basil, but sometimes parmesan dinner rolls will do.

I often hurl these at misbehaving players. I vent my anger, my players get quality, home baked bread. Everybody's happy!

Every DM should do this.

[rs2excelsior]

We're a group of friends (core group of around 4-5, plus a few more who are in and out) who all met outside of D&D. This group was actually my introduction to D&D and tabletop RPGs, about two and a half years ago. We've got 3 people who GM (one of them being me), and usually two campaigns running simultaneously: currently mine is a relatively high-level (the party is currently level 13) Pathfinder game that's pretty standard sword-and-sorcery, and the other is a 5e game in a sci-fi setting.

Of our 3 GMs, we all prefer to run different systems. My favorite to run (and play in) is Pathfinder, one has switched over to running 5e, and a third likes 3.5e.

I've never actually played a proper dungeon crawl. We've had small dungeons (no more than 1 session, usually) as part of larger story arcs, but all of our campaigns are story/mission based (and primarily aboveground). Even the first campaign I did was a (admittedly kind of poorly-done) mystery-type scenario (stop the orc invasion, with a couple of twists).

We seem to have two modes of operation: fairly smooth and mission-focused, using stealth and diplomacy as much as possible to avoid combat, and all-in, guns blazing, kill-'em-all. Sometimes we switch mid-action, like the time a mission to assassinate an Elf leader spontaneously turned into a mission to capture said Elf leader... mid-assassination attempt.

We're generally pretty permissive, which has lead to some rather funny situations... like the time my Hobgoblin Paladin delivered a smite evil through a headbutt attack ("I Smite Evil with my face!").

[StealthyRobot]

Mine is definitely an environmental factor: I game at work.

...spent in the game session proper;

Proper... I'm guessing you've watched critical role before. Only other place I've seen the word used like this.

[JenBurdoo]

As a librarian myself, I have so many questions about this that it would probably sidetrack the topic. Would you mind if I PMed you?

Go right ahead. I'd be glad to discuss it.

Proper... I'm guessing you've watched critical role before. Only other place I've seen the word used like this.

Nope, I just read a lot.