D&D General How many groups of players have you played with, face to face?

[Marc_C]

Edit: excluding conventions

During Basic and AD&D1e I had one group but it was always fluctuating. Many people wanted to try D&D. I didn't mind since I mostly did dungeon crawls. It stabilized with 1e. We had a permanent group of 4 players.

AD&D2e: I moved to the big city and formed a new group. It lasted a long time but exploded due to a divorce.

3e: Half the 2e group continued playing with new players. Down to 2 players for the last 2 years of the edition.

4e: Tried creating a new group but the fluctuation was intense. Almost one new player every other game. Stopped playing after 2 years until 5e came out.

5e: In 2012 tried creating a group. Same fluctuation problem. Quit in 2014. Restarted 5e in 2017 with a new very stable group. Currently in hiatus because of Covid.

Overall all six groups of players over 40 years. The latter years of 1e, all of 2e and 5e since 2017 have been the better years. Playing d20 Modern with just 2 players was fun.

 

[aco175]

1e and part of 2e we had a group of family and a few neighborhood kids that played with my father as DM. A few kid's groups with rotating DMs where we all cut our teeth with being the DM. Eventually we formed a group of 5-6 people with another DM that lasted until I went into the Army. That group had my father and myself from the original groups.

In the Army I had one group with a few more players coming and going. At this time, my little brother joined the other group and started playing with them. After the Army, I joined back with them and we tended to play Magic for half the time and D&D for the other half depending on who showed up. 3e kept this same group, but Magic faded for most of it and I took over as DM and also a campaign with my brother as DM.

4e/5e became smaller with the group mostly my father, my brother, and myself with most of the others fading away. I most always DM and now my son has joined which is better for a host of reasons. Now, I tend to mostly make modules with the published campaign background and do not make the world so much anymore.

 

[Larnievc]

During Basic and AD&D1e I had one group but it was always fluctuating. Many people wanted to try D&D. I didn't mind since I mostly did dungeon crawls. It stabilized with 1e. We had a permanent group of 4 players.

AD&D2e: I moved to the big city and formed a new group. It lasted a long time but exploded due to a divorce.

3e: Half the 2e group continued playing with new players. Down to 2 players for the last 2 years of the edition.

4e: Tried creating a new group but the fluctuation was intense. Almost one new player every other game. Stopped playing after 2 years until 5e came out.

5e: In 2012 tried creating a group. Same fluctuation problem. Quit in 2014. Restarted 5e in 2017 with a new very stable group. Currently in hiatus because of Covid.

Overall all six groups of players over 40 years. The latter years of 1e, all of 2e and 5e since 2017 have been the better years. Playing d20 Modern with just 2 players was fun.

Over 30 years of playing I’ve DM’d for four stable groups (more than six months or so) and two or three adhoc groups at uni.

The longest is my current group (ex pats from the previously mentioned groups) with over three years continuous play time.

 

[el-remmen]

1. First group I played with was my friend from school, his older brother and their friends. We played a mash-up of BECMI and 1E. This was 1983.
2. Second group was in middle school, there were rotating players, but these were the first games I ran (also a mash-up of BECMI and 1E). 83-85.
3. In high school I had two groups, one at school (it was boarding school) and one at home. Both played 1E, but eventually I'd play 2E with the home group too. 85-89
4. At my first college I ran a short-lived 2E game. 90-91
5. Dropped out of college moved back to NY and played in a 2E game for a year (also ran a short-lived thing for the same group in the summer). 91-92
6. Started up a 2E group with members of my band and friends I met at community college a year later. One member of that group would end up in most of my games. 93-95
7. Transferred back to a 4 year college. Joined a group and started a group (with some intersecting members). Both 2E. 96-99.
8. In 2000 started my Out of the Frying Campaign that lasted just short of six years. That same basic group would be the basis of my Second Son of Second Son that began in 2007 (which lasted to 2009). We played 3E/3.5E
9. Around the same time I began playing in another group for a couple of years - again with some members in common.
10. Left for grad school and returned in 2012 to join another 3.xE game, which ended in 2015/16.
11. In 2019, I moved to Pittsburgh and a friend there talked me into started a 5E game, which started F2F and ended up virtual
12. 2020 Pandemic hit and since we all had to play virtual anyway, I started a game with some players from past groups who are now all around the country (including a friend from the 1993 group and another that I started gaming with in '97)

So I guess by the OP's criteria, I was a part of 11 face-to-face groups - though it is difficult to make distinctions since time and people often overlapped. 37 years! Cripes.

 

[Campbell]

So most of the people I play RPGs with do not fit into the strict group paradigm I see most places where there is set group of people that always play together (usually with a set GM). I have one group of friends like that who I play D&D 5e with, but I also have a couple other social circles that know each other pretty well and run either one shots / short runs or ongoing games drawing from a common pool of players many of whom also GM. There's some overlap between those social circles. I would say in the sense of what we are talking about I would say that I'm part of least 5 ongoing groups that meet at least monthly and have played with at least 12 distinct groups this last year although there is substantial overlap between them.

 

[DND_Reborn]

1. 1981-1984: B/X, BECMI, 1E in elementary school with one group of friends (6 of us to start).
2. 1984-1987: 1E with another group of friends in middle school (another 4 new players, some from prior)
3. 1987-1991: 1E with another group of friends in high school (about 12 different players, about 8 newbies).
4. 1991-1993: 1E/2E with a group while at community college (about 12 different players, maybe 8 newbies).
5: 1993-1995: 1E/2E with a two new group at undergrad college (about 15 new players between both groups).
6: 1995-1996: 1E/2E during some visits home while in grad school (all old players)
7: 1996-2007: 1E/2E with two groups at various times, 3E for maybe 1 year (about 15 new players between both groups).
8: 2018-2021: 5E (a brief into to AD&D as well) with one group (6 new players) and one online group (players from old group/other group).

So, by my count 9 face-to-face groups with over 60 players over nearly 40 years and one current online game.

 

[Oofta]

More than I care to count?

Started with a stable group way back when in high school. Had another in college. Took a hiatus from gaming for a while because of lack of groups and lived in smaller city for a while and back then it wasn't easy to find others without a local game shop to advertise in.

Moved and found a group but then (I think) the DM got bored and started doing more things just to annoy players until we quit. Started public gaming (Living City) and have done so off and on ever since.

Started my own group, joined another but it just wasn't for us (I was married by then). Moved, started a group, moved started another group, moved yet again, started 3 groups which consolidated down to 2 because we had a lot of newbies who were just curious, moved one last time (now) and started a group. Phew.

So just counting home games? About [edit] 12 14, forgot family games[/edit] (do we count 1-2 sessions since I had a couple of those?). Not sure how to count public games because if I include them my answer would be "dozens if not over a hundred", especially since I ran or helped run a couple of game days in a major metro area for a while.

EDIT: It was pretty much all editions, I've always played the current edition.

 

[el-remmen]

So just counting home games? About 12 (do we count 2 sessions?). Not sure how to count public games because if I include them my answer would be "dozens if not over a hundred", especially since I ran or helped run a couple of game days in a major metro area for a while.

Yeah. I did not count groups I ran games for at cons or any other one-off thing.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Yeah. I did not count groups I ran games for at cons or any other one-off thing.

I didn't count those, either. Otherwise probably a fair number of us would be into several dozens or even hundreds LOL!

 

[Charlaquin]

Let’s see... I first played 3.5 in high school one-on-one with my best friend (who I’ll call C). We also played once with one other friend of ours (who I’ll call K) and a couple times with K and two others. I think it’s safe to consider that all the same group, since it was always C DMing and me playing, sometimes with the addition of a few other people.

4e came out in my Senior year of high school. C invited me to play the new edition with a couple of friends she had met at the LGS, with one of them DMing. That campaign went all through that year and the summer before I left for college and is still one of my fondest D&D memories.

Freshman year in college I tried DMing 4e for two friends, which lasted about 3 sessions before ending in a TPK (and I thought I was going easy on them...)

Most of college I was too busy LARPing Vampire: the Requiem to do much D&D. But Junior year there was a huge snow storm that shut everything down for two weeks. I lived on campus, and the housing there had its own generator, so my place was one of the few with power, so a group of about 4 other people sheltered there with me and my room mate during the storm and the 6 of us played D&D every single day those two weeks. Another one of my fondest D&D memories.

Senior year, the 5e playtest came out, and I ran it for another group, which included my roommate who I had played with during the snowpocalypse but was otherwise different people.

The last semester of that year I did an internship program working with a couple of theater companies back home, and during that time I ran the 5e playtest for C, K, and our other two friends from high school again. So, that probably counts as the same group. Then when 5e came out, we transitioned to that, losing one player and gaining another. And when Curse of Strahd came out I ran that for the same group, again minus one player and plus anothe

At one point I tried to run a 4e game for C, my partner, and two other friends of ours, and another time I tried to run a 4e game for my partner and two other other friends of theirs. Neither lasted more than one session.

For about 6 months or so I played in an online group of folks from my partner’s sibling’s Discord (I say “their discord” but they don’t run it. Just have a lot of friends on it who play D&D together.) I played in two different campaigns with those folks, but there was enough player crossover between them that I think it’s reasonable to count it as the same group.

My current (but on hold) group consists of my partner, their sibling, C, and my parents.

My partner and I had also until recently been playing in a game run by K with another couple, one of whom was the new player in my Curse of Strahd campaign. But that game is in limbo right now due to a combination of the pandemic and the other couple being in the process of separating. My partner, K, and I still want to play together, and one of the others might end up sticking with us, but definitely not both, and we might try to add another player or two whenever that happens.

I’m probably forgetting something, but that seems fairly comprehensive.