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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Volund" data-source="post: 8114995" data-attributes="member: 6872597">Group #1 (5e)7-8 people. Started at a game cafe at the beginning of 2017 and is now on Roll20 due to COVID. The lineup has changed considerably since we started; I'm the last of the original players in the group, and most are "3rd generation." Switching from biweekly to weekly improved retention and we've had the same players and DM for two campaigns. Some players were invited to join the game by folks who are no longer in the group, so we're not a cohesive group of friends. Friendly, but not really friends. I'm the "old man" who was playing DnD before most of the others were born. Aside from me and one other player (my friend from another group), it seems everyone else played MtG before getting lured into DnD. Currently we are playing Odyssey of the Dragonlords. We have a gamut of players from relative newbies still learning their character abilities to serious role-players with highly defined PC personalities. Cooperation between players is not always great. There is ongoing frustration between the instigators and the tacticians. We've had issues with players who choose PC personalities that put them at odds with others in the group, to the point where I was ready to drop out, but we talked through it and the current campaign hasn't had those problems. We also had to reign in one player's edgelord tendencies since we were playing in a public place and occasionally been open to new players joining in. My fellow cooperators and I have learned to ask some basic questions at session zero, like "It seems like in this campaign we're going to do X (eg save the children). Is anyone playing a character who would not want to do X (eg enslave the children instead)?" This has avoided situations where half the group wanted to rob or murder our NPC patrons after we finished a mission while the other half was warning NPC's not to hire us because our party couldn't be trusted.Group #2 (5e)7 people. I got recruited into this biweekly group by a 1st gen player from Group #1. We used to play at the same game cafe as Group #1 but now play on Roll20. Currently playing Dungeon of the Mad Mage. This is a group of players that were friends before I joined and so it's been pretty stable. In contrast to Group 1, I do consider this group my friends and we talk and get together frequently for things other than this particular DnD campaign. Subsets of this group play other games besides this biweekly game, but I'm maxed out right now. A guy I had previously met at an AL game joined this group when I did, and this year I asked him to fill an open spot in Group #1. I would call this a hard core gaming group. Two members have crowd-funded and published their own RPG books. They do podcasts. They go to cons, do playtests. We meet up to paint minis. Once a year we get together for a long weekend and have our own private con where we all run an RPG for the group. 5e, OSR, PF2, PBtA, or anything we want to try out. We keep up a steady stream of online conversations pretty much every day. This group is closer to my age and most players have been playing since 1e/2e. We are all very familiar with the 5e toolkit of class abilities and feats and multiclassing. Most of us have DM'ed for the group at one point and realize that it's a real PITA to challenge experienced players with optimized PC's who know how to set each other up for success with positioning, CC spells, imposing conditions, etc. They appreciate interesting lair actions that throw them off their game. There is a lot of sympathy for whoever is the current occupant of the DM chair, so there is a strong value for playing by the rules, and players will speak up about rules or creature effects even when they are detrimental to the player.Group #3 (OSE)5 people. Weekly game on Roll20 playing through TSR B/X modules. A few of us in Group #2 from time to time had kicked around the idea of playing a Rules Cyclopedia-based OSR game, but not everyone in that group was into it. During COVID I asked one of them to run it and steered them towards OSE, and we started right around when the recent OSE KS launched. The DM and two players (me and the one who also plays in Group #1), all from Group #2, found two other players to join, including one of my oldest friends who lives in another time zone. We could take on another player in this group but haven't found someone available at the right time with an affinity for old school DnD. We're all familiar with 5e but are learning the OSE rules as we go. A highly lethal game for PC's, with a mortality rate of over 100% so far, but incredibly fun to play. Life is cheap in those old modules, and you have to have a sense of humor (or rage-quit like one of the first players who joined!). Yes, your characters die, but sometimes they land a Light spell and blind a powerful monster for an easy kill. I would call this the most casual game I'm in right now. No backstory, no elaborate plot, just dungeon survival and resource management while we laugh about how excited we were to find more iron spikes, or how freakin' scary an 18hp gelatinous cube can be when there's no bounded accuracy and everyone misses their first 2 attack rolls on one of the easiest monsters to hit.</blockquote>

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