What makes your gaming group different?

[Mr.Moron]

We spend a lot of time fleshing out characters through their mundane actions. Shopping trips, tavern runs and other NPC interactions get as much if not more spotlight time than combat and other "Adventure" related actions. We've had sessions almost entirely spent planning & executing a birthday party, buying furniture, or in one case the spent the entire session debating among themselves how they should help an NPC where doing so represented a great risk to themselves.

Rather than have extensive backstories for characters I ask players to show up with just a rough personality and then we'd have small "Background Sessions" between regular play. I'd prompt a player with a question like "How old were you when you first discovered your magic powers", then we'd RP that out with the other players acting as NPCs from the characters past.

As a GM I'm pretty open with resolutions. I always try to announce DCs before players make checks and very often announce what the consequences of failure and success are before the roll is made:

Player: "Do I see any way across besides trying to make the jump"
Me: "Roll perception. On an 14, you'll spot a gentler path to the south. If you get an 10 you'll find spot a path that isn't gentler, but looks like it has less of a drop. Anything lower and you find zip"
Player: "5"
Me: "You find nothing"
Player: "Well we don't really have time to fiddle, we'll just make the jump. I get a running start give it my best shot"
Me: "On 10 you'll clear the gap easily, on 6 you'll fall just short and grab the ledge, lower than that and it's down to the bottom":
Player:" 7"

is a frequent exchange type. We're also generally pretty murder-hobo free, which feels like a huge exception if stories around here are any indication.

[Legato Endless]

For over a year, we never managed to game in a house. This has changed, but for a while we were functionally gaming nomads. We once gamed on a (empty) street. And in a (soon to be condemned) house. Also in the woods, but I imagine this is fairly common.

Some years ago, a lot of the people I game with were in that post college, no permanent residence phase of the young adult life. Anyway, because of that we found ourselves having some difficulty actually getting a group together. I had a home, but no internet, which apparently was a deal breaker for the DM. Others had residences that simply weren't suitable for one reason or another for gaming. (Size, room organization, roommates)

So we forced to experiment. What I discovered was...gaming in public just doesn't work. Even if you're completely comfortable with the hobby, (this group was a mixture of musicians and amateur improvisational actors) there's too many distractions, and you incur too much attention if you gesticulate appropriately in character in your local coffee shop. We traded these for a time for meeting in the quiet rooms of local libraries, but time limit and other impositions proved tedious. Eventually one of us sucked it up and bought a gaming appropriate house stead for the group. Since then every game I've been in has had a home thankfully, but it was touch and go for a while.

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

Ah, so you're more honest than most parties.

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

I've only had one group where the men outnumbered the women and non binaries.

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

This is normal. It's just a preponderance of tactical idealists on the internet pretend differently.

[JenBurdoo]

One rule that has proven popular in my homebrew game is mulligans. The players can reroll dice -- as many times as they like -- in exchange for a cumulative -2 on each extra roll and a cumulative rise up the fatigue chart.

What I discovered was...gaming in public just doesn't work. Even if you're completely comfortable with the hobby, (this group was a mixture of musicians and amateur improvisational actors) there's too many distractions, and you incur too much attention if you gesticulate appropriately in character in your local coffee shop.

We do have difficulties with that, as the game usually runs in a corner of the teen tech lab. People get up to do computer things, or the teen mentor has to supervise something or discipline someone. Also, other programs sometimes run in the same place at the same time, which can disrupt the ongoing campaign as we scramble for another time to play.

On the other hand, we get more people sitting and listening in.

As a GM I'm pretty open with resolutions. I always try to announce DCs before players make checks and very often announce what the consequences of failure and success are before the roll is made:

Player: "Do I see any way across besides trying to make the jump"
Me: "Roll perception. On an 14, you'll spot a gentler path to the south. If you get an 10 you'll find spot a path that isn't gentler, but looks like it has less of a drop. Anything lower and you find zip"
Player: "5"
Me: "You find nothing"
Player: "Well we don't really have time to fiddle, we'll just make the jump. I get a running start give it my best shot"
Me: "On 10 you'll clear the gap easily, on 6 you'll fall just short and grab the ledge, lower than that and it's down to the bottom":
Player:" 7"

I like this method! Do the players end up metagaming?

[Mr.Moron]

I like this method! Do the players end up metagaming?

No, not really and the amount of information on the resolution tends to have to do with the immediacy of the check. If it's a critical social moment, a tense chase, or something else one off I'll pretty explicit about the results. On the other end if it's an investigation of convenience check where the only penalty is losing time and you might get a chance to do it again I tend to reveal less information.

It's also something more of an ideal. Tables can move pretty fast and some checks are just too obvious in their results, or small bits of player distraction to be worth spending the time on listing possibilities.. other times I just plain forget. This is a seriously common exchange at the table..

Player: Some question about the current context.
ME: Sure roll Knowledge: History <pause while I consider things>
Player: OK! I got a...
ME: Ahhh! Don't tell me, I need to figure out the DC first.

Player: I'm going to talk down his prices.
ME: Ah sure, negotiate obviously.
<silence>
Player: The DC?
ME: Oh right.


EDIT: Despite the difficulties It does have a real advantage. There is 0 room for fudging. I know it, the players know it, things are out there and concrete. It adds a certain weight to proceedings when you pull it off correctly. Which is less often than I'd like, if I'm perfectly honest about it.

[Pex]

This is normal. It's just a preponderance of tactical idealists on the internet pretend differently.

I know that. With bias, I like to promote the tactic when the opportunity arises because of it.

[StealthyRobot]

Nope, I just read a lot.

aah. Well nonetheless I would recomend watching, they live stream on twitch and their videos can all be found here. http://geekandsundry.com/shows/critical-role/
Fantastic group of voice actors and an excellent DM!

[TheOOB]

We've had the same core 3 members of the group for 12 years or so, (and a fourth for about 8 years, and our 5th for about 3), we've had people come in go, but our roster has been surprisingly consistent.

We all take turns GMing and running campaigns, I probably GM the most, but I still GM less than half the time. Our campaigns also tend to be pretty short(12 or less sessions) but we've been making an effort to fix that.

Also our group is 3/5 school teachers, so that's interesting.

[Velaryon]

I've got some D&D-specific things we do differently as well (mostly 3.5, though we play a little 5th as well).

You know how you're supposed to get more XP if you're a lower level? We don't do that. We just use the average party level (calculated roughly) and assign XP that way. It rarely makes any difference since people are usually all the same level, but it does make things like LA buyoff in 3.5 kinda pointless. You're not going to gain any more XP just because you're now a level lower than everyone else.

A lot of optimization tricks I see around these boards simply do not happen in our group. Flaws are not used. Skill tricks are used very rarely. Melee characters don't dip Lion Totem Barbarian, though we do sometimes use Tome of Battle. One other member of the group allowed DMM Persist one time, but otherwise we never have CoDzillas (in fact clerics are pretty rare at our table for the most part). We never see crazy builds involving Ur-Priest or Sublime Chord to get two sets of 9th level spells. Actually the only time I've ever seen anyone play a dual-caster class was when I made a Mystic Theurge many years ago.

It's not that people are unaware of these (well, some of the group is unaware, but at least two of us have a pretty good handle on optimization), we just play at what would be considered somewhere between Tier 3-4 usually. I was able to play a pretty lightly optimized Drunken Master and be a relatively useful member of the group - and had a ton of fun with him!

On the other hand, I as DM have no problem beefing up weaker classes or bending the rules for characters in the name of fun. The best example is when I had a player dead-set on playing a Bladesinger, so I gave the class full casting progression so he could do a better job of keeping up.

[Jay R]

One player's husband likes to cook. We occasionally (rarely) get a gourmet multi-course meal.

We once got meatloaf, shaped to look like rat on a stick.

[Ionsniper]

So a few things to to lay out before I get into what makes my group pretty unique. How I ended up in this group was a friend of mine finding recruitment for a dnd game on craigslist. I make a drive almost an hour completely across town to game with these guys. Not so unusual for some people on this board I wager though. We are almost all in our mid 30's and they have been playing for years. I've been playing with them for almost 2 years now.

We started out in 3.5 and played into epic levels before changing over to 5th edition and starting a new mini campaign to help 3 new players get to our levels of our old chars. With this basic info I shall tell the tale of our game being different.


-Epic levels are when the game really begins

Our DM has such a sprawling world laid out with an incredible amount history and powerful NPC's. The play through from 1 to 20 is just the beginning of a long journey and mostly to get an idea of where to take your charachter. Most people I hear about on this board tend to play modules or sandbox's and tend to end around lvl 13 to 17. Our DM has been playing in his world for nearly 20 something years. Every player has left their mark on the world in some shape or another. We are completely free to do whatever we want in the world. His players have reached the lvl 40's regularly and faced world altering scenario's. He allows almost everything in his game. There are NPC's who can shape reality if they wanted too. The thing about it is, the pc's can eventually achieve that power level as well. He has a history of how every NPC achieved their power, where they got it and what ranking in the power scale they would be in. When I started the game I was a lvl 8 paladin Sorcerer gish red half dragon. At the time we set those chars aside almost a year later, I was a lvl 24 Platinum Teddy Bear race (a race of multi type/colored bears), who wields swords telekineticly and uses a combination of psionics and arcane magic along with the durability of a tank, an adult gargantuan prismatic dragon bonded mount, and the only person in the whole game who can gestalt.

-We use miniatures and Dwarven forge a plenty

The guys house we play at has boxes of tiles of Dwarven forge from Kickstarter. He also has around a thousand miniatures for nearly everything. Gnolls, to villans and heroes to dragons. Everything is used in our game. We build sprawling dungeons and use mats to help us get into the game hardcore. Most time we make stuff up on the fly but others we pre build the dungeons if we're doing something grand. We all have miniatures the represent us on the board that are very well painted by the DM. It's great.

-An ever ending world

Our DM'S world is full of history and grandeur. He has run multiple campaigns in his world and each run through is reflected in later campaigns. If a god was permanently ended then there is no bringing them back. If you made an enemy of a powerful NPC, then you better watch your back cause they will come after you. My DM told me a story about how the goddess of magic had been bound in a certain type of chain and an NPC was rolling her to a portal of the abyss. If he had succeed the goddess would have died and would have been no more with no way to bring her back. Ironically I have a sword that can do this. =p So the actions we do in game have resonating effects. Everything we do has consequences.

A few others have been mentioned in thread so I forgo writing them up here. From what I've seen and read here though it seems like these 2 are the biggest things around that most people tend to avoid with their groups. I personally love it and am ever so grateful to have found the group I'm playing with now.