It’s known that table dynamics affect play as much as (and some argue more than) what game you’re sitting down to play. And although both game and player are important, player aims often get talked about less or even disparaged through ‘taxonomies’ which typically valorize the playstyle of the author instead of providing objective analysis. Games are simply easier to discuss and critique; even movements which seemingly downplay the primacy of mechanics end up spending a lot of time discussing written material in the form of modules and settings which rarely if ever lead to the best gaming experience (because of, once again, player dynamics).

I started puzzling over this a few weeks ago, and wanted to return to the discussion at hand because I think it’s an important part of figuring out what you actually want to play. Needless to say, the ‘what’ in this sentence must necessarily be broader than what book you aim to pick up and puzzle through, but that’s always been the case: Even within a single game, editions, supplements, and pre-written material would always enter consideration before a single person sat down at the table. And, of course, the play outcome is still wholly dependent on the group even after the material choices are made.

Instead of putting any sort of stake in the ground, I wanted to consider the impacts of system choice on play in a place I can observe: my personal gaming group. My group has been playing together for over twenty years, running campaigns in systems ranging from D&D to Shadowrun, Legend of the Five Rings to Masks, Genesys to GURPS. Thanks to both our immense diversity of experience as well as the long amount of time we’ve been playing together, my group provides some interesting data points about what changes and what stays the same as we change systems. I’m also lucky to be joined by likeminded people in terms of a desire to analyze our games and find our way to an ideal experience. Not only is Seamus also in my group (it’s how we met, after all), but all of the other group members, whether or not they write for this site, have shown at least some interest in thinking critically about how our games go and what that means about picking the next one. Knowing that, and knowing that my experience won’t be universal, it seems the right time to ask the key question: When we start a new campaign, what happens?

What doesn’t happen

After returning to GMing for the last year and change, I’ve found the most fascinating things about game mechanics are what they never seem to change. In my main group, my players tend to write characters and play the same way no matter the mechanics. Now, that does mean that different systems privilege different players in terms of their preferences, but even that doesn’t necessarily pan out the way you think it would.

If I have to describe the playstyle of my primary group, it would be a dialogue between players and GM, with mechanics as the mediator of that dialogue. My group is experienced at trying new systems and learning mastery within them, and what that leads to is understanding which levers the game really wants you to pull. In that way, the game system is almost like our language; when we play Cyberpunk there’s going to be gunfights and a fixer wheeling and dealing, and when we play Masks there will be teenagers and tons of player-created baggage for them. But in every case, the implied social contract is relatively simple: The GM provides a premise, setting, and guidance for creating characters, and then the players provide characters who will grab spotlight in the way they prefer while trying to entertain the GM and each other in the process. It got us a headstrong samurai stuck in an endless cycle of competition with her brother and other clans, it got us a Sith Ithorian trying to spread dark side tree saplings, and it got us a Cyberpunk rockerboy named ‘Tickles the Clown’, which I believe is fairly self-explanatory.

I think 2024 provided one of my most interesting case studies in the primacy of gaming group dynamics when I ran Burning Wheel for my group. Burning Wheel is, among other things, a nudge-based game. The mechanics around Beliefs and the mechanics around skills are both designed in a way that the player is supposed to identify how the mechanic works, learn how to manipulate it, and then produce an ideal outcome both in-character and mechanically because they know how the mechanic works. My players aren’t allergic to aligning mechanical incentives by any means, but Burning Wheel provided friction to their playstyles in a way that helped me better understand some of the liabilities of the game. For one thing, Burning Wheel with all the dials turned up is actually fairly specific. In, say, a Duel of Wits, there are only certain skills which can be used for certain moves in the conflict system. This is the same in outright combat, but there most players are primed to understand the idea of a weapon proficiency. For my players, discovering that the core social skills of their characters and playstyles simply weren’t included in Duel of Wits was a rude awakening, and a reminder that Burning Wheel prides itself on being obtuse when it comes to actual system mastery (a fact I discussed briefly in my review).

Having Burning Wheel be so obtuse did serve as an obstacle to my group’s chosen playstyle, which generally involves playing to their characters’ mechanical strengths in inventive ways and looking for ways to trip every mechanical trigger possible. Of course all of these efforts to trigger the mechanics are in an effort to make the world (or in most cases the GM) react. When we were younger my players specifically relished in catching me off guard, now that they’re more familiar with how much I improv anyway they’re more interested in making things happen. It’s a perfect playstyle for PbtA where every Move must invite an outcome, but it works just as well in pretty much any game as long as both the players and the GM are thinking in terms of “if/then” when it comes to what their characters do. My players definitely like to ‘play’ in the worlds we inhabit together, which makes it all the more interesting when we hit upon a game that does push them to align with its playstyle.

What does happen

To truly make my group alter their playstyle in any way, the rules of the game must generally butt up against how they want to go about playing in the world. This doesn’t necessarily happen when there are many or complex mechanics (as shown in the Burning Wheel example, but also our earlier forays into Exalted and Shadowrun), but it does happen when there are strict mechanics. I’ve run both Twilight:2000 and Torchbearer for this group, and in both cases the need to work within the confines of the game’s structure altered the group’s plan of attack noticeably. I’d also note that the friction provided by these games wasn’t necessarily unwelcome; Twilight:2000 was highly regarded by most and the issues with Torchbearer had much more to do with its fiendish difficulty than with its structure. That said, there were limits in these cases as well. Torchbearer went a bit too far for the group by essentially disallowing freeform roleplay in Town phases, though we found a comfortable compromise that both let them play around but also didn’t undermine the game economy within the phase.

Interestingly, the other key shift I observe in how my group plays has nothing to do with rules at all. We are, like many gamers, keyed into genre, and there are few better examples of how acute this can be than our time with Star Trek Adventures. While I give the rules minimal credit for this, our willingness (and desire) to play out episodes of Star Trek within our sessions made Seamus’ Star Trek Adventures campaign feel notably different from other campaigns. It’s more than just genre, to be clear; the episodic nature of most Star Trek properties combined with an alignment of the adventure design for the game (which I will give the designers credit for) means that not only did we want to play out episodes of Star Trek, we were playing in adventure seeds which gave us exactly that. Combine that with the crew support mechanic which enabled us to have b-plots and focus shifts, and we fell naturally into a very different rhythm than most of our games, including others in known licenses like Star Wars.

It is of course also worth noting that when our group encounters high-concept games, they typically play out very differently than our campaigns do. This is to be expected; a high-concept game is nothing if not a push to play differently and have a different experience. I will note though that I wasn’t sure that would work out for us until I saw it happen the first time we ran DIE. While different mechanics play into this to a degree, there is an element of social contract as well; DIE in particular establishes this procedurally through the heavily delineated and GM-driven character creation section. I am lucky to have a receptive group who are generally willing to try most things; that said you ignore the social contract of pushing a new play style on your group at your own risk.

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I don’t mean to imply via this discussion that all campaigns my group plays feel the same. And although there is a core playstyle and narrative that I do see again and again, it’s also important to note what changes incrementally as a result of playing different games with different mechanics and different ideas. My group absolutely doesn’t play in the same way that we used to in college, and a lot of that comes down to experiences. Even tracing throughlines between the campaigns run in the exact same system, you can see differences in approach and considerations taken in later campaigns that weren’t there in earlier ones. To drive the point home further, when I look at members of our group who have since departed, they almost always end up in very different places regarding their own playstyle, and you can generally tell what came from our time together versus what they ended up doing later. Game design is a conduit by which designers express how they want to play, and our experiences with those designs build up into our own preferences. The sum total of gaming experience you have can often be a more potent indicator of how your campaigns go than the mechanics of whatever game you’re playing at that moment.

This won’t be the last time I consider my own gaming history; if table dynamics are as important as I and others have posited, then virtually any time I review or analyze a game or other published work I’ll be considering my gaming group in some way. That said, doing it deliberately has proven helpful; not only do I see some of my own biases, but I also see different ways to approach the question of a ‘good game’ other than what system we pick up next. As I continue this line of investigation, I’m going to think more specifically about some of our gaming experiences. How did we get into PbtA? Why did we go back and run second campaigns of both Exalted and Shadowrun? How has our Cyberpunk experience changed over literally 20 years? Even if the answers to these questions may not apply to all groups, all groups can benefit from asking these questions, and seeing how game mechanics land at your table can indicate more about what games work for you than reading about games in a vacuum.

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