I should add my third gaming group were more thoughtful and into the roleplaying and exploration aspects much more. Our sessions in that group were generally longer - 6 to 8 hours on a Saturday or Sunday - and would usually have two or three combats all day. We mostly played AD&D with them rather than other systems.
My San Diego campaigns had a different organizational structure. I didn’t have three distinct, discrete groups. I had one big pool of players—at its peak, around 16—and each time I started a new cycle of campaigns, I would pick three campaigns that got a lot of votes and sort players out according to which one they preferred. I did have three or four players who habitually liked high-action campaigns (for example, all three of them were in my Buffyverse campaign), but even they didn’t always end up together.
The analogy I like was that for me, a gaming group wasn’t a “club” that was created by the agreement of the members to come together and that belonged to them; it was a “dinner party” that was created by my inviting those particular people to play in that campaign.
I’m not saying that everyone should follow that model! But it does seem to me to avoid one of the common liabilities of gaming: The sense that the only games that are acceptable are those that every member of a particular group is willing to play in. In my approach, if player A doesn’t like game x, I put them into campaign y or z instead. This suits me, because I tend to approach gaming as an auteur: I want a lot of creative freedom.
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I agree that this is a pleasing setup, but some groups definitely have the ethos that it’s this particular lot of people first. (This is where I usually link to the Geek Social Fallacies.)
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It seems to me to be a collectivist way of thinking: Everything in the group, nothing outside the group, nothing against the group. I’m too resolutely an individualist to be comfortable with that approach. And at least in San Diego, I had enough social capital that people were willing to game with me without getting to form nucleated groups.
Speaking of character creation, I’m going to be working with two of my players today. They’re in my historical fantasy campaign Tapestry, but it’s about to shift modes from trade ventures to a military expedition, and they don’t feel that their characters are suited to combat (one of them deliberately built a character with 200 character points and no combat skills other than one point in Brawling); but the players were agreed that they wanted to carry on with the campaign rather than start a new one. So they’re building new characters. They’ve decided to try a different race, and one that none of the established PCs belong to, so they’re creating a brother and sister who are both elves—one of the things they’ll need to decide is which elven culture they come from, as there are up to four different options in the general region.