So, this is one thing I've noticed indirectly coming up in a lot of conversations on the forums. People who've been in a consistent gaming group/circle for years seem to have a very different outlook on the game than folks who have a high turnover rate in gaming partners. I certainly noticed a difference in the experience when I was in a campaign with a bunch of people I knew and had gamed with several times in the past vs. times when I barely knew half the people at the table. Have other people noticed the same thing?
How much does your outlook on being a player change when you don't know the DM very well? And the opposite question if you're a DM with several new players. How do you think your group dynamics have changed your overall Pathfinder experience, and your outlook on the game as a whole?
I'm not sure I'm quite following what the question is. What sorts of differences are you thinking of? Also, is your question specific to Pathfinder, or do other roleplaying systems count?
Basically, I want to talk about differences in how different groups play the game. Is Pathfinder as played by a group that's been gaming together for five years different from Pathfinder as played by a group where most of the players have never gamed together before?
Since we're on a Pathfinder Forum, that game would be the most relevant one to discuss. But since the topic is really about the differences betweeen long-running established groups who've been playing together for years vs ones where there's always a couple new guys, any system could apply.
Well, from a DM perspective..having a game with a lot of players or many new players all the time causes me to not care as much about pc death. I have run lots of one shot games and impromptu games with many folks, and in those situations I don't hold back at all. If the player's not likely to be there next time anyway his death will make for amusing recounting later.
In games where the same player's show up week after week I tend to have more build up, and fewer truly life threatening battles...since having to make new characters every session impinges on the stories development.
In my experience, a long running group is more likely to develop and implement a growing list of house rules based on their experience.
I'm highly skeptical of new (to the group) players asking to use homebrew/3rd party materials (and would never do so myself), but in a long standing group I'm more receptive to someone saying "Hey, I've made this PrC. I'd like to try it out, let me know what you think of it, and any changes you'd want to make."
In my experience, the gamers who role up new characters every week are more interested in power gaming whereas those running characters long term become more invested in the storytelling aspects.
Of course, neither is mutually exclusive.
As a GM and an author, I vastly prefer long-running games. I can tell stories, use character backgrounds to build adventure hooks, give out rewards like land and titles and important allies and expect the characters (and hopefully the players too) to feel rewarded by such things.
In a game with high turnover, I get 1/4 of the way through the story, players leave, new players come in, and the new guys don't really care about the old story that involved characters that aren't even here anymore. And setting up an adventuring group as landed nobles and good friends of the great archmage Murmandamas is suddenly meaningless when 3 of those characters are gone and new replacements show up.
I also like to give out rewards that grow with the characters. I once had a character find a magical spear at 2nd level. He didn't even use a spear. But it wouldn't let him sell it or get rid of it. It even insisted that he use it in combat and he quickly realized it was more than just a spear - in the end, around about 15th level or so, having used that spear the whole time as he and the spear grew in power, the character discovered that he IS Odin, incarnated in mortal flesh because he lost a bet to Loki, with no memory of who he was (until he discovered it on his own). The campaign got really interesting from there and that PC eventually gave Loki a serious thrashing - worse even than what the Hulk gave him in the Avengers movie (this campaign was more than 20 years ago, so no relation).
The time he found out he was immortal (by being killed and staked to the ground by several ogre spears, but never stopped bleeding) was one of the most memorable moments in that players long years of gaming. And he still jokes with me today, decades later, about the torture scene with Surtur - before he knew he was Odin, he was captured by Surtur who demanded that he give the spear to him. He refused and so Surtur tortured him to death. Being immortal, he woke up sometime later and Surtur tortured him to death again. And again. And again. One new death each day by a different method of torture each day; Surtur was really angry. It took the other PCs about 4 in-game weeks to rescue him the player asked me to describe each day's death scene, just to see how many times I could come up with a unique new torture. I later found out the players were deliberately stalling just to get the next torture scene...
Don't worry, the other PCs weren't overshadowed by traveling with an unkillable god because they had their own unique stuff too.
You just can't do that kind of stuff when the players are rotating in and out of the game, or even when you have the same players but they can't stay focused on just one PC for a long-term campaign and are constantly retiring and re-rolling.