I recently started a new campaign. Two players (one who has played in my games before and their SO, who has been begging me for a spot for years) unexpectedly dropped out, moments before our first session. Their reason was somewhat baffling; they said they didn’t want to spend “all day” on this, despite the game only going from noon to 3PM. They seemed to think this was a totally unreasonable expectation on my part, despite them previously having stated they were available during that time. This puzzled me.
I’ve been musing on this, and the strange paradox of people that say they want to play D&D but don’t actually want to play D&D, and I’ve had an epiphany.
A lot of people blame Critical Role or other popular D&D shows for giving prospective players misplaced perceptions, often related to things like your DM’s voice acting ability or prop budget, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. My realization is that, encoded in the medium of podcasts and play videos, is another expectation: New players unconsciously expect to receive D&D the way they receive D&D shows: on-demand, at their house, able to be paused and restarted at their whim, and possibly on a second-screen while they focus on something else!
I don’t know as this suggests anything we as DMs could do differently to set expectations, but it did go a long ways to helping me understand my friends, and I thought it might help someone here to share.
There was an article I read recently that said most people think saying no is way bigger a deal than it is. Like, people get all in their head about “if I say no they’ll be so mad” but most of the time it’s just “Ok, well hopefully you can make it next time.”
Like, if someone always says no to my invites I’ll probably stop inviting them if they don’t otherwise signal they’re interested. But most of the time people don’t think about it much.