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.
I think something that’s being underestimated here is that often people greatly over-estimate their availability for this stuff. Even a 3-hour session, which is pretty short for sessions I’ve been part of, you really have to plan your whole day around, and they may simply have not realized the level of commitment that would require, or at least been prepared for it. I don’t play right now, and haven’t for a while, simply because I cant make that level of commitment, and it would be unfair to the rest of the table to have to deal with my unpredictable schedule.
This is very true for all parts of life. I kind of feel bad for people who fall into it, a little. Folks just say yes to stuff and end up committing to like two DND games, a book club, a morning run, and a bowling league. Then they’re just exhausted and unhappy.
Accurately imagining your future self is not a skill everyone has. Like, I’m awake and energetic right now at 1pm, but will I be the same at 6am to go for this morning run I’m being invited to? I think a lot of people just can’t do that. They can’t, I don’t know, have empathy with their future self.
That feels a lot like me but with also mixing in the fact that I don’t want to let people down. Like if someone asks if I want to do something at a certain time even if I have something else going on that might be kinda close to that my instinct is to say yes cause I do wanna do stuff with them and don’t want to make them feel bad by saying no or make things complicated by trying to plan around me.
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.
Indeed, practice any sport, you have like 2h training twice a week, add commute and shower and sometimes third half time at the bar, the session becomes a 3h or more activity.
I used to play a lot, nowadays, I rely on shorter campaign, they’re fun too
This sounds much more like the reason. 12pm-3pm, plus some time before and after to prep and commute and stuff, plus these things often run long in my experience… It easily becomes most of the afternoon. If you have anything else you need to do that day it becomes a fairly big deal.
Yes, and Noon to 3:00 PM can blow a hole in your free time in a way that something running 7:00-10:00 PM doesn’t.
I put about 6-10 hours a week into RPG’s (DM’ing/playing/prepping) but would never want to play every Saturday afternoon. That would totally crimp my other interests.
I think the hardest part is by far dealing with no shows. I have a group that meets 1 in 3 sessions, with no idea which ones people will cancel on. It makes it hard to devote any energy to something unlikely to happen.
i don’t think players are conditioned to expect you to be their little court jesters performing for them on demand, and i think it’s really weird to make the case that they do
your player probably just got into dnd through something like dimension 20, which has its sessions edited down into 1 hour slots, but relatively seamlessly so you can’t tell if you’re not looking for it
I thought you were going to take this in the direction of unrealistic expectations about how long a session takes. I’ve always been really amazed at podcaster DMs’ ability to get so much done in a 1-2 hour segment. When I used to DM I felt like I got the same amount done in about twice the time.
I know Stinky Dragon edits stuff out to keep the run time down. I assume for live streams the DMs just use the “it’s dead when it narratively fits/needs to happen to stop bad rolls from dragging this out an hour” rule and players know to focus more instead of spending 30min on cock jokes after finding a cock fight that then devolves into a heist plan to free all animals in the village and make them the masters of their own fates lol.
Likewise Dimension 20 is cut down quite a bit. You can see from the contrast between the length of their episodes on the dimension 20 live season vs their non-live seasons
I mean, thats honestly going to be a thing that happens whenever some people get into something new through a different medium, really. Warped expectations are a thing. We’ve been dealing with it for decades with people who come to D&D/TTRPGs from video games, and expect the in game NPCs to act like theyre from skyrim or something. It’s honestly not that much different, only with a different set of preconceived notions.
That may be a reason for it. If so offer them the opportunity to just watch, to consume D&D as they do podcasts. They can leave whenever and it won’t mess up the game, but it also may get them more interested and want to commit to actually playing.
I found Pathfinder society scenarios are a good Start. 2 or 3 encounters, most are done in 2 hours, easy to adapt. Way less pressure than a 20 level run.
There’s only one pause button I know that works on GMs, “food’s ready!”
That’ll pause any game. Though it may pause it in 10 minutes, as sometimes you want to hit a stopping point.
