Entitled player insists on lowering the campaign difficulty
Hello! This is my first (and hopefully last) time posting here. This is a throwaway account so I can get this off my chest and hopefully no one involved in the situation will see it. Its a long one so if you want to know the short version, I'll leave a TL;DR at the bottom.
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"Some" context first: Back in 2020, my DM decided that to start playing his homebrewed campaign with a group of four of his friends (all between 18-20 y/o). He wasn't 100% done writing the overarching plot (he'd been working on it for a good four years up until then) but was feeling isolated so he decided to release it anyway. He also told them all beforehand that the campaign would be high-stakes and would become more intense as they played.
One of the friends he'd invited to join him was also friends with me. He'd tell me all about the fun stuff they did and show me his art from it. He asked me if I wanted to join them about three years ago after one of the players left the table because they got too busy to consistently be there. I had never played D&D before or seen anyone play it at that point, so I wasn't sure.
He set up a group chat with me, himself, and the DM where they could tell me about the campaign and see if I was still interested. They described it as being high-stakes and serious which sounded really interesting to me since I'm a sucker for the GOT and Witcher book series. My friend reassured me that the group was good at working together and that there'd be nothing to worry about in terms of sketchy decisions. So I agreed to join, and my friend helped me make my first D&D character.
I really like himbos and knew from my friend and the DM that the party was lacking some powerful melee damage since it mostly consisted of magic users, so I decided to make paladin Fred Jones (from Scooby-Doo) with a few tweaks to make him fit the setting better and have his own unique backstory. My friend and the DM thought he'd fit in well with the party makeup. The DM told me to wait a bit while he got the party to a good position for my himbo to join them, so I waited a few sessions. This is where the first red flag popped up, but I unfortunately ignored it.
The week before I was supposed to join, my friend and another player (P1) got into a huge fight outside of the game. It ended with the other player demanding that my friend be kicked from the table or she'd take her boyfriend (P2) and leave. The DM was better friends with her than my friend so he decided that for the sake of the party he'd kick my friend out. I was still allowed to join though.
The first few sessions were a bit awkward because I hardly knew the DM and didn't know the other players at all; I'd been counting on my friend to help me with that. Since I was new to the game, I had my himbo go along with the other's plans while I played catch-up even if I knew he'd disagree with them. In hindsight, this was a bad idea because it set an awful precedent for P1 since she was our party face and acted as the decision maker and leader of the group. I also noticed that things were different from what my friend had told me in terms of sketchy decisions. There were a lot of evil aligned choices that P1 was promoting as correct, like manipulating NPCs to ignore personal boundaries so she could gain more power or refusing to help injured NPCs if it meant it'd make her character look bad.
I asked my friend about it, and he was surprised since P1 had never done that while he was there. He mentioned his character also had high charisma, so they switched back and forth between who acted as the party's face or not. I thought that her refusal to do that now was weird, but let it go for the time since I didn't want to be the only person at the table disagreeing wth P1 since P2 always went along with his girlfriend, P1.
The next red flag came from my character's backstory. I was going to introduce it in little chunks to the group to make it more intriguing, but shortly after the group left the city we were staying in, P1 started trying to drag the whole thing out of my character. She even resorted to reading his mind while interrogating him and caused him psychic damage from delving too deep. I tried to make it clear I wasn't going to put up with this and give her what she wanted, but it took our DM stepping in for her to back off.
We played a few more sessions after that with my character staying as far away from hers as possible while we dealt with a dungeon before our DM paused the game for about half a year to deal with some personal things. Once he was doing better, he started it back up and introduced his partner as a new player (P3).
P3 and I got along immediately and quickly became friends. We were on similar wavelengths about some of the sketchy things P1 wanted us to do, so we were able to team up like she had with P2 and explain why we didn't want to do certain things. She started to get increasingly hostile to us because of this. Yet another red flag.
She went so far as to accuse me several times of "just doing what my character would do" about certain decisions we faced because I disagreed with her opinion about the best way to go about it, ignoring that P3 also agreed with me. She also accused me of sabotaging some of her plans whenever I pointed out flaws in them. She would tell me both in and out of session how I should change my character to fit the party dynamic better, despite there being a clear rift of morality between my paladin and P3's cleric compared to her and P2's characters. She would sometimes complain to me that my character felt like a random decision generator because none of his decisions made sense to her to the point where I'd have to get into minute detail about why he chose to do Y instead of X and give her the entire backlog of reasons that went into the decision.
For instance, we had an NPC lie to us about how he'd reformed to become a good and honest citizen, and P1 and P2 believed him. P3 wasn't sure what to think. I, however, had a bunch of evidence proving that this NPC was good at manipulating people and would do anything to get out of tricky situations from my character's backstory. I told the others as much, but P1 still believed him so she and P2 set him free which meant P3 and I had to go back and recapture him before he could sell another family into slavery. She got mad at us for recapturing him until P3's character communed with their god to ask them if he was planning on going back to enslaving people and sure enough, he was.
Thankfully, our DM stepped in to help whenever things at the table got too heated which would always make her back off, but she never seemed to get that P3 and I had opinions that should matter when we needed to make decisions as a group. Or that our characters had their own reasoning behind things.
Still, P3 and I stuck it out because we wanted to see how the story progressed.
This is where the reason for this post begins.
At this point in the campaign, we had learned that the gods themselves, not just the world, was at stake and that if we continued to delay our plans to defeat the BBEG, gods would start to die which meant that the BBEG would become stronger. Our DM told us we could probably fight the BBEG in roughly five sessions if we stayed on track.
P3 and I were on-board with this and had plans to tackle our last big dungeon in the Nine Hells, Malsheem. It was said to contain a weapon we needed to defeat the BBEG. Outside of the session we came up with a list of supplies and spells we need to swap out so we could successfully navigate the citadel with as few fights as possible to up our survival chances once we met the boss protecting the weapon. We knew from using communes that it'd be really difficult fight against a lich.
P1, however, wanted to have the group spend a month (an actual, out-of-game month of time) playing tourist in one of the cities that she'd helped the DM design back in the day. P2 was inclined to go along with his girlfriend since the man was unable to form an original opinion. This caused a huge fight that resolved with P1 complaining to the DM that he'd made the world too realistic and the stakes too high and that she wasn't having fun anymore.
Our DM went around to each of us individually and asked what we thought about lowering the game difficulty. P3 and I were in agreement. We liked the stakes where they were and lowering them would mean that our DM would have to change the overarching story he'd spent a decade crafting which we didn't want to do since we knew how hard he'd worked on it and were invested in the story. Plus we maybe had five sessions left!
The next time we got together as a group, he told us beforehand that we weren't going to play and were just going to have a talk about the future of the campaign. He told us he was going to split the group into two tables and run two separate games instead. P1 threw a hissy fit about how that's not what she wanted and why couldn't P3 and I just listen to what she wanted instead. We explained that we felt differently and that we were tired of our opinions being ignored. We told her that we both thought that this was the best way to progress the game in a way where everyone felt happy and no one would have to leave the table and not learn how the story ended. She disagreed and told us we were no longer friends before she and P2 told us to get out of their house.
Our DM later texted them about what had happened later that day, and they both agreed to split the table after one more session together where we could come up with in an in-game reason for the split and divide the party loot. They both made it clear though that they were mad at P3 and me and felt betrayed.
P3 and I were fine with this since it meant we were finally free of them and didn't have to keep pretending to be friends for the sake of peace. However, P1 and P2 have been refusing to agree to a time to meet up so we can finish the dungeon. They keep saying they're busy whenever any of us text them to ask about their availability, so we just gave up on waiting for them.
P3 and I met with our DM a few weeks ago and decided to fake divide the party loot. We "gave" P1 and P2 some supplies but really took everything. We decided it wouldn't matter since we won't ever be playing with them again.
We've played twice since the split happened. Next time we're going to fight our lich, but so far we've been great at making decisions together and problem solving. I wish I had had this from the start since I now know this is what D&D is supposed to be like.
We still haven't heard anything from P1 or P2, which is fine by me even if it makes me feel a little guilty that we didn't follow through on our compromise.
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TL;DR: There's an entitled player in my group that keeps trying to control what the party does, and she recently decided the stakes were too high for her and asked the DM to lower them so she can have more fun regardless of what the rest of the group wants and despite knowing we're about five sessions away from fighting the BBEG. We ended up splitting the party and now those of us who can work together as a team are finishing up the campaign without her and her boyfriend.