My D&D session was cancelled because everyone was too tired, then they played another game for the rest of the evening without me.
I need some outside perspective on this because I'm honestly not sure whether I'm being overly sensitive.
I'm the DM for a group of four friends, running an Alien RPG campaign. I've been putting quite a lot of effort into it and was really looking forward to our next session. We play on Foundry, so there has been a financial investment in keeping the server running month to month from my end as well.
Our scheduling has been difficult for a while. Sessions can be 3–4 weeks apart, we've had people forget that we even had a session scheduled and the usual cancelations or blocked-out calendars. Because of the long gaps, I also end up spending a fair amount of time reminding everyone what happened previously. Sessions are roughly only 3 hours long.
For this particular session, I'd gone pretty far with preparation. I had several pages of material, maps, scenes, artwork, encounters, audio and narration prepared.
I wasn't doing this because I expect my players to appreciate every hour I spend preparing. I just genuinely enjoy GMing and was really excited about this particular session. I thought it was going to be a major change in the campaign and a really cool crew moment.
Only two of the players showed up at the scheduled time, but two of my players were 30 minutes late and arrived sounding tired.
One of the other pushed pretty hard for us to cancel. I actually understand that. If people are exhausted, I don't want to force them to play a horror RPG for several hours. It's no fun for me, and it's no fun for the players.
Anyway, we concluded to cancel the session and there were murmurs of another session in 3 weeks time or so.
Then things got weird. The group decided to play an online game together instead.
That game only supports four players. There were five of us. They went ahead and played without me. I don't quite understand that. Are tabletop RPGs more strenuous than online games requiring you to complete puzzles and avoid monsters?
I don't think my players are malicious people. But I can't shake the feeling that the whole thing was incredibly dismissive.
If everyone had said, "We're exhausted, let's just call it a night. I'd have been disappointed, but I would have completely understood. Instead, it was effectively: "We're too tired to play the session you prepared. Let's play something else." And apparently it was fine if I didn't join.
The kicker really was that they ended up playing until late. Probably passed when my session would have ended.
Maybe I'm taking this too personally, but it genuinely hurt.
With scheduling already being difficult, when I finally have a session that I'm really excited about, spend a huge amount of time preparing it, turn up ready to run it, and then the group cancels — only to spend the rest of the evening gaming without me — it leaves me wondering why I'm putting so much effort into this.
Is this just one of those situations where I'm assigning much more meaning to what happened than my players intended?
I'm particularly interested in hearing from other DMs: if this happened to you, how would you feel about it, and what would you do afterward?