NO RECAP FOR YOU!
So, very recently, I had a game completely fall apart in a matter of seconds. I'm honestly a bit impressed that it only took the DM saying one thing for everyone in the group to say, "fuck this shit, I'm out." But I'm getting ahead of myself. This was a Pathfinder 2e group I found on Roll20 that was running official Pathfinder adventure paths set in the official Golarion setting. Now I love Golarion as a setting. I did a PF lore binge around the time of the OGL incident, and it quickly became one of my favorite fantasy worlds. I really wanted to RP in that world, so I jumped at the chance to play an official adventure. And that's when the problems began.
So the first campaign I tried playing was Blood Lords, which takes place in a nation ruled by the undead. And when I first logged into the game on Roll20, I was actually impressed. The guy put a lot of effort into the maps he made. They had all the fancy stuff like animated effects, background music, and fog of war. To someone who's used to theater of the mind and basic grids, this was fancy. I was less impressed by his frequent complaints about not having enough official maps to work with. And when I say constant, I mean it happened like every 30 minutes. Every time we'd enter a new area of the city, we'd get a complaint about how he didn't have a map for it. This overreliance on the fancy maps would cause another problem when all the fancy effects started glitching out. This didn't happen too often, but when it did, the session would grind to a screeching halt while he tried to fix it. He was also not very good at RPing the NPCs and had a tendency to rush us to certain plot points. Dude was also not good at improvising NPCs. If there wasn't a description or statbock in the book, he'd complain that Paizo (the company that makes Pathfinder) wouldn't give him enough information. Still, I could ignore all these small annoyances and try to have fun. Whether or not that was because I'm a tolerant person or because I was desperate to play is up to you. What I couldn't ignore were half of the players dropped out of the game entirely. They said that it was because of work stuff, but looking back, I'm not so sure.
So the first campaign was a bust. That's fine, DM had a plan B. We'd start a new campaign. The new plan was to start with Wardens of Wildwood (an adventure where we had to deal with the change in leadership of a druid lodge) and move on to Spore War (where we'd assist an elven nation in fighting some demons). Now I was really excited for this one. Both of these adventures take place near my favorite nation in Golarion, The Republic of Andoran (a.k.a. fantasy colonial America that spec'd hard into abolitionism instead of capitalism), giving me the perfect excuse to make my character one of Andoran's elite Eagle Knights. DM got a brand new group of players together, and we were ready to start playing. And every session had someone drop out. Sure, they all said that they were too busy (and one guy legit said that he had more fun smoking week than playing Pathfinder), but I could tell that the DM was becoming a bit too much for some of them. When the group got down to just me and another guy, we decided to move on to plan C, grab some new dudes, and start Spore War. We did just that and got two sessions in before we ran into a different problem. Spore War starts you at level 11, and half of this new group had never played PF2e before. They were a bit overwhelmed by all the stuff you get at higher levels. So we all decided it would be best if we just started over with an adventure path that started you at level 1. And just our luck, Paizo released one around that time.
Plan D, Hellbreakers. It's time for our ragtag group of adventurers to free a nation from its devil-worshiping oppressors. We all got our character sheets ready, backstories written, and dice ready to roll. I even decided to make my new character an Eagle Knight, too. And the first session went great. Sure, the technical issues cropped up again, but that was overshadowed by the group really finding our footing with our characters. Our first mission was to evacuate civilians from an active warzone, and we took to it like fish to water. The party RP was really fun, especially when one player found a friend of his executed by the aforementioned devil-worshipers who invaded the city. The session ended with us in an alleyway, and one of the party members sent his weasel familiar to scout ahead. The weasel said something to his owner, but the session ended before he could report back to the rest of the party. I feel like it's important to mention at this point that this game was played every two weeks late at night. I'm talking 9 pm to midnight late. So by the end of the session, we were a bit tired and many of us wanted to go to bed. Two weeks later, we get ready for session two. We were pumped, we were excited, we hopped into the Discord VC ready to kick some hellish ass. Then the player with the weasel said, "Hey, I don't remember what my familiar said last time. Could you give me a recap?"
The DM replied with, "No. You should've written it down. I don't like repeating myself."
Fucking... what?
DM: "Yeah, you guys need to write stuff down. I can't be expected to do everything while you do nothing."
This was the last straw. Three out of the five of us dipped immediately. The last guy and I spent like half an hour trying to tell DM that he needed to cut us some slack. This wasn't a test that we needed to study for; we were all here to have fun and play a game. But it was like talking to a brick wall. He eventually decided to leave the VC and then deleted the entire server in the middle of me talking to the last remaining player. I think it's safe to say that this was a bust.
If there is a lesson to be learned here, it's that as a DM, you have to remember that we're all here to have fun and play a game. I know you want your players to pay attention and actively engage with your plot, but you can't treat TTRPGs like a classroom. People are busy. They've got jobs and responsibilities that can be very distracting. They might forget something, even something important. That's normal, that's human. It's not your job to punish your players for forgetting something like this. It is your job to make sure that everybody is on the same page, though. I'm still pretty new to DMing, but even I give a "previously on Dragon Ball Z" style recap at the beginning of every session. And these recaps are especially important if there are long gaps in between sessions.
It is a shame that this game fell as flat as it did. I still love Golarion and really want to play in it. I'm sure my time to be an Eagle Knight will come one day. And when that time comes, I'm gonna make sure that I won't get rejected when I ask for a recap.