r/DnDAITA

This happened with a long running campaign that I currently am running. The problem player that we will just call “A” has been a good friend outside of DND but inside DND they are to put it lightly, a problem. They like to blame their ADHD and various mental issues for the way they are the way they are. And I’m not casting aspersions on other people for this behavior who also have mental issues or ADHD. That’s just been their excuse for what’s been happening.

A, will often get distracted themselves or distract other players while lore is being explained, that player is taking their turn, or is purposefully antagonizing me as the dungeon master in an attempt to piss me off. They treat the latter as winning at d&d. Previously, I had a long conversation with them about how wanting to piss me off when I’m just trying to run a fun and engaging game makes them a bad friend. They seemed to understand and the behavior died down. Until today.

While describing a scene to the table, A, wadded up their straw wrapper and threw it at my face while I was looking away. I froze, turned to look at A, and stared at them for a very long moment. They giggled and waited for me to explode. Part of me wanted to get up and walk out right then and there. But I said enough was enough. I looked right at A and said

“Your next turn is skipped. Do not throw anything at me.”

They argued that it didnt hurt me at all and I was taking things too serious. I told A that we talked about this before and that their behavior was unacceptable, and there would be consequences. A then flicked their straw at me, but it only hit my DM screen.

“That’s two turns skipped. Do you want to go for three?”

A got red in the face and argued some more but settled down after. They did not interrupt again or distract anybody while the consequences played out and when it was their turn again, two turns later, they participated accordingly and the session finished with everyone having fun. So, was I wrong?

So here's the situation: I am a player in a group of 5+DM. We've been playing together for almost 10 years, starting in-person but have transitioned to online 6 years ago when we all moved long-distance.
We play weekly, every Friday evening for roughly 4 hours.
DM and Barbarian are roommates.
Monk and Cleric are a couple but don't live together.
Sorcerer and I are a couple and live together, and we now live in a different country from the rest of the group.
We are all in our late 20s-early 30s and have jobs, but none of us have kids.

We generally don't make a big deal out of people cancelling, but we have always elected not to play if someone couldn't make it. We decided on that because since we have 2 couples and a pair of roommates, often when 1 can't make it it means 2 can't make it, and it's worked okay for us.
Usually when 1 or 2 people can't make it and tell us in advance we still get together but we do a one-shot or play a video game instead.

But recently, in the past year or so, Barbarian has been canceling a lot of sessions last-minute, for reasons that we feel should have been communicated in advance. Sorcerer, Cleric and I specifically have talked about it a lot and have been getting quite annoyed at them for it.
Examples include:
- They were traveling out of town for a Pride event in another city. They had known about it for weeks as they had booked a hotel and train tickets, but didn't tell us they were canceling until I messaged our group chat asking for clarification on a magic item, the morning of the session.
- They had a friend staying over. The visit had been planned weeks in advance, but they only messaged the group chat about it a couple of hours before the session.
- They got invited by another friend to go to the cinema a few hours before the session and decided to do that instead of playing.
- It was their brother's birthday. They obviously knew about their brother's birthday in advance, but only told us about it on the day of the session.
- Their character had died the previous session and they hadn't made a new one yet, so they asked if we could wait for them to make their character before starting. It took them over an hour, and by the time they were done we were all doing other things and ended up not playing.
- One of their friend who is a streamer was doing a stream event and they decided to take part in it, they told us literally 10 minutes before the session that they wouldn't make it.
- It was the evening before Valentine's day and they wanted to go for a date with their partner. They knew they wanted that date specifically, but they only told us they were canceling when Cleric asked the group chat for confirmation on the time we were gonna play a few hours before.
- Their mum got a new kitten, and they decided to travel out of town to meet the new kitten for the weekend, leaving on the Friday evening. They only told us of that plan about an hour before the session, despite knowing about the kitten for a week.

Overall, we felt like there was a pattern of them having things planned in advance and not informing us that they wouldn't make it to sessions until the day of, or sometimes until being prompted by someone else on the day of. We were annoyed at it, since we have all been blocking out our Friday evenings for dnd for so long, and not knowing that dnd got canceled until a few hours before has prevented us from making a lot of other plans.

We brought this up to the group chat, Sorcerer wrote a message asking for people to be a bit more thoughtful and to try to announce cancelations earlier if possible. His message wasn't aggressive or mean in any way.

But Barbarian obviously took it very personally, and reminded us of a time a few years ago where we had to cancel a lot of sessions in the span of 3-4 months, mostly because of me, and no one made a fuss about it.
The situation 2 years ago:

Week 1: Sorcerer and I got stuck on the highway for 6 hours due to a car accident, didn't make it to the session.
Week 2: My Granddad passed away that morning, I was busy doing family stuff and wasn't exactly in the mood anyway.
Week 3: That was the day of Granddad's funeral, so I once again wasn't able to make it, I informed to group as soon as the date of the funeral was set, so 3-4 days before I think.
Week 4: we played!
Week 5: Cleric and Monk cancelled (not last minute) because it was Monk's brother's wedding.
Week 6: we played!
Week 7: Sorcerer and I cancelled (not last minute) because we were on a family vacation and our plane was landing Friday evening, so we weren't sure we'd have time to make it back home for the session if the plane was late.
Week 8: Someone tried to break into Sorcerer and I's house that day and broke our lock. By the time we got home and the session was about to start we were locked outside, and had to deal with locksmiths and police before we could sit down, had to cancel last minute.
Week 9: I was on an important business trip, and would be sharing a hotel room with someone so couldn't make it to the session, had to cancel (not last minute).
Week 10: Cleric had a medical emergency and had to be taken to hospital the day before. Monk didn't remember to tell us until the morning of the because he had been very worried about her.
Week 11: DM was ill and had lost his voice, had to cancel.
Week 12: There was a massive storm that hit where Sorcerer and I live, and our power got cut about 10 minutes into the session. We weren't able to get back online except on our phones for several hours, so we had to drop out as we weren't able to use roll20 or really hear the session properly.
Week 13: we played, and that was the end of that streak of bad luck.

We feel like most of these cancellations were not our fault, it was just exceptionally unlucky that they all happened in such quick succession.
We're not best pleased at Barbarian for using those as an excuse to keep not informing us of their plans, especially as they were quite callous in comparing my Granddad dying to them having a friend over as similar situations.

Basically, Barbarian is not denying that their excuses for canceling are flimsy at best, and has said that they'll try to be better, but they are saying that we're being hypocrites because our excuses were not any better, and they were being the better person for not being mad at us at the time.

So, are we the assholes for thinking that not all sets of circumstances are equally as valid as far as reasons to cancel sessions go?

My character is a level 10 warlock. I played her through an entire campaign with this DM and party, and we carried the same team into the DM's next campaign. For context, this is a pro DM who runs games off Start Playing.

The character is a ranged control caster. I took pact of the chain and gaze of two minds, and in most battles my strategy is to stay back behind cover and send my familiar, George the imp, into battle. I cast from the familiar's location. George can fly and turns invisible at the end of each of his turns, so he rarely gets killed, but if he does I just resummon and carry on. This strategy does mean that my character, who is quite squishy and low defense, rarely takes damage. But I also don't deal much damage, mostly focused on pushing enemies into better positions for my party to hit or locking down enemies with stuff like fear, hypnotic pattern, banish, etc.

Thought this was all going well until last week we got into a battle that was in a large open space doing aerial combat on flying mounts. No cover or anywhere to hide, and the enemies had very high movement speed so I couldn't really stay away from them. I cast a banish early in the fight using my last spell slot, and all the enemies decided I was the primary threat and completely focused on me, ignoring the rest of the party. That party does include other full casters who were actively doing damage with their spells, so it wasn't just a matter of taking out the caster first. I spent the rest of the battle stunned and/or poisoned, missing nearly all my turns and unable to do anything about it. The rest of the party dealt with the enemies. I woke up after the fight was over and everyone was crowing about how much fun that fight was and their cool strategies.

So I felt pretty bad about it, and chatted with George afterward. Asked his advice on how to do aerial combat better since he does it all the time. The DM plays George when we talk, and his response is: "Your usual strategy of being a coward and sending me out to do all the dangerous work while you hide in the back like a chicken is what you do best. You should stick to that." Literally used those words. Whole party was listening and laughing about it.

Is he right? Have I been annoying the party and the DM this whole time and I was somehow oblivious? I'm fairly new to D&D so maybe this is some kind of widely hated meme build and I just didn't know it.

I have been playing (bear barb) in a group (6 players total) going through Descent into Avernus. The DM was a stickler about the rules but told us we could use either 2014 or 2024 rules for our class. When he realized that the paladin and I (back story we have fought side by side for years) would always use flanking and be able to wallop on the baddies. He then took away flanking because 2024 doesn’t have flanking but then he said the only class that can flank is the rogue.

Throughout the rest of the sessions I was calling him out on rules he wasn’t following since he was such a stickler for the rules. He also held us back in levels because it was “too easy for us” then at level 5 (supposed to be 7) we ran into a horseman devil (not the normal rider of the nightmare) and it did over 100 damage to me in one turn, thank goodness I was raging or I would have been down. He would have killed the entire party. I was resistant against everyone except one person because he didn’t give any of us magic items yet even though the book said we were supposed to already.

I wanted to do some interesting things with my character like make a deal with a devil or have Torm bless me to be a paladin or cleric multi class. He said no to any cool idea I had. So I just stayed a barb and that’s all she wrote.

He gave us a Wand of Magic Missile with only 5 charges and then it would fall apart. I asked if it was corrupted or damaged. He said no it’s just a normal one. So I responded that the wand of magic missile recharges 1d4+1 each day. He then told me well it’s not going to because I cannot give you guys that much power and “I am the DM and I say so” I don’t remember what I said something like that then why give it to us”

Throughout the entire campaign it commonly made comments like “I’m the DM I’m supposed to be kill you f$&@ers” and stuff like that. It wasn’t a cooperative story telling since every time we would try to RP he would check out or leave the room until we were done. Try to RP with NPCs? They just say no or give you the intel you need. Nothing more.

We have two characters that started having a romantic relationship. He doesn’t acknowledge it in anyway shape or form.

In the end I was just kicked out of the group because I’m too confrontational. Because I have asked to do things not in the book and after every session three of us players meet outside of where we play and just vent about the bullshit this guy has been pulling against us and during the session.

So AITA?

Player 3: 2026 — 2 times / 2025 — 5 times

Player 1 (me): 2026 — 1 time

DM: 2026 — 2 times (the internet wasn’t working) / 2025 — 2 times

I've been playing a campaign with a group of friends since the end of 2024, and we're currently having an issue with scheduling.

There’s one player, Player 3, who has canceled several sessions either the day before or on the day of the session.

Last year, we had a conversation with them about it. They apologized and explained that they were going through a difficult time, and we understood. Thankfully, things got better for them.

Recently, though, they've started canceling sessions again.

I completely understand that unexpected things can happen, and I'm not expecting everyone to be available 100% of the time. However, at this point, it feels like the issue might be more about priorities and commitment to the campaign.

I've already talked to my DM and told them that, in some way, I feel disrespected when sessions are canceled at the last minute more then once, so i asked him to create a rule for cancelling last minute. The player would get a curse or not get XP for that session. He told me he was gonna talk to Player 3 about it and think about it.

But I'd like to get some outside perspectives. Do you think we should introduce this rule or other? Or would it be better to simply have another conversation and leave things as they are?

Any opinions or advice would be welcome.