she/her, 29, low resolution brain goblin, prolonged Cinema-Media-Arts and Polisci undergrad, ongoing Gender Situation. Asuka for short, Asukapaper for long, and Jill for real
Discord ID: asukapaper (they took away the funny numbers, curses)
One of my players left the voice call halfway through the session, minutes before the new players were done being introduced. I'm really distressed and worried about it
rebounding from this with some stringent discord server infrastructure. worst comes to worst I'll have to put more work in making sure the new players understand what's what
cw. trauma dump, doomspiral
Like I'm oscillating between being terrified what happened on their end, since they're normally a very conscientious and communicative player, and being upset. I equally can envision it was because they were accidentally left hanging for half the session due to a lack of social glue holding the evening together, as well as a delay getting new players' character sheets ready and providing them grounding in the world through gameplay
I am genuinely and deeply terrified that I overcorrected on making sure the new additions weren't bored by forgetting to check in to their character, which I'm normally very good at not forgetting but I did exactly that this session
(edit: one of the most important things to work through was the new netrunner, who I made sure had plenty of unique choices that could make the table more or less money but the netrunner's player neglected to give their character a freaking cellphone, derailing my usual quick phone exposition for something more involved. I was flying without a map and lost a second hour of play out of four for my hubris)
so when finally all timelines converged and the PCs were all in same place, the most important person to orient the rest of the table was gone. I was horrified. I was a hair's breadth from cancelling the session. We sleptwalked through a bit of the combat encounter I had prepped for the party after I calmed myself and screwed my courage to the sticking place, letting the new players sit in and have some fun exploring being bewildered without a guide (it's a VR sim, so thankfully the whole instability could be played off as the tech not working right, or people getting forcibly jacked out as underhanded things happen in the background and such)
I'm going to head into bed at a Reasonable Hour(tm) and hopefully the other shoe drops whether this is an accident or I need to have a conversation with the player about how to make sure I can keep them engaged (I know that's not reasonable on my part. this is a communicative activity and I have no idea what the heck is going on, but I'd rather mend bridges if I can help it. It's my one flaw besides being a raw nerve guided by RSD and autistic overwhelm)
sleep's going to solve this. I may update within this comments section, at least for my own therapeutic self-journalling purposes. I was riding so high, too. I just added a new emote to the server that was an NPC villain who'd captured the ire and imagination of the party.
I'm very proud of that character. It's like I took Sharks, a concept near and dear to my heart, and asked the important question: "What if I removed all her redeeming qualities (her ride or die nature with the people closest to her), made her unambiguously evil, made her vaguely fascistic in that 'survival of the strongest' sense, but she was still just as if not more gay." Heidegger is a weird little freak; Everyone should praise her because she said so
SCENARIO SPOILERS
I doubt any of my players will read this far, so I'll confide that there's something very sad about embodying Heidegger despite her being this fairly flat character in performance (a good kind of sad - perhaps coming from a place of bleed but a valuable place of bleed). She's a competent surgeon, and makes a lot of scratch by disposing of the necessary scruples that should come with the trade, but she's bereft of a lot of those essential human things that keep most people going. She can't get affection beyond knifepoint, both because she doesn't know how and her actions render her a monster. Heidegger is, rightfully, a shunned person. Is someone like that worthy of love? Heidegger says so
Sleep didn’t solve it. I can get in this person’s DMs again but they’ve ignored every single one yesterday