So one of my closest friends has a discord server with all of her friends in it. She made me an admin a while back but I’ve never asserted myself in her cord. We all just kinda shoot the shi and ask about playing games. Nothing to really mod or watch over. A small group of us in the cord have been preparing for a DnD campaign and recently had to postpone session 0. It was a last minute thing because our DM had a family emergency (that is still weighing on him). No private details were explained openly to the group, but he deeply apologized for the inconvenience and asked everyone to share our availability so we could coordinate a schedule going forward. Myself, my friend, and one other out of the 5 players did so.

Yesterday morning I got up for work as usual and checked notis from the night before on my phone. I saw that one other player had made a comment the night before and it didn’t quite sit well with me so I ended up responding. I’ll be copy/pasting the messages below to show exactly what was said.

Player also never shared their availability and still has yet to do so. I don’t really know this person. They hardly ever speak in cord. The most I’ve seen from them is them sharing their character.

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Player: Can we get a schedule made so we know when things are going to happen? I took Monday off for the session zero and we ended up not doing anything

Me: Session 0 getting postponed was done very last minute and not without reason. Let’s not forget that things can happen, people may have emergencies, and even with a schedule, there may still be days that were planned for where we still end up “not doing anything.” Trying to coordinate a campaign in person where everyone has different schedules is tricky enough. Doing so online across different time zones will be even trickier. I know it can be frustrating but let’s try to be understanding.

I could have missed it but it looked like only a few people provided their general availability here recently. If we are to make some sort of schedule, we can only do so if everyone shares what days/times they’re generally available to play. Once we have everyone’s availability we can try to coordinate specific days and times much better.

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Another friend/admin in the cord mentioned that I came off bitchy and that Player isn’t a mean person and that I should have approached the situation with an olive branch. My friend that owns the cord has not said anything as she has been dealing with her own family stuff but has mentioned in the channel that when she has the spoons she does have something to say. The person that said I came off as bitchy mentioned that we’re supposed to be helping our friend (cord owner) and how she needed this DnD group to go well and the best way to do that is to be amicable. They pointed out that DnD is cooperative and I’ll be starting off on the wrong foot by being so harsh and bitchy. They also stated that I was assuming Player was being rude/catty with their message and that I was as assigning emotional connotations to her message that it didn’t have.

I personally don’t think I was THAT bitchy but maybe I did go too far. I originally intended to respond to Player directly as other comments were made before I saw it, chose instead to just @ the role and make a general admin message, though I did make it clear I was referring specifically to what Player said. I also don’t believe I misinterpreted Player’s tone. The DM saw it and privately messaged me thanking me for backing him up. He said he had intended to “clap back” at Player but decided he should calm down first because he was very insulted by what she said. While he didn’t specify details of his emergency we all knew something had happened to cause us to postpone the session.

So Reddit Judge and Jury, am I the AH for standing up for my DM?