D&D 5E Difficulty Playing D&D: Player Still Waiting Off Screen After 3+ Hours

[Libramarian]

I think this scenario was more difficult to DM than you think, and you interpreted some of his poor decisions as slights against you when in reality he was just overloaded. To help him improve, you should have amicably opened the subject of how best to handle this scenario with 5e. Trying to bully your way through by chirping at him in game and "confronting" him afterwards will not help. He'll either ignore you or it will hurt his performance in the future by making him nervous.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I have a bit of a conflict of interest here, one of my current players ALWAYS (at least three times per campaign for the last 8ish years) tries to do this kind of thing. As both a player and a DM it gets on my nerves. I am trying not to see you as pulling what my group calls a "Ken Maneuver" witch we would define as "going off to do your own thing then expecting it to perfectly dove tail back in at the climax of the adventure."

Look at it from the other player side. Let me tell you about the great kobold round up...

it was a few years ago right around the 3.5-4e change over. It was a 3e game and we were teenish level. The DM had in an earlier level (maybe 3rdish)set up a group of kobold mercenaries for us to fight and instead we ended up making friends with them. It was great and an epic moment of RP. We then talked to them a few times. They were like 200 MM stat kobolds, and 25 special champions stated out with levels, one of them was a dragonwrought kobold who used some trick to have epic feats.... anyway back to the adventure in question, we were about to be invaded by a shadow elf army from the moon. They were going to land on shadow dragons at sun set and wreck the capitol of our empire. The seven PCs all talked and came up with what we thought was a good plan with only hours to go, then his sorcerer teleports away without a word. The rest of us were ready to 'time jump' to the fight, but not ken.

Ken had decided to go get those kobold mercs and bring them into play. That sounded kind of cool, but to do so he had to teleport to were they last camped, then cast spells to divine where they were, then fly to catch up to them, then talk them into helping (not exactly easy, it was WAY out of there league), and finding out they were on a job against some gnolls. SO he (still flying) handles the gnolls with his biggest badest spells, so they could complete that contract then come to us. Then he realized he couldn't get them there in time. So he takes turns teleporting umpteen kobolds at a time to us... end result he was almost out of spells and we had a couple dozen low level allies, oh and we couldn't play out the fight because his side trek took almost 2 hours and we had to call it a night.

 

[anvilandcompass]

Yeah. I think the issue is on both sides. Splitting the party is not always a good idea - sometimes it can work but most times it doesn't. D&D is a cooperative game after all. Sharing in your plans and bringing the group along would have helped there. That said, I've played sessions where two or more players are sidelined for two to three hours. Sometimes more. Of course my issue is different: too big a party, players that hog the spotlight and make no pauses while talking at all (push to talk rule would help...) and a constant amount of side tracking. There have been two sessions now where we haven't done any quest or any plot driven anything and in one session, two players went off to a fight club for two hours while the rest of the party waited. By the time it was my group's turn, I couldn't drive the plot forward because it was too late, and someone derailed everything by putting attention on their own character splitting the party because they could "take the bad guy on their own if they wanted to."

I had about 10 minutes of interaction maybe and most of it was my character listening to others. The DM even derailed the party enough by bringing in NPCs just to bring NPCs. Nothing important about them other than grab more time. I was sidelined from a lot of the stuff, and while I do RP in other games, in this one my character barely said anything. In the end, it was like listening to a podcast. Fell asleep on my chair a few times and another player even went to get food lol. There is a text RP going on that moves some plot - some times - but if the sessions aren't going to hold any importance, then just to a play by post game, because the sessions could be handled better there, to be honest. Even then, the DM has pulled some deus ex machina stuff to hold characters from doing certain things. So, it always feels like a constant loss and that you are being manipulated by the big bad.

It was that bad.

 

[ECMO3]

Second rule of being a good player: Never split the party.

Not because it isn't warranted or smart but because it inevitably leads to situations like this. Could the DM have done better to make it a more inclusive game? Probably, but so could you.

Instead of riding off to be the hero and leaving the party behind you could have sent a farmer or maybe used speak with animals and sent a bird or used the sending spell.

If you want to compare LOTR - like you said you pulled a Gandalf ..... and in LOTR there were hours of on screen time and hundreds of pages in the book where there was no mention of Gandalf because he left the party on a different mission like you did.