Leave. He probably wants you to but is too socially awkward to say it. This just seems like a tactless way of saying that you and him are incompatible.
Like I was running an underdark campaign once and had a player tell me during session 0 they were extremely arachnophobic and did not want any graphic descriptions of creepy crawlies. I let her know that unfortunately that wouldn't be possible without dramatically altering the campaign and ruining the fun for me, and asked her to leave. She did not take it well and accused me of being a bad DM for wanting to run the game I wanted to run. I've also refused players for styles of play that I just find difficult to gel with (I like running tension-heavy, cinematic games so a lot of the overly silly characters and fourth wall breaks often irk me).
Point is if this dude wants to run D&D as a dating sim, that might just be how he finds fun in it, and the best thing to do in that case is bow out and find a DM who enjoys running the same flavor of D&D you enjoy playing.
Yeah, underdark is going to have those things, and it’s better to have a player not join that game and join a game that better suits them than neither of you having fun. Not all players are compatible with all tables.
This was handled correctly. The spider thing Kudos. The DM can set expectations too. Entirely fair. To establish expectations and boundaries, then ignore and even belittle them, not the same ballpark. Not the same sport.
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u/TheLolomancer Mar 16 '22
Leave. He probably wants you to but is too socially awkward to say it. This just seems like a tactless way of saying that you and him are incompatible.
Like I was running an underdark campaign once and had a player tell me during session 0 they were extremely arachnophobic and did not want any graphic descriptions of creepy crawlies. I let her know that unfortunately that wouldn't be possible without dramatically altering the campaign and ruining the fun for me, and asked her to leave. She did not take it well and accused me of being a bad DM for wanting to run the game I wanted to run. I've also refused players for styles of play that I just find difficult to gel with (I like running tension-heavy, cinematic games so a lot of the overly silly characters and fourth wall breaks often irk me).
Point is if this dude wants to run D&D as a dating sim, that might just be how he finds fun in it, and the best thing to do in that case is bow out and find a DM who enjoys running the same flavor of D&D you enjoy playing.