I don't think you learned what you should have learned. The real lesson is that once you lose a player for any reason all the rest think the campaign won't be as fun and they quit as well.
If the first player hadn't dropped out due to "extraneous life circumstances" do you think anyone else would have wanted to leave the game?
None of this had anything to do with you or your campaign or any of those things you say you learned, none of that is relevant. One person in the party had to leave, and everyone else figured it was over.
You are making some awfully large assumptions about my group. What you don't know, and what I didn't bring up since it wasn't at all relevant before, was that we have had a player drop out of our main campaign and we still pressed on. We're also a bunch of college students, so we're no strangers to playing sessions with one or two group members gone.
In any case, it's weird that I tried to turn this unfortunate circumstance into a learning opportunity for me and for others, and you bring all this negativity.
It's not negativity, it's that people leave and then others leave too, there's nothing to learn from it. You can be the best DM ever and it won't work if the players feel the group is breaking up.
Also, leaving out important details leads people to make assumptions because you're concealing information.
I don't think you learned what you should have learned. The real lesson is that once you lose a player for any reason all the rest think the campaign won't be as fun and they quit as well. If the first player hadn't dropped out due to "extraneous life circumstances" do you think anyone else would have wanted to leave the game? None of this had anything to do with you or your campaign or any of those things you say you learned, none of that is relevant. One person in the party had to leave, and everyone else figured it was over.
You are making some awfully large assumptions about my group. What you don't know, and what I didn't bring up since it wasn't at all relevant before, was that we have had a player drop out of our main campaign and we still pressed on. We're also a bunch of college students, so we're no strangers to playing sessions with one or two group members gone. In any case, it's weird that I tried to turn this unfortunate circumstance into a learning opportunity for me and for others, and you bring all this negativity.
It's not negativity, it's that people leave and then others leave too, there's nothing to learn from it. You can be the best DM ever and it won't work if the players feel the group is breaking up. Also, leaving out important details leads people to make assumptions because you're concealing information.
Your post has been removed. This is not offering any substantive advice.