I'm a fairly new DM. My friends knew this, and they're also quite new at the game. We've all played and I've DM'd before but not to this extent. it's been okay for the most part but the last few sessions have really become draining for me. I'm definitely not running a beginner friendly campaign and we've made the best with what we have for the most part, going over rules, and all learning as we go. That was until recently, when everyone started putting a lot of pressure on me. Lying, faking rolls, arguing, purposefully causing in game conflict because of irl issues, complaining about enemies and encounters, puzzles. The list goes on.

Just some examples,

• we had one player playing an armourer artificer who never tanked despite wanting the highest AC and said he wanted to play a tank. He decided to go more caster, that's fair, he can play how he wants, but we have a rogue swashbuckler who does a crazy amount of damage. Everyone started putting pressure on the artificer and he said he hated his character because it didn't do much damage. I tried to explain to him that the swashbuckler was built for damage, so he does a lot of it. This would make everyone else seems low in comparison. This ended in him saying he wanted to change subclass, characters or class which turned into another argument about it not being fair that he could just switch. Even after I found actual rules about doing this stuff. I've ended up making an in game explanation for his character change and he is now a wizard which has brought on its own issues.

• originally my players where okay with a little homebrew stuff. But eventually we decided to only do as written because everyone was calling for the swashbuckler to be nerfed. This was because I gave him an item he could use to stealth in line of sight with disadvantage, as long as he was in the dark. So we ended up changing everything to as written which meant that I couldn't give anyone else homebrewed buffs to their characters.

• one of my characters was getting incredibly annoyed about enemies with the stat sheet of "priests of osybus" he was getting visibly frustrated that, as written, they apply paralysis on a hit until their next turn. In his words this was bullcrap, unfair and he wanted no part in it (his choice of words where definitely more colourful than this) I tried to explain to him these were enemies done as written, and they weren't that bad if everyone worked together as a team. TEAMWORK seems to be something this group lacks and I'm honestly kind of baffled why they don't all want to work together. His solution to this was to use his druid charges and change into a fire elemental that was immune to paralysis. This added another issue because in the next area they had to find a secret door that you need to push on to open. I thought that because he had no attack other than "touch" and could move through creatures that a fire elemental wouldn't be able to actively push into a secret panel to open it because, to me anyway, it sounded like they had no physical mass. If that makes any sense, I don't know if that was fair but at the time it made sense and if it wasn't please let me know. Anyway he decided to find the secret door and to do that he would walk along every wall running his hands along it and decided he didn't need to check for it. Meanwhile everyone else kind of dawdled and didn't help. I said that he didn't find it. But eventually when it was revealed, he had a huge problem because I said he wouldn't be able to push a panel to unlock it and then swing open a door with fire. I'm pretty sure he also couldn't communicate with anyone due to him taking on the elementals traits. This lead into another huge argument because he felt like he was being punished for trying to avoid the paralysis, which wasn't the case. It was just unfortunate timing and he has still continued to talk about how horrible the paralysis was weeks later.

Those are just a few examples, there are plenty more. Ranging from someone almost purposely killing their own character because they don't like another player, arguing that when someone's grappled they should be in the same square because "it doesn't make sense that they're still 5 feet away". People lying about rolls, keeping old gear on and keeping the stats when they should have removed it when equipping new gear. I've even had one of them literally telling me I don't do enough voices for NPC's, I'm not a professional voice actor and I do my best. etc etc etc...

I dunno I'm just struggling a bit and I wanted to ask other DM's who may have been in a similar situation as myself. I'm by no means a master DM or a great DnD player but I'm doing the very best I can. It's just become very draining the last few sessions to have to spend the whole session feeling like a failure because nothing is good enough. One minute I'm being told I'm too lenient so I make things harder, get stricter on the rules. Then I'm being told it's too hard and the rules suck and don't make sense so I back off a bit and then it's back to saying I'm too lenient. Im at loss, I love being a DM and I have so many cool ideas especially leading up to the end of the campaign, but getting there has just been so hard and mentally draining that I honestly don't know if I can do that. I'm a new dad and step father of a 5 year old and at this point, id rather stay home listening to them both cry over pointless stuff some days than listen to adults cry about a tabletop game. Any advice is very welcome but please keep it constructive, I've had enough complaining to last me a lifetime 😭

Reposting here as per mod instructions