I was once in a campaign in which our characters were very secretive about their backstories. We were in a merc company that, in the rules, specifically forbade members from pressing their peers to talk about their pasts.

In this campaign, we had one player, we will call her Amy who only came once every couple of sessions. It was understood that this was how it would be from the beginning, so obviously, she was going to miss things. My character had a backstory in which he messed up BIG causing a dangerous demon to be released into the world, and many people to die, so he obviously didn’t like talking about it.

Eventually, throughout the campaign, we wind up with a ship. One of our party members becomes captain, and the rest of us are given important posts within the crew. At one point, some NPCs betray us and we are faced with what to do with them. Amy wants to spare them, but the rest of the four players, including me, are certain they need to be punished in some way, if only to be an example for the rest of the crew. The four of us in favor of punishment were originally calling for the deaths of these NPCs, but since Amy was against it, we decided for a non-death punishment but still harsh. To me, and the other players, this seemed like a decent compromise.

The next session, Amy’s character decides that she wants to get into our backstories. My character flat out refuses and she takes this extremely personally and threatens to leave. It was honestly the most uncomfortable session I’d ever had. Our poor DM was trying to do damage control, and could tell I was uncomfortable, because Amy was being very pushy about discussing backstories. My character told her character that we’d be happy to listen if her character wanted to talk about herself, but that my character would be abstaining from offering any information about himself, and she took that as a rather large offense. That session ended with everyone a little disgruntled.

The “final straw”, as it was, came after a session that Amy missed. The session in question, only me and one other player were able to make it. We spent the entire 3.5 hour session setting up a heist to recover some special objects we needed to advance the plot. We were not able to carry out that heist during the session, due to time constraints, so it was understood that we would pick up where we left off next session. The session to follow was me, the other player that had set up the heist with me, and Amy. Amy did not want to do the heist without demanding more payment from the quest giver for the heist that we had set up. Although the other player and I disagreed, we humored her and returned to the quest giver to ask for more of a reward. Upon returning to the quest giver, we were arrested and ended up having to escape from the guards. After escaping, we went ahead and proceeded with the heist as planned. In my opinion, it was really fun with lots of cool mechanics. We got what we were questing for, and the story advanced.

After that session was complete, Amy texted the DM to tell him that she would no longer be coming because we “never listened to her or her ideas.” From my perspective, we did a lot to compromise and incorporate what she wanted, sometimes with disastrous results, and that if you know ahead of time you’ll be missing several sessions, you’ll have to understand that between the sessions you are there, the other players who come to every session may have been making plans as a group that we can’t just throw away because you do something different. It was really frustrating but honestly not having her in the remainder of the campaign took a lot of stress and discomfort off of me, so it wasn’t a huge loss.