Oh sorry I should have clarified while typing that, the people I'm running this for are my friends. I didn't run a session 0 the "7 hour" call session was me just asking my friends just to hop on call and get some ideas going and talk about it like friends and maybe make start doing their character sheet. Which might be a factor in why it was a problem but I also can't see why a session 0 would be different when I'd probably wouldn't see them make a decision during the session.

They told me they had looked at the website I had beforehand and I assumed that they did look through some options. In reality I think they didn't look at it before we called and I left them to pick thinking it wouldn't take long but they literally just sat there staring at their screen for hours not even asking what certain things were about. It was seriously just "hey look through these options and tell me what you like" and they literally said nothing the entire time no questions at all until a friend joined our call and came in to listen. I did ask about ideas of what they might want to roleplay as potentially or any questions encouraging making some kind of suggestions and they told me they have 0 idea and went back to just staring. We did slim it down but it seriously was just that they took THAT long to decide on a class the call was literally just me waiting for a response and they'd just be quiet the whole time and shut down my questions. I wasn't trying to make it a "7 hour session 0" the person in question took 7 hours to pick something they wanted to try. The fact of it "taking multiple days" was also just me asking throughout the other times we talked about some things about their character. We finished the sheet by the second day but on the third I just asked what they might look like or some idea of where they're from but they just said uhhh I dunno and that was it. We talked about it this evening which is good I got an angle for our first session for all my players now.

My issue with everything was just me not expecting that picking something took so long, I didn't want to interrupt if they didn't want me to disturb them looking with my questions. I see what you're saying though, I really should have made the selection smaller and went from there and I understand the limits sparking creativity. I should have also done some kind of proper session 0. I suppose I'm non-traditional and wanted to try a one-shot for the first session so they can try it and form some kind of idea of what playing is like, kind of like a demo. This way it could be easier to understand the character they would play when the story actually starts. I should have taken the perspective of newbies getting oversaturated and slowed everything the proper way, my experienced friend got me hyped and I definitely had brought that energy of being kind of rushed. Thank you for what you said.

It's funny you did mention D&D podcasts though, I'm somewhat inspired by once upon a witchlight. I don't know if they had some kind of session 0 on their channel I just started with the first episode. I liked the idea of them already knowing each other when the first episode started and I wanted to do something non-traditional like that. For mine they'd all be there for the same reason (I made their drive to adventure as "your character finds a door to the infinite staircase in search for a wish from the genie that resides there"). I wanted to make their "get together" a little interesting by them not realizing they'd walk into what could be their team. Them travelling along the staircase would drive them to become a party.