Hey y'all, I've been thinking about this for a while and I was wondering if there was any advice here, perhaps people who have been through something similar.
I've been DMing 5e for a while; I started maybe 7 or 8 years ago in college. I ran LMoP for my roommates to begin, and I had a campaign that lasted two semesters for a different group of friends. That second one was super homebrewed, and hugely successful in that it seemed like everyone had fun. But throughout that campaign I realized there were a lot of things in my game I wasn't satisfied with, especially in regards to combat and the "difficulty" of the game. PCs blew my encounters out of the water and took long rests whenever they felt like, and I wanted there to be stakes, dilemmas, etc. That stuff has been pretty widely discussed online and I have learned a lot since then.
Since then I've only had one group stay together for a reasonably successful campaign, and I thought I could do more or less the same as I had done before, but better. I had one player from the previous campaign as well, which I thought would be a boon. He's my best friend and I love the guy, but I realize now he just doesn't like the way I have evolved my DMing. He doesn't like how there's not always time to take a long rest or fighting without all his resources, he doesn't like encounters more complex than running into the fray to swing swords and cast spells, and he doesn't like that the characters might die now. He's been pretty open about this, and he's told me that in his opinion, the way the game should go is the players face some obstacles but they overcome them, and it's unsatisfying if they don't, and character death is unsatisfying and unfair, and imo if I read between the lines he basically wants to be able to run his warlock into an Annis Hag and know that he will come out the other side alright.
To be clear, this isn't a bash-my-friend post or a problem-player post, I appreciate his honesty and how he knows what he wants from the game. The problem is I am having a lot of fun with the things I've learned, and I don't wanna go back in the playhouse. So the question is how do I handle this and AITA? Would I look for a new group, or is that me thinking the grass is greener with folks I don't know very well? I don't want to run a game that my friend will get tilted in, but I am so bored with running simple encounters that get exploded by a party that gets a long rest between every fight. Help please.
I think the rest of the table enjoyed themselves, but I do think part of it is that they weren't as invested as the player in question. They would show up to the session, put themselves in danger, and don't really seem to get the same anxiety about their character dying because I don't think they would really care that much.
Frankly I think that amplifies the issue because we only have one player that might want to spend time on a plan to try to guarantee success and the rest of the party is more "fuck it we ball" types. Furthermore the anxious player was the most frontliner of them all so the party's lack of planning is most likely to bite him in the ass out of any of them.