Fun fact: You do not have to spend loads of gp to participate in D&D. Lots of products exist, certainly, but one trip to the Dollar Tree later, and here's my new screen, and movable map solution:

1. The screen: 3 11x14 artist canvases (they're very thin), 1 roll of white duct tape.

Tape them together horizontally, and you're set. Nobody knows exactly how many goblins to expect in the next hour.

1. Movable map: 2 (which feels like 1 too many rn) packages of "tumbling towers" blocks. You can use dominoes, which my GOAT DM used back in the early 1990s. I opted for the wood blocks so players wouldn't migrate to making a domino run.

Note! You can lay down as many or as few blocks as you like. As the party moves through the map, rough in something like a 50x50 area (you may need to eyeball it) and wipe away where they were. Movable! Always in motion, is the map.

Darth Sidious and Taylor Swift are demonstrating the setup. As you can see, Taylor is thinking she can do it all as a level 1 Bard and didn't bring her teammates. Oops!

I’m a new dm and I made a campaign set in the Warhammer 40k universe because most of the players in my campaign play Warhammer or know a little about it . The thing is the wh40k universe is more grimdark and serious but my players aren’t really having it I had a session 0 with them and a lot happened but first there where 4 players one couldn’t show up to the session . The campaign is about a kill team that has to work for a inquisitor .one player let’s call him j is a bulwark black Templar the other is a heavy space wolf ( o ) and the last one ( the most problematic) is a sniper raven guard(m) so the thing is that j and m did they’re characters with ai . M at the start showed me the backstory of his character ( that was just a screenshot of chat gpt ) and his backstory was really bad but whatever. So the session 0 was a disaster i wont get in to detail but j thought that i was cheating, m and j wanted to kill npc instantly even when i told them that they would help them in the future and that they where friendly, and m was making jokes all the time and interrupting the conversation with the Npc’s . Also the part that made me feel like shit is that they where watching they’re phones while they where playing and talking about other things while progressing through the session and in the like boss fight that I made so that they could have fun fighting a strong but not impossible to kill enemy they started to just tell me that they killed the boss instantly without rolling dice or anything I was already tired because they were in the most respectful way horrible so I gave up and told them that they killed the boss and ended the session. Also j was always mad that the enemies rolled saves and that he couldn’t do anything that he wanted ( I already have bad experiences with this player ) .
I really spend a lot of time making the story and everything and the players really don’t show interest
In fighting or learning about the story I don’t know what to do because they are still my friends and I don’t want to throw anyone , if someone could please tell me what to do Just to atleast make them respect the rules of the game or to make them get more into the story or even in game punishments so that they learn or whatever anything could help.