M. Sean Molley's page

Greetings...

I'm happy to talk about this decision [the decision to allow players to replay adventures in LFR], why it was taken, and what we hope to accomplish by allowing people to play adventures multiple times. I recognize that some folks will probably never get on board with this idea, but I think for the vast majority of players this causes little to no harm and it does a great deal of good.

First of all, let me tell you my philosophy on "cheating." I am not going to sit here and say that nobody cheats. Of course some people cheat. However, I don't think there is any value in trying to stop them. No matter what rules or systems you come up with, someone who is determined to cheat can easily get around those rules and systems. Most of the time, those things just make it even harder for honest players to play the game and have fun. For example, we could certainly make a rule that the DM is required to check every single character and confirm that the math is correct and the character has legitimately gained every XP and gold piece that the player claims. No doubt that this system would occasionally catch a cheater (and it would also find a lot of honest math errors). Of course, it would take an hour out of every single session while the DM laboriously audited each and every player character, and I am pretty sure that we would lose far more players because of the boredom and annoyance than we would gain from the subset of players who might appreciate the fact that nobody else at the table was cheating on their character sheet.

The simple truth is that this is not a competition. The RPGA has to get away from the old "tournament" mentality or it will never appeal to the casual gamer. The D&D Championship is there if you want to compete. Living Forgotten Realms should just be about having cool adventures with fun people and enjoying the game of D&D. Therefore, if we have a choice between allowing something that will be a big benefit to the majority of players but at the same time it opens up an avenue by which someone could cheat to gain an unfair advantage, we're probably going to come down on the side of being open. In a team-oriented tabletop roleplaying game it's pretty hard to see how people who cheat are really cheating anybody but themselves anyway.

I see allowing replay of adventures as being one of those things with a lot of potential win and very little potential lose. Yes I suppose there is some risk that a player will ruin everybody else's fun by shouting out all the secrets. But I really don't think that is going to happen much, if it happens at all. Someone who wanted to do that before LFR could simply order a home game with the same adventure or download it online (I'm sure all the RPGA adventures that have ever been published are available somewhere on the Internet) and read it before coming to the game. If you want to cheat and ruin everybody else's fun, you don't need a "replay rule" to enable that. It's quite easy to do. So I think this idea that allowing people to play adventures more than once is going to somehow unleash a horde of problem players who have been invisible up until now is a bit overblown.

I have personally met literally thousands of different people during my time in the RPGA and I can count on one hand the number of people I have met at RPGA events who were just pure jerks. 99.99% of all the other people I have gamed with were nice folks who were there to have some fun. I think if anything people will go out of their way to avoid spoiling things for the people who haven't yet played an adventure. But if someone is a problem, the DM has tools to deal with that. We have made it very clear in the adventure boilerplate that the DM is empowered to do what she needs to do in order to help everybody have fun in LFR. If that means changing a few details then change a few details. The RPGA also has sanctioning mechanisms in place for people who are disruptive. A table DM with a problem player who is not playing well with others should be able to turn to the Senior DM just the same way she would if that player was kicking and screaming because his character just died to a critical hit from an orc with a greataxe.

I also don't expect that replay of adventures will really be all that common. As someone already pointed out upthread, we will be releasing some 60-odd adventures a year. If you have time to play them all twice then more power to you but I suspect most people do not enjoy that luxury. It's going to be tough to keep up with playing everything once, much less multiple times. I think the situation where people will end up replaying an adventure will be those situations that already exist in the RPGA.

- You have a couple of new players who show up at a convention to give the campaign a try but there isn't anybody who hasn't already played everything and nobody wants to make a new 1st-level character anyway because that means they wouldn't be able to play that adventure later with their primary character. No problem now because you can replay it. I think most people are perfectly willing to sit in and "play dumb" on a module if it will get some new players a chance to experience the RPGA, especially if they don't have anything going on in that slot anyway, but before now, you had to be willing to break the rules to do that (even if you didn't take an AR). [Note: potentially less of an issue in PFS because it is legal to sit at a table with a 1st-level pre-gen and play dumb in an adventure you've already played, with no rewards for your own character.]

- You have a new adventure that nobody wants to DM because they won't get any rewards for their character and will fall behind their regular group. No problem now because you can replay it. Or you come to a convention and for whatever reason they were not able to get you into a slot zero. Before now you just had to grit your teeth and burn the mod. Now you can replay it. [Note: potentially less of an issue in PFS because you have a form of DM rewards, but we give away a ton of free product to RPGA DMs, and it's still an issue for us, so...]

- You have one of those bummer game day situations where only 5 people show up. You need 4 players and a DM. But there is no adventure that everybody has in common that they haven't played so instead you have no game and everybody has to go home. (Or you break out Three-Dragon Ante [Yetisburg], which by the way I am not slamming as it is great fun, but when I show up to play D&D, I would prefer to play D&D.)

- You have a bad experience with a DM who stayed up all night playing midnight madness and the adventure ends in 2 hours because the DM rushes through everything so fast you have no idea what was going on. Now you can replay it and get the proper experience. Or you have a TPK because everybody's dice went cold in the first combat encounter and you never got to find out what happened after that encounter. You can't replay it with the same character, but at least you can replay it.

- You have two groups of friends who you like to play with but one group has high-level characters and the other group has low-level characters. You have multiple characters, so you can play with either group, but you have to be super careful about which adventures you play with which group of friends so that you don't miss part of a series with a character who played another part already. Now you don't have to worry about it.

The list goes on and on. My point is not that replaying adventures is going to be as much fun as playing them the first time. Of course it is not as much fun when you already know the plot twists. But a good DM might be able to tweak a few things and throw you a curveball (I know I never run the same adventure quite the same way twice). Plus a great deal of the fun comes from the other people at the table and the roleplaying interactions between characters. That is going to be just as much fun whether you are going through the scenario for the 1st time or the 5th time.

For me the clincher is simply this: if you feel that playing an adventure more than once is somehow contrary to the spirit of the game, you don't have to do it. I totally support anybody who makes the decision for themselves that they personally do not intend to ever replay an adventure and we tried to make sure that nobody would be punished in any way by the campaign rules for making that choice. You will not lose out on anything that anybody else can get because we do prohibit people from playing the same adventure with the same character. So if you play all 60 adventures one time each with your one character and I play all 60 adventures ten times each with my ten characters, then sure, I obviously have more total character levels than you at my disposal, but my highest-level character by definition cannot be any higher level or have any more stuff than your highest-level character so we are still on a level playing field.

Anyway, that's probably enough for one post. I am happy to take any follow-up questions that folks might have or talk about this issue in more detail. I don't expect to be able to change everybody's mind, but I just ask that you give the idea some thought. When I first heard about this idea (quite some months ago) I had the same initial reaction -- it seemed wrong on some fundamental level because playing the same adventure twice has never been allowed. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this really does solve a ton of problems. They are corner cases, but when they happen, they are really frustrating and they serve as a reason for people not to participate in organized play. Basically all this change really does (in my opinion) is helps honest people avoid being put into bad situations where they have to choose between multiple bad options (eat an adventure or cheat, play dumb to make a table and cheat or turn away new players, etc.) and it doesn't really enable any kind of cheating that people couldn't already do if they were so inclined. So to me it is a great change. I also think that most people will probably have little or no reason to actually take advantage of the replay rule, but now it is there if you need it.