Friday, February 3, 2023

Questions & Answers from a year of Role-Playing Games Stack Exchange

I spent a year of spare time asking and answering questions on Role Playing Games Stack Exchange. 

You can filter for my most upvoted questions and answers on the site. But the most upvoted ones are not the most interesting ones. This has several reasons.    

Questions

I found asking questions on SE difficult. A few active members use their interpretation of the site policies to limit what questions should be allowed, mainly questions about concrete social problems you encounter in play, or simple rules questions that can have a "right" answer. Everything else can easily get downvoted or closed, and once closed, nobody can answer them. I believe this is primarily out of concern that the site would devolve into a low quality discussion forum experience otherwise. So the questions I found most interesting often did not survive. 

Sometimes someone would claim I had a "X-Y problem", and did not understand my problem. While this can be well-meaning, I felt it was horribly patronizing to insist I did not know what question I was interested in, even after I confirmed I did indeed want to ask that question, not another one they wanted to rather answer, or felt more able to.  

Shutting down questions is easy, all it needs are five votes. You can pick your reason from "opinion-based", "off-topic", "needs focus" or "duplicate", and it is very hard to formulate a question that cannot be argued to run afoul one of the them if someone puts their mind to it. Even if it does not, that does not stop people from voting to close. Duplicate is maybe the most problematic, as anyone with a gold badge for the game in question can single-handedly close questions as duplicates. Even if the question later gets re-opened, that marks it as "not well-received" for badge achievement.

I found that questions about the history of the game, worked to avoid closure. They often were intially greeted with downvotes as "mere curiosity" questions, but in the end most had high positive scores from the wider community. Questions about social issues in our game (mostly DM management) were generally well received. And question on how to interpret certain game features like spells or optimization questions about feats, but of course, I could have answered those myself. 

Sharing Research.  These were some of my earliest questions, self-answering for sharing research work. Shared-research questions were mostly closed or forced through "workshopping", even though they were real problems I had had, and from my perspective were more useful than rules question you can solve in 2 minutes by reading the rulebook, because they would have saved someone else those hours or days of work. It was not a good experience, even if the people who did it meant well.
Clarifying fundamental rules and rules interpretation concepts. Questions that asked about general rules were ill received by those who wanted a specific problem you had run into during a game session,. Their position was one should never ask in general, claiming one cannot answer usefully in general. That's of course nonsense. It would be more useful to have general guidance, than only having answers for specific little situations. I'd often start out with several downvotes. At least, if the question somehow survived and was not permanently shut down by closure, it often got solidly positive votes. 
Statistics questions to help with optimization, evaluating how strong something is for game balance. These met with heavy opposition, users claiming such statistics are not useful, you only can speak about a specific situation or play group and never generalize. Individual experience from years of play, in-depth statistical analysis or surveys would not be not good enough for answers, and hence the questions were closed as opinion-based. 
Based on our campaign. These fit the "I have a concrete problem from play" pattern.
Individual Spells. In reality due to voting, SE is a popularity contest, not a way to determine objective truth. Votes are opinions, and often are as much about what people like, as they are about what is technically correct. In many cases when there is no clear-cut rules answer, what you go to SE for is to get a feeling what people vote for and what seems to be common consensus of how to handle it best. That is how we went there first. That is, ironically, the value for us was mostly to get others opinions, exactly the thing that the purists claim has no place on the site. 
Dealing with Shitty Rules.  These are questions where the rule is bad, so how to go about it? As that question would be opinion based, you cannot ask for that directly, you can only ask for how the rules work, and hope someone answers based on experience, explains the rule is shitty and what you could do. 

Answers 

If you answer an old question, you get much fewer eyeballs. The bulk of people using the site do so by looking up common, very old questions found via web searches. Those already have answers, often many of them, and often also highly upvoted and accepted ones. As answers are by default sorted with the accepted answer pinned on top, and then in order of votes, if you add one more answer without votes it will be way, way down on the page. Most people won't even look at it. And if it is not one of these evergreen questions, likely nobody is looking at it at all. So getting any votes for answers to these old questions is hard. My early answers were to those questions, for example about spells like contingency, about what an object or creature is, or about portals and glyph of warding, and often stuck at 0 or few votes.

I also initially answered unanswered old questions that irked my OCD of making everything neat. Because there was little interest in them or they did not have a clear-cut answer, they did not get a lot of votes, either. 

Later I switched to answering new questions. These get more eyballs and engagement, as the small group of active, daily users is looking at this category. However, most of the obvious questions für D&D 5e have long been asked, so these were mostly Homebrew Reviews, obscure rules corner cases,  or 3.5, Pathfinder which I stopped playing long ago and Pathfinder 2, which I never played (but had good online rules books). This worked a lot better if you care about votes and had the nice effect that I learned about other games from looking up what the rules said. 

The most popular are answers that deal with social interactions, because everyone can relate to them and have an opinion on them. These often get [Good Answer] badges for more than 25 votes. Of course, positive feedback instead of nothing felt good, too. 

Also successful are simple, clear rules answers, a short rules quote with some explanation, so it fits on one screen. These answers were successful in spite of being boring -- or maybe especially for being so, because then they are easy to verify as correct. These often become the single, accepted answer. 

Sometimes answers got downvoted to a negative score because people did not like them even when they were technically correct, or because they were answers to questions some highly active people want to close instead of getting answered, and so they downvoted to punish you for answering, independent of how correct or good the answer is. 

Because of these effects, sorting answers by vote is not a great way to find interesting answers. And because this site here is mine, here is a list that reflects my take on the most interesting or memorable answers (out of the 888 total answers I posted at the time I wrote this):

DM Techniques -- the core of DMing. Not game system specific, although there may be some influence. 

Fundamental Rule / Term Defintions. Creature and object definition show up all the time in interpreting rules. I refined these answers as I learned more. 

Real-world medieval history and game economy. These are among the most interesting to research, as you learn something about the real world.

Adjudicating fundamentally murky or flawed areas in the rules. There are parts of the rules that are not well designed, like the magic item rarity to power or sensible prices, or the rules about creature space in combat.

Sharing useful experience on PC tactics and shenanigans

Game History
Optimization and Balance. These questions look at the game mechanics and expected outcomes for optimal results, and often took a lot of work and number crunching. Answering them drove some of my own questions in turn.
Statistics. These came out of the optimization questions, as you need to make assumptions about hit rates, number of encounters (assuming short rests in between), etc. 
Glyph of Warding and Portals. Glyph breaks how normal spellcasting works. I tagged questions with glyph for the [Taxonomist] badge, but accidentally flooded the "front page" doing so. The tag was removed for [spell][trap], which does not capture these uses of glyph. I later created a tag for [portals]. which has been used independently, and in the end got there. 
Individual Spells
Helping others. There were several cases where a question got shut down because someone does not know how to answer it themselves, and therefore deems it unanswerable, or pressures the asker to ask a question they rather would answer.

Other Odds and Ends
  • Council Voting in Waterdeep this lore qeustion meant poring over lots of old books from first, second, third, and fourth edition, as 5th does not have a lot. 
  • College of Poems bard One of the many homebrew reviews. I had fun answering in rhyme. @shadowranger, with the accepted highly-voted answer was a great sport and defended it.
  • Spells known and Wizards This one is memorable because @non_novelist granted a 500 point bounty on it. Unfortunately, he could not deal with how the stack was run, and got banned.
  • Using alternate ability scores for attack just a useful collection.
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