@Mala What I think we'll see is the rise of a new, RAW-centric RPG at some point, when 3.5e's star has faded enough and PF shows that it's not the successor for that part of 3.5e. There's clearly demand for such an RPG, so someone will write it and someones will play and spread it.

@BESW groan

@SevenSidedDie I can only hope :)

@Mala I'm curious what kinds of questions about RAW you feel aren't welcomed that you wish were? I'm pretty much a 3.5-RAW-exclusive user, and the only one of my questions that hasn't been well received is the one that wasn't a RAW question.

Is it that open-ended optimization questions get closed, like rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/98783/… ?

Or just a sense that people don't seem to ask very many of them, rather than that they get closed?

@A_S00 Well it's related to Back It Up. Mathematically, you can back up stuff with analysis and numbers but I feel often answers without personal fluff get closed quickly

@A_S00 so any question that contains 'I would like to see a math/analysis based answer, not anecdotes' is not a good fit anymore for the site now.

And it was not like that

And it seems weird to me, because given the strong compsci backgrounds many people on this site have it would seem to me a scientific approach is a natural one

What do I care if Answerer X tried something at his table and what his experiences were.

@Mala I would disagree with that assessment: rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/96749/…

That sounds less like it's about objective/subjective priorities, and more like it's related to our realising we couldn't field everything tangentially related to RPGs, but have to focus on stuff that genuinely needs an RPG context.

@BESW charop is ' tangentially related to RPGs' ?

I mean, is it, in your mind?

If it's "how can I use real-world physics to make a flaming sword," then yes.

@Mala You're right, as a community we seem to have raised our expectations for that kind of thing. Part of the motive there seems to be that whiteroom analysis can be so often wrong when tested in actual play situations… There are so many places that already cater to esoteric whiterooming, too.

@Shog9 I think that--and I'm pretty confident in saying this of at least those running who've amassed more than double-digit net primary votes--there's definitely a sense that there's a lot of janitorial work to be done, and a lot of close inspection, a lot of criticism.

@SevenSidedDie yeah -- whiteroom analysis is often conducted with a set of "generic" assumptions that are anything but

which is a failure of the broader charopt community IMO

@SevenSidedDie 'raised our expectations' .. that are loaded words and I am not surprised to hear it phrased that way by you :(

@BESW it's not just obviously unanswerable stuff like that, though; the question I linked earlier was "What would be a t3-4 melee character who would do well in an undead-heavy campaign and synergize well with [listed party members]?" and it's on hold on the basis that it doesn't include sufficient criteria for non-opinion-based answer evaluation.

@nitsua60 good

@SevenSidedDie Whiteroom analysis is the only thing that can abstract the huge differences at tables, while concrete examples intermixed too many unrelated or not relevant factors.

@Shalvenay Which is great! It's an excellent exercise to engage in. It's just the kind of thing that works much better in a forum environment where people can wrestle over it until it's really good. Here we just have up/down-votes, which don't provide enough of a creative feedback environment to produce quality witerooming.

but yeah, lets not get into that ...again...

@SevenSidedDie yeah. we are better at concrete "optimize a character for a given role under a given set of table assumptions" than at whiteroom exercises

@SevenSidedDie What community cater to esoteric whiterooming in the way the 'old' rpg.se did?

@Mala GitP

that one's easy

Not really

just don't click on anything with "Tier" in the title

(imho)

@Shog9 Speaking for myself: I'm an academic administrator at a high school IRL. I'd say that 98% of my administrative time is spent dealing with kids having problems their teachers; teachers having problems with kids, other administrators, or parents; and parents having problems with kids, teachers, and administrators. (It's some horrible bizzaro Lloyd Dobler confluence.) And maybe 2% of time I get to talk to someone about academics, pedagogy, learning, mission.

I'd assume Stack-moderation is pretty similar.

@Mala Raised the bar for, then? I don't mean it as a value judgement, just as a “yeah, the community totally has a really high standard for analysis questions now” and it's harder for questions to clear that bar now than before, regardless of the value attached to either the questions or the standards.

maybe there should be a charop.se board

sigh

@Mala there are plenty of things I don't like about GitP, but I definitely wouldn't argue that it doesn't "cater to esoteric whiterooming"

@Mala sometimes those differences matter though -- trying to overabstract optimization can be counterproductive as it starts to suck in more and more assumptions about what's going on at the table

@Mala it's more that open-ended stuff simply is a misfit for the Stack format

@A_S00 Yes, but it lacks the most useful aspects of SE

true dat

@Shalvenay Given that it worked really well for charop most of the time I was on here I would disagree.

@Mala Agreed. I often wish forums had more Stack in them…

@nitsua60 reasonably close, I expect.

@Mala And RPG.se used to work way better for “I am have problem with player at my talbe, what do?” questions, when now we have way higher standards for them and they often get closed as too broad or opinion-based. The tightening of standards has happened across the board here.

I found that it's worked well for my limited charopt experience here -- but I'm very much a role/goal-driven optimizer who wants something that works for a specific, given context, not a whiteroomer

@Mala -- why are you assuming charopt must be placed into a vacuum?

@SevenSidedDie Do you think some of that is just general fatigue with only having enough detail to re-state "have you talked to the player?" over and over again?

@nitsua60 I think so, but I also think the general fatigue is responding to something that's fundamentally wrong with the questions and/or how we're handling them?

@Shalvenay I'm not sure that's the claim, so much as that charopt questions that don't explicitly include or ask for anecdotal table context tend to get closed, and that's sad for people who like to ask and answer those questions.

not that ALL charopt questions should be devoid of context

@Shalvenay Because I am a scientist

Or, at least, used to be ;)

@Mala This strikes me as just as much a faith-based statement as someone else saying "whiteroom analysis isn't useful, all answers must have play-experience."

@nitsua60 Sorry, I don't get it, care to elaborate?

@SevenSidedDie I suspect the fundamental wrongness is that people are coming to us before they've talked to the player and tried to address the matter directly, but that might be me

@nitsua60 whiteroom-only questions get closed, play-experience-only questions not.

both are faith, but one faith is surpressed

;)

@Mala I'd say charopt is closer to software development -- and not accounting for the usage context of a piece of software is a great way to make a piece of software that doesn't work

oh hey there btw @Reibello and @KorvinStarmast

@nitsua60 I have no problem at all with people asking and answering tons of touchy-feely play-experience questions.

@nitsua60 but other people (and mods) close whiteroom/science/math analysis questions because of back it up

I don't want one OR the other, I just think there should be space for both but these days, majority disagrees so ... sucks for me and people with similar preferences.

@Mala I... don't disagree. (I disagree a little with the absolutism of your statements, but see merit in the general gist, that one set seems to be treated a bit differently than the other.)

@Mala I am interested in hearing more, but I'm running out to game night right now. Kingdom Death: Monster, here we come =)

So, what I'm seeing is two different kinds of questions being held to the same standard, but one kind of question is easier/more accustomed to asking in line with that standard.

@Shalvenay Sure, I don't say the context is not important. I say 'answerers' context is not important to me as an asker, and I do know my own questions context. Context in RPGs can overrule all so too much context makes the answer too specific instead of generally useful.

If this is true, then the issue would be whether the standards need to be different for each kind of question, or the single standard changed to better accommodate both, or if this means one kind of question is really a better fit for the Stack formula than the other.

@nitsua60 Maybe we need a rule where the question has to include what the results of talking to a player in order to be on topic (like Arqade requires an artifact for game-ID questions to be on topic), in order to drastically weed them. But just spitballing; I don't have the stomach for proposing that on meta…

@Mala The asker isn't the only person the answer needs to be helpful for, though.

@BESW Is the standard you're referring to "must include actual anecdotal table experience?"

@A_S00 There is no such standard, so no.

@BESW asker (or a reader)

@A_S00 It's called back it up here and was heavy-handedly (imho) used in the past to close some really interesting charop questions :(

@A_S00 The standard is GS/BS, which means "Back it up!", which does not mean only anecdotal experience and if people are applying it that way then we have a problem.

@Mala what I'm saying is that an answer should take the querent's context into account -- folks aren't psychic and don't know how you plan to translate from a whiteroom answer to the conditions at your table

@BESW Can you elaborate, then? (never mind you did)

Good answers explain why they're useful solutions to the problem in the question. If the question is insufficiently clear or suffers from critical X/Y issues, answers will be speculative guesses which can't support specific usefulness.

@Shalvenay Yes, of course. But the relevant context can easily be written into the question. It usually was, since it's usually the boundaries for the whiteroom analysis

@Mala Play-experience-only ones fit directly into GS/BS though, so that's not suprising. It's an asymmetrical comparison.

@Shalvenay Hullo there. Hmm, I see that our attempt at helping to workshop DForck's question failed.

@BESW Indeed. But that's not really related to charop itself, just to bad questions.

@Mala The volume of badly written questions strikes me as in excess of well written questions, but that may be a perceptual error in my part due to how often I head to the review queues.

@Mala and that's of all sorts, not just charop.

@SevenSidedDie Yes, but there should be a similar principle for math analysis focused questions, and there is none :(

@Mala Exactly. It's harder to write a good charop question according to those guidelines. The more we understand the benefits of the guidelines, the more questions get closed, and charop questions get hit harder because they're harder to write well in that way.

@BESW Do we need better guidelines, or more easily understood guidelines? Not all askers are native English speakers. Then again, the last attempt at guideline improvement I tried, with Game Rec, was more or less ignored in Meta.

It's about how the specific topic (and the way the wider RPG community handles it) interacts with Stack guidelines, not about a campaign against the topic.

@BESW So, if a charop question is "how would you build a character who meets [criteria]", backing it up should consist of demonstrating how the character or character-building advice in the answer helps the querent meet those criteria, yes?

@Mala Why should there be? That's getting the development of these things backwards. We didn't invent GS/BS to make play-experience on-topic, GS/BS was invented so that sites with subjective topics wouldn't fail out of beta for being Bad At SE. There's nothing similar for whiteroom analysis because we're not inventing things to make it on-topic.

@A_S00 in theory, yes, in practice the asker will be forced to related tales of their own use of those rules at their table :(

@A_S00 That seems like a reasonable rule of thumb, yes.

@SevenSidedDie Whiteroom analysis is math, not subjective, given a sufficiently defined context.

@Mala Example?

@Mala Right, it's not subjective--but when completely divorced from its RPG context it stops being on topic either.

@Mala It's not quite that simple. In math you have rigidly defined start and goal conditions. We don't have that with whiteroom analysis unless the question is really, really carefully written.

@BESW I am uncertain whether rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/98783/… is an example - would you say that its problem is simply that its criteria aren't sufficient to evaluate the quality of potential answers?

@BESW Using an analytic approach to demonstrate that black tentacles is better than fireball is still RPG related

@Mala Against what target?

If you want to get that specific question re-opened, make a case for it in a meta post.

@KorvinStarmast That's where the context comes in. Unless there's none given in the question, which would mean default to two or three most probable ...groups/types/.. ?

(To my eyes, the most important part of that question is that it clearly defines its goals in the What I'd Like To Do section. Without that no amount of detail could save it.)

@BESW I was a bit frustrated in the lack of help from those arguing to VTC. OK, what improves the question? Crickets Chirped

mhm, I'm sorta torn about it honestly, it smells like a good question but I can see how it's open ended enough that even a pretty large list answer like mine isn't really providing ALL of the potentially good answers

@Mala No, it gets closed as too broad. Because It Is.

@A_S00 How to improve the question? As I'm not a 3.5 ace, and not all that big on charop, I was only able to be somewhat helpful to DForck.

However, it already has two very answers that look very poor, which I take as a sign that there may be a subtle structural flaw to the question which needs to be rooted out.

@KorvinStarmast Specific context is too broad? No.

Hahaha

@Mala He means, without context, the "default to probable groups/types" solution is unworkably broad and doesn't save the question from being closed.

@Mala we seem to have crossed wires here. Unless there's none given in the question, which would mean default to two or three most probable ...groups/types/.. That's what I mean by "close as too broad."

@BESW I disagree, but even then, a simple request for this context would save the question.

@KorvinStarmast I honestly have no idea - like, the question the OP wants to ask is obviously "suggest me a few things that meet [well-defined criteria]", and its only problem is that the stack doesn't like questions asking for suggestions where lots of things meet the criteria and there's no objective way to say which ones are better

@Mala So leave a comment asking for the clarification and when it's edited in, the question gets re-opened.

Current RPG.SE approach: Lack of context in question: ok, but context is forced into answers by way of Back It Up

I prefer the other way around

@mala if the querent can be bothered to participate in improvement of question. Those who do often get them re-opened. Help those who help themselves.

@Mala Now I'm just confused.

@Mala Disagree with your statement ... must be off ... best wishes to all.

@BESW I see Back It Up as a large negative, because it encourages answerer's context (his personal table with tons of differing/custom things) into the answer.

But you just said earlier that your problem is with askers being forced to give their context.

@Mala Theres no such thing as a “most probably group”. That's the basic problem people are saying whiteroom analysis needs to overcome somehow to work well here. And if we ask for solid context, the question becomes fine. We have a bunch of those.

So I got nothing.

@BESW I would like (for charop style questions) to have relevant context in the questions, and then a 'whiteroom analysis' (as it was called above) based on that.

@Mala Okay, well Back It Up is non-negotiable. The site would be shut down without it.

@Mala That's exactly what you've been describing as what you don't want, though, so we've been talking at cross purposes.

@SevenSidedDie Of course, Back It Up can be applied in non-experiential ways, depending on the context. This IS something I've seen us struggle with.

@SevenSidedDie But there is. Fireball-relevant, an analysis of most probably group might be: percentage of monsters with Vulnerability to fire in monster manual.

@Mala Only useful if your GM selects monsters from the manual randomly.

@SevenSidedDie Back It Up is not required e.g. for mathematical proofs on statistics or math se

@BESW No, it's valuable in absence of better information (=context in question)

@Mala I think it's more that for math questions, the proof IS backing it up

@A_S00 yes, ery much so

@Mala Do questions like that get closed? Do you have an example? That one seems unproblematic, and I think we have open questions like that.

An answer which lays out its assumptions as assumptions is not likely to get deleted; downvoted if people disagree with the assumptions, yes.

@BESW @SevenSidedDie Look, I understand that for many questions, Back It Up is good and needed (etc.). But for other questions, it's actively harmful.

@Mala no, it's "what is the form of proof needed?"

But you've been talking about closing, not deleting, and closing is for questions while Back It Up is for answers. So I'm super confused.

It feels like there's at least two behavioral problems you're talking about, one for questions and one for answers, and we're flipping between them without signalling the lane change.

@BESW My mistake. But it's both. Obviously, the strong focus against charop and related topics (RAW) including the mod war against RAW a few months ago does seem to have made the minority that really likes this questions even smaller.

So having 'useless' Back It Up + tons of table context answers not deleted while 'useful' analysis answers being wiped because Back It Up is seen as panacea instead of as useful but limited instrument

has a negative effect

*minoriy that still frequents rpg.se

@Mala Have you considered writing a Meta along the lines of “Back It Up seems to interfere with a valuable kind of question. Is there some way we can make whiteroom analysis work well here?” (As long as it's not a rant about how things are currently handled, it should do okay.)

People are smart and like lots of questions. If we can make a type of question work well here, we generally want to. The only time we mark things as outside what the site does is when we do them badly.

@SevenSidedDie -- do you have the power to migrate something from RPG.meta to the main meta?

@Shalvenay To MSE? Probably, though I would always hesitate to do so.

@SevenSidedDie ah. I only ask because someone posted a "blocking google.com breaks SE" on our meta, which isn't a useful place for it because it's going to be a SE-wide issue

I'm pretty sure [feature-request] and [bug] tags are monitored by Our Benevolent Overlords regardless of which meta they appear on.

@BESW to some degree, but the issue at hand is something that belongs rightly on MSE