@ColinGross Show them the UA Theurgy subclass for Wizards. Then cry when you realize you were dumb enough to show them the UA Theurgy subclass for Wizards.
"I'm a wizard." "What's with the apron, butcher knife, and the duck?" "Oh, I'm a chef, I work with meat, and I think the duck is pretty neat. Colorful feathers."
"I don't think a duck feather is going to qualify as a phoenix feather." "Have you tried? Maybe the gods are busy and won't look too closely."
@NautArch Yeah I can't speak to why that one was allowed, but the wording of this one definitely fits squarely in the realm of questions that are not allowed here currently. Maybe a tweak would fix it, but I can't think what it would be.
"How do you guys handle this kind of situation in your tables?" I mean just this part is enough to set off alarm bells. Though I don't think the phrase alone means the question is POB at its core.
Welcome to the site! Take the tour! Unfortunately, the site can't help you design your mechanic. Instead, the site can offer suggestions as to how to employ existing mechanics or the site can critique a mechanic that you've already developed. These forums are more appropriate for gathering new ideas. The site's happy to deal with many other kinds of questions, though! Thank you for participating and have fun! — Hey I Can Chan6 mins ago
This is also a good point. They are asking us to design the mechanic which is something we don't do.
I think what it boils down to is that Stack Exchange, because of the existence of voting, confers a sense that some answers are defacto better than others. That's appropriate when, for example, someone asks something like "Does an Ice Elemental take damage from the Fireball Spell"—some answers are going to be more correct than others. But questions like "what's the best way to design non-combat encounters" have too much personal value judgement. Just because *most* people like one particular solution the most doesn't mean it's right for you.
FWIW, I feel Stack Exchange is missing a step by not presenting a suitable framework for handling questions with no "obviously best" answer. We get a lot of really good questions that we have to respond with "take it to chat" or "go to Reddit/some other forum", and I'm not sure that's the right approach. But SE doesn't give us the tools to handle those questions directly ourselves.
@NautArch Maybe, I would have agrued that the open question is POB as well though. So, at least I seem to be consistent in my personal rulings between the two.
Instead, we have to reframe and rephrase those kinds of questions. "Give us what you've specifically done to solve this problem, and we'll critique how effective it is." And those kinds of questions are legitimately useful, but they also skirt around the actual problem the OP is trying to solve.
And then there's my personal issue with going in and making those changes directly to make it applicable and not guiding the querent to do that which would ensure we're answering the question they want answered.
@NautArch I actually didn't think the answers really answered the question that well either honestly. I don't think they moved beyond "this is what I did" step and actually adressed the core question. This was part of my reasoning.
@Xirema definitely something we see a lot for sure.
@Rubiksmoose Yeah. I feel like the issues that require some mental gymnastics to pose as a stack question is fair because the answers may require similar mental feats.
Also, might preclude some questions as the putative poster sorts it out in the process of trying to get it into the correct format.
@Rubiksmoose Which is why, not just for rpg.se, we really need a framework for questions whose answers are necessarily going to be personal-preference based.
@Rubiksmoose Expanding from a narrow view of Q&A to encompass the uses of the forums that people get pointed to for discussion, pontificating, or personal opinions
@ColinGross I see I see. Yeah I don't really agree that SE should try to accept these kinds of things because I don't think it can. (I misunderstood earlier when I agreed).
@Carcer This is an easy-to-overlook point. A lot of sites (especially StackOverflow from my experience) have highly upvoted questions from years ago that, if asked today, would be closed for being off-topic.
@ColinGross Not just talking about the answers though. SO has questions like "What are some good C++ books", a topic which is blatantly off topic by today's standards. But the question was first asked almost a whole decade ago, and edited/maintained over the years.
At any rate, I don't think scope creep is a defacto concern. I think SE should be working harder to accommodate questions that aren't going to have objective answers. But I also feel we need a new, additional framework than the one we're currently using, because just saying "we're now permitting subjective questions network-wide" would be disastrous.
@ColinGross Maybe. My instinct was more like "questions where you can vote on the question, but not on the answers", but of course that has an incentive problem, where no one bothers to provide any answers (unless maybe we gave people karma for the degree to which the question was upvoted + how much the OP felt the answers aided them?)
TBh, if I knew exactly what the best solution was, I don't think I'd be explaining it here, I'd be working for SE as a software developer, actually building such a solution. XD
We aren't here on the Stack to read the rulebooks to people. We're here to help people learn how to synthesize the mechanics, the non-mechanical text, the social context, our personal experience, the learning of the broader community, to apply all that to a particular real-life problem someone's having and find a solution for it.
@KorvinStarmast The issue I have with that post is that the framework of how SE actually works is at odds with how they're saying SE is intended to work. Because the way that SE is structured encourages posts that basically boil down to "I want to get impregnated by a dragon, can you quote me the exact rule that either permits or prevents me from doing that?".
@Xirema The answer to that is pretty wrote. No rules address it. Similar to the programming exchanges where someone essentially asks how they can solve something in linear time that is known to be polynomial.
@Xirema Personally I do feel we are a bit too fast to close questions for being too broad. There's a distinction between "hey, what are some cool ideas for a pirate-themed campaign?" and "how can I design an interesting social encounter around trying to get in good with nobles at a ball?" and I worry if perhaps the line we use to measure what's acceptable has gone too far in the restrictive direction
@ColinGross But that's the thing though: if no rules address it, then that's an easy answer: "The rules don't concern themselves with this, talk to your DM about your weird Dragon fetish".
@Xirema Yeah. It's not a bad question. It's just a wrote answer and is unlikely to get much attention. Seems like a fine fit. Specific question with specific answer.
I understand the latter question is still more likely to attract less good answers but I'm not sure our judgement on whether it will get so many less good answers as to be not worth having here is on point
the one has the real obvious answer of yes because there's half-dragons all over the shop in D&D but I think the question would also be okay if it were some lesser known creature where the answer may not be so obvious
an RPG expert may know of some obscure rules that describe that or of bits of fluff or lore from the vast landscape which evidence that such pairings or possible or something that explicitly denies it
but the asker doesn't need to specifically say "I need rules for this!" for it to be a valid question
anlwnetnilbul It was just an example question I wasn't trying to provoke a discussion about Dragon/humanoid realtionships WotC why would you leave this pandoras box just lying around for us to open
While True Polymorphed, say into a dragon, can you get pregnant? If so, what happens when you revert form? I am a player in a D&D game that wants to know.
@Xirema This stack ill serves RPGers if all it can do is play RAW rules lawyering. That is one thing in our tool kit, to be sure, but that is only a fraction of what RPG expertise is all about. This isn't about coding. That's my two cents. Some of our best answers are about DM "how to handle this" that Isn't In Any Book or in Any Rule.
IMO, our best approach to various problematic questions includes asking "what problem are you trying to solve?" in a comment to help the asker focus on what they need an answer to. When we do that, I think we get pointed to where the SE model works best.
Hey guys if I might interrupt... Do you know any chat/forum (or there is even an stack for this?) where I might ask about a problem I have with steam voice chat? 'been googling for a few days and I'm not finding an answer that helps :/
@doppelgreener there is, useless. Asked and I was told to look at the other answers. There were tones of similar but not the same question, and a few taht had the same problem but no real answer
I'd had mic problems the last few months where, apropos of nothing, the system stops recognizing the mic, until I restart the computer or disable/reenable it.
and yeah, I checked if the mic is the selected source, and no, I don't have the "listen to this device" option enabled
@Xirema they hear themselves talking, and my games or whatever is going on my pc. If the mic is connected they also hear me, but if I unplug it, they hear everything but me
so, it's rather annoying for all the parts involved
@Carcer I think the assumption that closing is a bad thing is the problem. It's better to close it, verify and clean it, than it is to wait. Closing is a good thing in terms of developing better questions. The problem is that people feel bad about getting a question closed when theyshould feel good about getting engaged to make it better.
Unfortunately, it's not a great idea to tell people their feelings are wrong, and the Stack Exchange has made only superficial efforts to actually change the closing process to improve the experience.
@BESW Right. It's not about telling them their wrong but having a process in place that's clear, understandable, and presented to new users at the start. And I don't think we have that.
@BESW I generally don't think SE has/had network Policy problems. I do think the network has design problems and (especially, ESPECIALLY Stack Overflow) cultural problems.
The Stack's underlying philosophy is "We carefully designed an interface to work well for a niche localized purpose with a specific community, and now EVERYBODY can try to use it for EVERYTHING without making any changes to the tool--just change your policies about how to use it, that's all you need!"
And now that they're realizing this leads to elitist exclusion problems, they're trying using the same attitude: solving infrastructural problems with policy modifications and superficial phrasing changes.
I mean, look at how people, especially high-rep users, got when the admins said "hey, our site feels hostile to some people using it", and the collective community response was this hyperbolic outrage that, in an irony none of them seemed to grasp, reinforced exactly the reason the staff felt like they needed to address that.
But what the admins don't get is that their site design reinforces those cultural problems.
@BESW Though I do think the "new contributor badges" is helping somewhat maybe? I certainly have modified my behavior because of them to try to be more accomodating.
@Rubiksmoose It's... a step in the right direction, maybe. But it's still a user-facing solution rather than a designer-facing solution. I'm not sure it's much better than changing "closed" to "on hold" in terms of actually addressing the site's designed hostility.
The "new contributor" badges are still about telling their users to "be nice," not about making the site's design nicer.
@BESW Yeah I agree. It is a small change. And I really can't say what impact it is having on the actual people who are impacted (new users). But yeah. I was just pointing out some progress has potentially been made. But I do agree with it being user-facing rather than adressing underlying design issues.
It feels like it's treating symptoms rather than causes.
And to be sure, I don't have actual solutions to this. I have some training in facilitating small real-world communities, but online community design is beyond me.
@BESW If anything, it isn't actually treating anything. It is telling us to help paint over the flaws of the site. In other words, hopefully by going out of our way to be nice and accomodating (though good by its own merits) hopefully we can reduce teh impact of poor design.
@BESW Yeah, pretty much. Misaimed site design caused toxicity problems in the community, and they're trying to treat the toxic community itself instead of addressing the things that caused the community to become toxic in the first place.
To be fair, trying to wrangle a toxic community is, in-and-of-itself, a commendable effort.
But if you want those changes to stick, you need to deal with the underlying problems.
And stacks are user driven communities. Several stacks seem to have well-meaning users that move in in the formative stages, become administrative or influential, and then impose their particular culture of acceptable, which may not always be ideal or entirely compatible with the stack toolset.
One challenge is a process common to silicon valley ventures: a small, localized project got much much larger than it was originally intended, but its project managers only increased the scale of their process in response rather than checking whether their original assumptions and goals needed to change in response.
(cf Facebook's really not wanting to deal with the responsibility of becoming a major international information distributor because that wasn't in their original plan.)
Case in point: Stack Exchange still doesn't properly manage foreign language versions of the site. Like 30% of the posts that land on Stack Overflow are obviously written by people for whom English isn't their first language meaning 1. They have to translate their problem to English, losing meaning in the process and making it difficult to explain their problem 2. Users read these posts in broken English, and get angry, because bad spelling/grammar tends to upset people 3. More effort is spent just figuring out what the root problem is
@MikeQ I mean, there's all sorts of epistemological implications about the role of the user as an impersonal cog in a machine, and the way using policy to paper over design problems leads to users taking authoritative stances which easily slide into bulllying.
@MikeQ I mean, I don't want to spend a bunch of time unpacking the sociopolitical aspects. Short version is that if you read a paragraph that's written using poor spelling or grammar, you're more likely to approach its perspective/content with incredulity or hostility.
The Stack Exchange devoted years to developing an interface and infrastructure to enforce an epistemology that values pithy independent responses to clear, precise problems. This interface and its accompanying infrastructure actively discourages discussion, ambiguity, and accompaniment.
Then they applied that interface to their space for discussing policies, identifying ambiguities, and accompanying each other.
It's very telling that the Stack Exchange, having defined itself by its ability to hone an interface that creates a community, has put literally no effort into crafting the interface for that community's backroom.
Also, check out how the official response to "it's really hard to learn how to use the site" is "well if you're not going to put in the effort then you're not the kind of person we want using the site."
user15026
9:04 PM
@BESW So much this thing
user15026
@BESW Also this thing makes my heart sad, and it's something I try to fight a lot because like...we each had to learn, why can't we extend the kindness to help others learn it too
The number of times I see "Why was I downvoted?" on several stack metas is a sign of community problems.
And the answer is always, "Downvotes don't need a reason, you'll have to deal with that." the user gets frustrated and ceases to participate or engages in further arguing.
@Lord_Gareth I find it's very easy, once we've gained understanding of a thing, to forget what it was like to not have that understanding --and even more, to not remember what it was like when we didn't know it was a thing at all.
@Maximillian Yeah. It's true, because of the way the site's designed. But that's arguing from the wrong direction; the site doesn't effectively communicate how its wisdom-of-crowds philosophy trivialized individual contributions to the sorting algorithm.
Something like maintaining a knife. It's a tool that needs to be in good shape to work for you. But if you constantly keep sharpening it over the slightest imperfection, it's no good to anybody when you've grinded it down too far.
Hmm. I mean, filtering out the ambient toxicity that one would expect to see anywhere else, the only unique hostility I see here is the insistence that questions must be asked a certain way, or comments must be used a certain way, and giving new users the ultimatum to either adjust or be silenced. Which is on us, the users.
@Maximillian So what you're saying that I should wait until yellow sharpness before using my whetstone instead of putting on my Ghillie right when I drop out of blue.
@BESW That bit was hard to phrase properly. Was trying to avoid the implication that a certain threshold of toxicity is tolerable or acceptable. Only that it's not unique.
We do have a tendency to get a bit elitist sometimes; it's easy to forget what it was like to be new to the ideas underlying RPGs, and to learn the systems. I'm always happy to see "new blood." Keeps us grounded.
RPGs have lots of rules and rely on semi-structured communities and (implied) social contracts to resolve rule questions and keep a game going. So a semi-structured community for RPG game questions sounded absolutely ideal.
Early on 'list questions' were the hot debate, as well as wiki format questions.
@Rubiksmoose Well, there's also the occasional pattern where high-rep users become the de facto community authority, and may behave rudely to those with differing opinions. But I didn't want to insult anyone by saying so.
The nails in the coffin for me is when I start seeing well thought out, well formatted questions get posted and get closed because one person made a counterpoint and four people just clicked 'close' on the review queue because there's a badge for working so many items in the queue.
I honestly don't have high hopes for our Stack Overlords turning this bus around, but I think that we (users, designers, Internetians at large) can learn from it so that whatever communities we work with next benefit from the experience.
@Rubiksmoose I did, however, leave another stack community that seemed to orbit around a group of very high-rep users, whose go-to response (to the slightest disagreement) was basically "I have more experience in this therefore you are wrong and inferior"
Several stacks seem to have a tipping point where the moderators become an active police force trying to screen all new content as it comes in for compliance, rather than whether or not the user can get help the way their question is posted.
@MikeQ I think there's a PhD thesis in studying how users with high rep and long experience on one Stack seem to forget all their learned experience and need to re-negotiate basic Stack principles the instant they join a new beta.
Somewhere in the help files it outlines that moderators were intended to be minimal involvement, taking action only when absolutely necessary. And I'm pretty sure most are way more active than that.
I kinda question what was built and what was intended, but I lost the desire to see a meaningful resolution and I've gone back to private forums for most of my information needs.
I don't understand it either, but it establishes that there's a gap between what was intended and what's actually happening. You see it in user systems all the time.
It creates this weird tension in that a site community actually doesn't want their most active and helpful users to become moderators because then they're strongly encouraged to be less helpful and active.
@Rubiksmoose Re: my earlier point, though, each stack has standards for implicitly measuring "good" questions - those that get a certain range of answers, or require a specific amount of research to answer properly. This becomes a pattern, and questions that adhere to the pattern tend to be well-received. And it becomes a problem, though, when users assume that the pattern is a necessity.
@Maximillian A lot of user systems seem to have been designed by people whose training is exclusively in the technical aspects of interface design rather than also having training in designing community spaces.
[rummages for old link]
"Post-Narco Urbanism," a 99% Invisible podcast episode about re-designing a Colombian city to reduce cartel influence by changing the community spaces.
I wish there was an easier answer to making the stack system work. I kinda stopped caring when administrative action removed a comment and told me what I meant by it rather than asking what I meant by it.
@Yuuki Yes, this. The "binding vote" mechanic is symptomatic of an underlying attitude toward authority, I think, which bleeds out in other ways as well.
@BESW Do you feel that the binding vote mechanic is bad or that the community's attitudes towards the mechanic is bad? Or both (or neither)?
user15026
@Maximillian Yeah, we've been labelled as exception handlers, so things get weird fast and we kinda can get hobbled, which is like the opposite of what should be
I'm not sure myself. On the one hand, I can see why people thinking binding votes are bad. On the other hand, I feel like when I elect these moderators, I trust them and so I want them to use their binding votes.
@Yuuki @Ash Hm, it's complicated for this early in the morning. I think the binding vote mechanic has these problems. But further, I think the fact it exists indicates that our Stack Overlords have a particular attitude toward authority and how it should be wielded, which also manifests in other design/policy choices which may be more subtle but contribute to the Stack's overall community atmosphere.
It's maybe getting out into the weeds a bit, but I think part of the Stack's challenge is that its designers don't recognize their own epistemology and confuse it for simple and changeable policy rather than seeing how their perspective permeates everything about how they engage with the endeavor.
And then there's moderators who are well meaning, but upon enforcing policy (whether said policy is right or wrong) alienate users. I mean that happened in this stack to the point that there was push to get stack to recall/remove one of our moderators and all that did was drive them to listen to users even less.
user15026
@BESW very slowly breaks down the words Okay, yeah, I think I agree
Very early in my time on the Stack, someone (maybe Brian) called it "the Stack experiment," and I still think that's probably the best way to approach the whole thing. I don't think anyone in charge of the Stack Exchange thinks of it that way anymore though.
I helped run a place when I was younger. What I discovered is that our most vocal users didn't actually represent the actual wants/needs of the user base. But that's all the moderation team had to go on.
Stack was built for code questions and code answers. Somebody tried to respond with 'Why do you want that?' instead of a TRUE/FALSE answer and people have been upset ever since.
That said, I will still take reading between the endless arguments of stack over EXPERTS EXCHANGE.
As for this place, I've gone back to Paizo's boards for PF questions or I just pop up here in chat and find one of our local experts. Actually using the stack seems less ideal.
And that's the thing. I wanted stack to work, but ultimately I had to give up on it because I didn't /need/ it to work. (want/need, big separation there)
Screening content to make sure there is only good content is a noble goal. But if you screen so hard that users with very valid needs or attempts to help said users are screened out regularly, that's not a community, that's a mostly closed vault.
The policy was put in place that 'We do not assist with modded minecraft questions, consult the mod's resources'. Noble goal since game mods introduce so many points of failure out of scope for Arqade.
But people started edging that rule/justification onto so many other minecraft questions, even some that were legit aaaaaand before I gave up it'd pop up as a point of tension roughly annually.
(Correction, it was a block on minecraft crash logs from modded games)
Earlier in my stack time, the other fun one was asking valid questions onto Stack Overflow only to get, "This is your class homework disguised as a valid question, isn't it?"
"Uh. No. I need help with this function call in VB.NET." CLOSED.
@MikeQ just a round table of people that all have the same face and are communicating only by pictographs in thought bubbles. To the side, a create that we can only assume is a dog.
For some reason one of the players appears to be a white Barack Obama.
@Maximillian I think the point where I left scifi.se was when someone argued that allegorical fantasy like Gulliver's Travels is off-topic because it's allegory and therefore not fantasy, and then someone else added that a story about talking animals isn't fantasy if there aren't any humans in the story, and then the old "we aren't here to talk about kid's TV shows"/"BUT TRANSFORMERS" debate crawled out of its grave and I ran and never looked up.
@Maximillian This is what I meant before. A stack is advertised as a Q&A site for questions about some topic. But if a question is asked in an improper way, or involves certain subtopics, then it is rejected on principle
@Carcer Don't forget about a size-changing d20, which may be as large as the players
While True Polymorphed, say into a dragon, can you get pregnant? If so, what happens when you revert form? I am a player in a D&D game that wants to know.
