How to ask for loopholes/hacks/edge cases or other ways to make things work?

Question

BACKGROUND: I'm a buildmaker. I'm RAW RPG gamer, following the philosophy of "GM has no say when it comes to rules", and I enforce this both as a GM and as a player. I love inventing things while at the same time trying to avoid following ready-to-use build guides. It's a mental challenge, it's a riddle, it's a minigame and I love doing it.

But since I mostly play big systems (I mean 100's of books kind of big), there is no way to memorize or even read every single rule and line of text that can be considered a clue to understanding some specific rule. And even then there's probably some errata or official magazine article that has something to add in the matter that I never knew existed.

PROBLEM: Most of the time my questions have a single goal of "how to make this work". I don't care if it's OP, broken, unrealistic, game-breaking, intended to be errata'd (as long as it wasn't in the end for whatever reason) or problematic in any way shape or form. I'm interested in making something work, per RAW, bending rules as far as they can be bent but NEVER, EVER, breaking the rules and never, unless there is no other way, relying on GM's decision, because rules simply don't provide anything to go by.

I'm not interested in "what this GM would rule" or who would or wouldn't allow something at their table. And I'm getting a lot of those, so much that I'm running out of ways to politely tell author of the answer or comment that I'm not interested in that angle, nor will I ever be. I'm interested in getting desired result, by any means necessary within RAW ecosystem.

EXAMPLE: My recent questions regarding Major Image spell for Pathfinder. I tried to split it in two (because several times before I was accused of squeezing several questions into one), I tried to specify my intentions (things I am sure should work and all I need is justification/precedent/single-long-forgotten-line-of-text-in-an-obscure-book in a way lawyer in court would present one to win his case).

I have no idea how to write such question properly to get the answer I need. So, how do I go about that?

Answer 1

You can’t make people do what you want. The most you can do is explain that you’re looking for a particular sort of solution; this is fine to do. As long as the answers attempt to address the problem, they can approach the problem however they like, even if it isn’t exactly the sort of solution you’re looking for. This is a feature, not a bug, of the Stack Exchange model. Diverse perspectives are welcome and provide value to future readers too, not just the question asker. What you can do is vote. Downvote answers that don’t satisfy what you’re after, upvote answers that do, and others are free to vote however they like. When an answer does satisfy you, you can accept it, which will pin it to the top of the answer list no matter the reader’s selected sort order.

If a question does not receive a satisfying answer, then you can offer a bounty for it, and include in the bounty text the sort of thing you’re looking for out of a bounty-worthy answer.

Answer 2

Ask open ended questions

In your current approach to these questions, you describe your loophole and supporting arguments as to why it should work, and then ask if your conclusion is correct. When people answer why it is not correct, you in comments follow up trying to invalidate or find gaps in their arguments. This (at least for me) creates the impression you may not be looking for an answer to the question, but for confirmation that your clever, creative reading works.

If you really want to know if it would work, you can ask the question open ended, for example, you can just ask if, rules as written an Illusion like major image can impose conditions. Cut out the self-answer in the question that describes why you think it could or should. That way, you have a better chance to get neutral answers.

Also, if you do not like the answers you get, you do not need to accept any. And, you can self-answer with your own conclusion, and open that up to voting by the community. My experience is that just like for confirmation-seeking questions, you will get downvotes if your answer is either wrong or unpopular; but at least this will provide you community feedback of how highly or not people think of your conclusion. You still can accept your own self-answer, no matter if it is the one with the most votes or not. The acceptance checkmark is an expression of what answer you think is the best for your question, not what the consensus best answer is.

Are you getting opinion based answers?

Looking at the answers for your most recent example questions Can you use the Major Image spell to replicate/cause other conditions?, and How does the Will save to disbelieve the illusion from the Major Image spell work?, my impression is the answers are not opinion based, they provide ample support and rules citation for why what you want does not work.

You say you like to find loopholes, even if they create abusable results, but you lack the in-depth mastery of the systems you are doing that in. When you ask a question of this nature on this site, where there are people who have that in-depth mastery, and they tell you why your idea of a loophole does not work based on that more comprehensive knowledge of the rules, they do exactly what you asked for. They answer in a RAW based way. Unfortunately, that answer means that your idea does not work.

There is a great answer by @DanB that explains what RAW means: it does not mean that if the rules are silent on something, you get to do whatever you like. It means that -- especially if you want to do something unbalanced or exploiting the system -- you need an actual rule that states what you want to do is how it works, and no rules text that would stop it from working.

Lastly, there are some systems like 5e, where the spirit of the rules explicitly is to leave a lot to the DM, often refered to a "rulings, not rules" attiude. So, when you ask about an ill-defined area of the rules, by design the answer will be "Ask your DM", sometimes with some "Here is what I would do based on my experience with this problem" thrown in. The reason you are not getting a RAW answer is because in those cases there is no rule written for what you ask, other than the rule the DM adjudicates such cases. So the answers tell you that RAW, there is no specific RAW answer. That does not make it an opinon based answer.

Answer 3

Emphasize that you are only looking for RAW answers, and that the actual problem is the thought-exercise.

You can find examples of how to successfully ask by looking through question histories from KRyan and HeyICanChan, among others.

For some game systems, asking any question strictly about the written rules will attract low-quality opinion-based answers. My experience suggests that there is a strong negative correlation between those answers and how satisfying that system is for rules analysis, so that may be a small loss.

There is also an inexplicably fraught history here around asking about the literal implications of a ruleset. You may need to grow a thicker skin if you want to splash in those waters. That's neither fair to newcomers nor right, but pretending won't change the reality.