It depends on whether it's about RPGs or not
Questions here must be about RPGs. That's the site topic, and it's a hard requirement for questions.
That goes especially — not less — for questions about things that can be about RPGs or not about RPGs, depending on the context of the problem behind the question. Things like dice are RPG tools, but not all dice are RPG tools, nor are all questions about dice RPG questions.
Most of the time, if there's no reason to doubt a question's topicality, it will do fine on the site. It's mostly an honour system.
But when a question about one of these “RPG adjacent” topics demonstrates that its problem is nothing about RPGs and is just posted here because… we're usually helpful? It gets shut down.
(It gets shut down even more firmly if there's some sense that it's trying to get past our topic requirements by rules-lawyering our own rules or something. That's just taking advantage of our benefit of the doubt. I don't think you're doing that! But I've seen it attempted before, and the community didn't react kindly.)
Learning about / making loaded dice in general is not an RPG topic
That's what happened with the oven-dice question and with the gallium float question. They showed a distinct and noticeable lack of RPG context, and were shut down.
These questions are shoehorning themselves into our topic without actually having any RPG content to their problem. You've said right here that your goal is to learn more about loaded dice and how to make them. There's no gaming group, larger goal, campaign, GMing technique, cheating player, etc. involved in these questions. They're just looking to learn more about loaded dice — a subject that's its own topic that exists independently of RPGs, and that separateness isn't being mitigated in the questions by any clear-and-present connection to RPGs.
Contrast this with the two questions that they were inspired by (they're not the same):
Is the Saltwater Float represented in this question a good way to test for loaded dice?
This is a question asking if a dice-testing method that's been talked about in the RPG community is actually practically useful for RPG players to test their RPG dice with. That's automatically miles more RPG content than the gallium float question, which has no background in RPG discussion and no apparent practical application to RPGs specifically — it is, as you say, just motivated by a desire to learn more about testing dice.
Worse, it requires expertise that cannot be expected to be inherent to RPG experience. While saltwater floats, by virtue of the method being discussed within the broader RPG community means that it's obvious that RPG community members will have practical experience with it, a gallium (or other float) has no precedent in the RPG community, and therefore there's no reason to believe that RPG experience would be relevant to being able to answer the question. (In fact, it turned out that material science is what was needed to answer that question.)
Even if it luckily turns out that some user here can answer an non-RPG question based on their non-RPG expertise, that's insufficient — we also need to expect that our community of voters are sufficiently expert in the answer to vote knowledgeably on the answer.
Does microwaving a die significantly alter its balance?
This one has slightly less obvious RPG context, but it gets that benefit of the doubt mentioned at the beginning of this post. It cites a “a rumor online a long time ago” — readers will presume that, since the question is being brought here, that rumour was in the context of RPGs or within the RPG community, and therefore RPGers are particularly likely to have been exposed to the rumour and need it examined.
It's more borderline than the original saltwater float question, because it's only a very thin and implied connection to RPGs, but it was lucky and didn't get looked at too hard at the time. (Ironically, all these questions are under the microscope now because of the attention brought to them.) As a sense of how borderline it is, we have one mod who's inclined to close it; one who's inclined to reopen it; and another who's right on the fence and wouldn't object to it being open, but also wouldn't object to it being closed. It's very borderline. But as long as it flew under the radar, it didn't get looked at too closely and it wasn't important to get it “right”.
So the questions that these are being modelled on are inherently different: while the earlier questions were rooted in RPG-related discussions out there in the RPG-playing community, which gave them RPG-related context enough to have demonstrable or presumed RPG topicality, these new questions aren't rooted that way. They're just derived from the other questions themselves, just hypothetical and untested idea extensions, with no origin in actual ideas rooted in the wider RPG community.
We've been here many times before
This debate on where to draw the line isn't new. The flawed idea that if one question about a thing isn't off topic then all questions about that thing must be on topic isn't new, but is still no less flawed.
We used to allow campaign research questions, until we realised that allowing them turned the site into “Everything Stack Exchange”, which was untenable (and at the time, if left uncorrected, could have resulted in the site being terminated). So we stopped allowing campaign research questions unless it was about a particular RPG setting. We brought it back into the basic site scope of “RPGs”.
For another example, we field a lot of questions about interpersonal conflicts and group dynamics. Tonnes of them. We consider those questions on topic. But that doesn't meant that suddenly every possible question about interpersonal conflict is on topic, not by a long shot! These questions are only on topic because they're about group dynamics that RPG playing groups run into and need to solve in order to play RPGs effectively. As a former moderator put it so well:
Yes, depending on what you want.
If you want a question situated in "how did you get your groups to choose a leader?" than RPG Experts can answer that.
If you want a question situated in "how does the cognitive theory of nudging provide a way to hint towards a group leader" welllll... We're probably not the best bet.
At the end of the day, it's about how you frame your question. We certainly have questions about RPG groups and the problems they face, but they exist within our jargon and our sphere of expertise without any sort of well-controlled trials or studies.
If someone comes to us and asks something about group dynamics that requires deeper psychological expertise than what can be expected of RPGers' just learning things for practical game-playing purposes, then it's going to be off topic. And it will still be off topic if the asker insists that it must be allowed because we allowed other questions about how people behave in groups.
If someone comes to us and asks a group dynamics question that has zero RPG content, then it's definitely off topic, and pointing at our existing on-topic group dynamics questions is a non-starter.
As another mod put it in response to that post:
if it's a general human interaction question no, if it's specific to RPG scope yes.
Non-RPG topics are only on topic here if they have RPG aspects inherent to the question/problem. General questions/problems about non-RPG topics don't make the cut.
Our topic page clarifies our scope, it doesn't expand it past “RPGs”
It's possible to read our topic page as saying that things like dice are on topic inherently, so that anything about dice is on topic. It even says “In general, if you have a question which covers: […] Tools and equipment used while playing table-top RPGs”.
“Dice are tools used in RPGs,” someone might think, “so any question about dice is on topic. It says so.”
That's one way to read the topic page, but it won't help avoid having questions closed. It's not the reading the help pages were written under.
Ages ago, we were tasked with defining what a Q&A site “about RPGs” meant for what questions we would answer. As part of that we asked ourselves What kind of questions can I ask here?
From that conversation, we explored the boundaries of “RPGs”, as a topic, for our purposes, to clarify what that topic covered. In doing so, we looked for what it already covered, and the plain reading of our site topic — RPGs — continues to be the guiding light for what is on topic. We've since had many other conversations refining our understanding of “what is RPGs”, but none have expanded our site scope beyond what Stack Exchange gave us this site to cover: roleplaying games.
So what we didn't do was decide that our site would be about RPGs plus things that overlapped with and went beyond the edge of “RPGs”. When our help pages list off things that can be asked about, those aren't there to expand our site's topic.
Put visually, our site's topic doesn't look like this:
Rather, that list in our help page exists to reassure people that all things inside the RPG topic are on-topic, even if it's not RPG rules — yes, even their niche RPG interest that maybe they've been told elsewhere isn't “real” roleplaying. People regularly mistake RPG.se for being only about rules questions, or only about tabletop RPGs, or only about D&D, or only about face-to-face games, etc., etc. We've had conversations where we needed to explain that, yes really, LARPs count, and so does RPG-assisting software, and yes, non-rules RPG campaign setting questions are on topic and don't need to be migrated to Science Fiction & Fantasy. (Those are all assumptions about the site I've seen semi-regular users state, and have had to personally intervene to prevent them from chasing off a new asker!)
Our site's topic looks like this:
Our topic page exists to affirm the scope of RPGs for those who fear our topic is too special-purpse and narrow and doubt whether their RPG question fits here. It's not to expand our site's scope beyond the boundaries of RPGs.
Site scope must exist, and be enforced
Fundamentally, we have to have scope boundaries. We play games of imagination that model all of reality and some parts of unreality though — everything is potentially related to RPGs. We must draw some lines that allow us to curate questions and not turn RPG.se into a mushy pile of questions about everything anyone can think of.
We can't be Everything Stack Exchange. We are mandated to be RPG Stack Exchange, and to draw lines. Sometimes that means a well-meaning question just isn't enough about RPGs and will get closed, even if there are other similar questions.
Every question is different in myriad subtle ways, so every question is judged on its own merits. There's no riding the coattails of other questions to get the “on topic” blessing.
