How can I find questions that don’t require system-/setting-specific knowledge to answer?

Question

I thought of this while reading the “this is DND-ish SE” answer. When the systems you play most have 0 and 11 questions, game tags aren’t a useful option to find questions interesting to you. How do you find questions that are helpful to read or for you to be able to answer?

• As promising as the system-agnostic tag sounds, there have only been less than 10 open questions asked with this tag in the last year or so. It’s just not an effective tag, especially for new questions.
• Filters looked like promising as well but you can’t make a tag filter that only ignores tags. The alternative, making a filter that looks for every non-system tag that exists, is unmaintainable.
• Even ignoring tags doesn’t work. Ignoring DnD doesn’t create a useable question view. Questions that don’t require game/setting knowledge are filtered out because they happened to be tagged with a system tag. The remaining questions usually require knowledge of other systems you don’t play. (And because I’m likely going to play some DnD I would need to be continually switching out the list of ignored tags.)
• At the cost of being hard to set up (you have to filter out DnD, Pathfinder, and then start ignoring other system tags which clutter the results), a search can almost work. Still, like before, there are questions that use a system tag when they don’t need a system answer that would be missed.
• Self-answering is a potential option but not everyone wants to do this.

Answer 1

Most days, you can't, and you need to be okay with that.

I don't answer questions about D&D 5E mechanics at all. My top non-system tags are gm-techniques, terminology, roleplaying, system-agnostic, and npc. The questions I've answered under these tags tend to have the following things true about them, even if they're tagged with a system I don't answer mechanics questions for:

• they don't mention system-specific mechanics in their title
• they tend to attract a lot of answers

Of course, seeing mechanics in the title requires you to know a system well enough to recognize its mechanical elements, like spells and character classes. And if you're contributing to a question that has a lot of answers already, you'll really need to make a standout answer in order to get any attention on it.

Coming up with a good self-answered Q&A might actually be the easiest option. At least if you're playing a system with very few questions about it, it's easy to make sure it's not a duplicate! As long as you keep it to like one a day, and the question is a full description of a tricky problem you or someone in your playgroup has actually encountered in running the system, you're probably solid. See this Meta Q&A for more guidance: How legit is it to ask & answer some questions about my favorite RPG system (that I have contributed some small material to)?

Most days, I can't find a question on the site to answer. And I've learned to be okay with that.

Admittedly, this is because I rarely go history-diving anymore. The systems I do answer mechanics questions about have slightly better representation on-site, so when I history-dove, it was mostly for those rather than trying to get the whole history of, say, roleplaying. There are mechanics questions where somebody already got the answer right, and questions with lots of answers where I don't think I'll be able to provide a usefully distinct perspective.

Answer 2

Search for tags that often describe system-agnostic problems.

Some notable candidates that immediately come to mind are social, problem-players, and problem-gm. In these three tags, we have 29, 127, and 41 open question cotagged with dnd-5e. Many of these questions will have system specific solutions, but there are often system agnostic solutions worth presenting as well. Your mileage may vary, just be sure that a system agnostic solution is appropriate.

To find more promising candidates, search system-agnostic and see which tags often describe these system agnostic questions, and search for those tags.

Long Term: Use the system agnostic tag where appropriate.

I've compiled a somewhat lengthy list of questions tagged problem-players that do not have system-agnostic or any system tag¹. I'm not saying every question there needs the tag, but I'm sure it would be appropriate for some of them.

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^{1 I haven't elimated all of the system tags from this search yet, but I got most of them.}