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Ever since starting to build characters, I have struggled with trying to understand weapon damage and the merits of modifiers. After someone suggested that a 1d6 weapon with duelling hit stronger than Shillelagh, I decided to invest my time into gathering the info on just how strong single and dual dice weapons would be with up to a +10 modifier. (aka, 1d4,2d4,1d6,2d6,[...], 1d12, and 2d12)

Having composed everything into a nice, short and concise table, I wanted to share my findings with this community, as it has helped me tremendously with understanding D&D beyond my own limitations, and I hope this might help a player in the future who might be having a hard time to wrap their heads around the concepts.

However, I'm posting this question first on Meta as I am not quite sure how to proceed: Should I pose a question like "How can I make sense of the different weapon damages?" and then post my findings in an answer? Or should I post all my findings in the question itself?

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It sounds like the you've got the basis for a self-answered question

I'm going to reiterate a basic premise of the site, because I think the specific perspective will be useful: Our Questions give a specific problem, and the answers give useful solutions to that problem.

Who posted the question and answer doesn't really matter. If its a good problem (it being an actually faced problem is a good way of getting there) and has a good solution (for whatever applicable meaning of good), then it's good Q&A.

By the sounds of it, it sounds like you sure had a problem you faced and that should be the basic of the question. I'm struggling a bit to give direction, because I'm not quite sure what you've struggled to understand. And I'll very much recognize that it's not always an easy thing to formulate. I'm guessing we'll get a good idea from seeing the answer, so the general guidance would be to make sure you're still posing a good and clear problem. Try to ask the question as though you didn't actually have an answer for it.

Just for awareness, self-answered Q&A are often put to a bit higher of a standard, but the goals aren't different. The quality floor we'll accept is higher, so to speak. The fear is a user asking unneeded questions just to gain rep, which isn't a motivation we want to spend our efforts supporting.

Related:

Self-promotional examples which might be useful:

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  • \$\begingroup\$ The backstory is that I have a reading comprehension problem and it's taken me a while to understand many of the basic mechanics in D&D (like how spellcasting works.), sometimes leading the community to deem my questions "opinionated," vague, or confusing. I fault nobody, as it is hard to formulate a clear question when it is the concept itself that confuses you, and I found in my earliest posts that the more you elaborate on a subject, the more people tend to cling to the specifics of clarifying examples. \$\endgroup\$
    – Victor B
    Commented Jan 21, 2023 at 14:14
  • \$\begingroup\$ (example: trying to clarify your concerns). The question at play is the mechanics behind choosing and using a weapon. For instance (but broader), why choose a mace when a great club does as much damage? For the couple of years I've studied, I always felt like there was this secret formula everyone knew, but I was blinded from, one that kept biting me like a "kick me" sign taped to my back. I did ask, but again, the answers were specifically about the two weapons I would ask for, or closed for "being too vague." So it took a while, but I finally gathered enough hints to piece it together. \$\endgroup\$
    – Victor B
    Commented Jan 21, 2023 at 14:26
  • \$\begingroup\$ (last one I promise) I know that the chances are high that I'm not the first or the last to have this confusion, so now that I've spent the time and worked it out in an easy-to-read chart, I wanted to share it as a free resource for others to help them.... As for why I posted this meta question, I wanted to make sure that I follow the site's guidelines when I posted it, which you've helped me out beautifully with. \$\endgroup\$
    – Victor B
    Commented Jan 21, 2023 at 14:34
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    \$\begingroup\$ @VictorB You might consider workshopping explicitly the question and answer here on meta, see the workshop-question for some examples we have done before. \$\endgroup\$
    – Thomas Markov
    Commented Jan 21, 2023 at 14:37
  • \$\begingroup\$ @ThomasMarkov Thanks. I will definitely look into that (though the link you provided did not show any results). \$\endgroup\$
    – Victor B
    Commented Jan 21, 2023 at 14:45
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    \$\begingroup\$ @VictorB Oops, try workshop-question. \$\endgroup\$
    – Thomas Markov
    Commented Jan 21, 2023 at 14:51
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    \$\begingroup\$ @VictorB Thomas is right that workshopping your question here on Meta is a good way to make sure that it's ultimately well-received on the main site. Thomas, I fixed the typo in your first link. :) \$\endgroup\$
    – Oblivious Sage Mod
    Commented Jan 21, 2023 at 15:22
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Be careful not to smuggle the question's clarity into the answer.

Someone_Evil's answer provides some helpful guidance here, but there is one trap in particular that I hope I can help you avoid. When you have a question and an answer already, you obviously already know what sort of answer you are looking for from your question. But when we write the question to post on the site, we need to do so in a way that makes it clear to everyone else what sort of answer you are looking for without having to read the answer that you post along with it.

Now, I know that the question you gave in your post here is more a "proof of concept" sort of example, not literally what you would put into the question box, but even from the title, I'm afraid that it may be too vague of a question for the site. But since you have already done research and computation sufficient for an answer, I'm sure it would be abundantly clear exactly what you meant by the question after reading the answer. The question itself needs enough context and details so that an expert reader would already be expecting at least the kind of answer you are providing along with the question. If the answer makes clear the problem you were trying to solve, but the question does not, we've taken a misstep somewhere along the way. The clarity required for understanding and solving your problem must be entirely self-contained within the question so that when we read your answer, we can say "Yes, this is a good solution to the problem described in the question", not "Oh, that's what the question means."

And just as Someone_Evil did, I can provide some shameless self-promotion of my own self-answered questions that have done well:

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I went into detail about everything in the comments of Someone_Evil's question, but in short, the issue I've been having was the whole "proof of concept" regarding weapon selections, and asking my question here was to help deviate from the issue you described. NGL, I might have trouble formulating the question/clarifier as it relates to all weapons and modifiers, but I will take the time to revise everything with your suggestions. \$\endgroup\$
    – Victor B
    Commented Jan 21, 2023 at 14:44

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