For a System Recommendation question, is it better to give one answer suggesting multiple systems or one answer per system?

Question

I wrote three answers to Are there any good tabletop RPGs for young beginning players. I made it three answers instead of one so that they could be voted on individually. (I could swear that, at the time, I’d done that because it was recommended.)

A couple of years later, someone combined my answers into a single answer. So now there is one unfocused answer instead of three focused ones. The individual vote counts (granted, not a lot) are no longer there to tell the reader what the community thinks about the individual answers.

So, when answering System Recommendation questions, should I put all my recommendations in one answer? And if so, why?

Answer 1

My understanding is that the focus on StackExchange sites is to find the best answers, the pearls. The votes mean "I find this answer useful", not "I agree with this answer" (on meta it is quite the opposite).

From that point of view, an answer may (and often should) have more than one suggestion if there is no single correct answer... which is the most common situation for a System Recommendation question. A useful answer could make e.g. three recommendations depending on different factors that are not specified in the original question. For example: "if your kids are under 7, then Pokemon; if they are over 10, then D&D Basic; etc".

In my humble opinion, one-system-per-answer encourages the "I agree" or "I like" behaviours, rather than the "this is useful".