About Dead Winter Questions

Question

I am creating this meta in order to prevent any misunderstanding about whats going on and checking with you guys if this is okay before I go on posting the questions around.

What is Dead Winter RPG?

Put it simply, it is a variant ruleset from the d20 system. A cousin to both Pathfinder and D&D 3.5. It came to be six years ago, as a new ruleset for my group to play with. During four years, I tended to it and watched it grow as its only DM. But them, it growth big, and two years ago other DM's started to conduct games on it.

It spread over to a bunch of groups and became a complete, however obscure, system.

Since it was written in portuguese, almost no-one in the great RPG communitys never heard a thing about it. It is not on rpg.net, it was not on rpg.se, it is not on GitP.

As it sole writer, Software developer and a bunch of other things, it is extremely hard to me to keep all of my duties AND the system on check. I can't keep on giving answers by email to every doubt that comes around.

Then I looked at RPG SE. It have the perfect format for adressing questions as they rise. It have an incredible easy interface and is really more clean than forums. So, I started to drive the dms and players of the system here, so we could keep a repository of questions and answers about the system.

As it is part of the brazillian culture, however, they ignored me and kept sending emails.

So I started looking around their question and posted a couple of the most confusing subjects here, and sent back to then a "hey, there is this great site that we all can use to kill those doubts!"

Most of them never heard about RPG SE. Im hoping that directing them to this site, they start to use it too.

Those questions are not some form of "propaganda" to DWRPG. Far from that. DWRPG is not a product, to start with, but a free, independent initiative to create a system with a different feel. I never used any term from DWRPG as an answer to another peoples questions. I never went to a game rec and said: "here, I have a System for ya". It is not my interest to do so.

If people look at those questions and want to know more about or even use them on their own games, thats fine. I would gladly talk about it all day long. It's my kid afterall.

Of course, if the people here on RPG SE prefer that I stop posting questions about the DWRPG, thats ok. I wont argue nor fight about it.

So I leave this to you guys. It's okay to post those questions here, or would you prefer that I don't?

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Thanks for the great answers. I will sumarize what I got until now:

• Posting those questions is fine if I keep them relevant to the scope of RPG SE
• Having the SRD of the System up and online is priority so more people (specially english-speakers) could answer the questions.
• Keep the questions actual problems the players face or rules clarifications, as should be with any other question around RPG SE.

Answer 1

Thanks for letting us know. I'm pretty sure this is fine. It's an RPG system, it's used by a bunch of people (so it's not just your tight-knit group), and these are questions that fit in with our Q&A format.

There's plenty of precedent for various organisations or individuals outsourcing assistance with their products to a Stack Exchange site, and it's generally accepted.

There's a solid line to draw, though, where it becomes unwelcome for organisations or individuals to do that: make sure the questions emerging here as a result of your outsourcing are still completely appropriate for our site. There are companies that have attempted to use Stack Overflow for tutorials, for their entire FAQ (including questions not appropriate to Stack Overflow), for their bug report or feature request medium. That behaviour is disruptive, and people have appropriately responded by telling them to quit it. They're also things Stack Exchange sucks at handling, so nobody should want to do that stuff here anyway.

However, by your current record, I'm pretty confident this will generally stay within that line. We'll wait and see.

Bear in mind your community might have some issues with us, since as you've said your system's written in Portuguese, but Stack Exchange sites are not multilingual (except for the Portuguese Stack Overflow recently launched). That, and people can often get pretty confronted and have a bad experience when they arrive here and find their question can be put on hold in minutes, and a bunch of people start asking them to clarify so-and-so. Most people seem to handle it fairly well, so just be aware some people in your community... might not.

Overall, this should generally be OK. Just work with us to ensure the things that appear here are the kind that should appear in general for RPG.SE, and if this site doesn't fit your needs for particular inquiries, look into other solutions too.

Answer 2

My question was literally that. Insofar as there is a community and it's a real product, that's great.

We would like three things:

1. Disclose your relationship to the RPG, at least in your profile.
2. Somehow get the reference documents online so that other people can have a chance to answer.
3. Give your questions some time such that they may be answered by other people.

Treating the site as an FAQ for a product is totally cool. (I've actually encountered this problem myself on GIS). So long as they are real questions with real sources to back them up.

Answer 3

This is totally a legitimate way to use the site.

It's probably good to mention that you are the author in your profile.

You don't need to write this in your posts, though:

Disclaimer: I'm currently the author of this. If you need any more detail on how it should work, I would be glad to talk about it.

A "disclaimer" like this would be reasonable for, say, game recommendations (disclosing an apparent conflict of interest). There's no reason to add it to a simple factual rules question, though.

Answer 4

Just an FYI on your disclaimers:

Disclaimer: I'm currently the author of this. If you need any more detail on how it should work, I would be glad to talk about it.

If you need to make them, you should trim them down to this.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of Dead Winter RPG.

• The 'currently' is unnecessary.
• 'This' is ambiguous, and I've replaced it with the proper noun. No harm in being specific, and everything to gain. (Someone could read 'this' as meaning your answer, and likely go duh, I can see that.)
• The last sentence is problematic. That's already a part of our model - they can leave comments if they need clarification, and they'll probably naturally do so anyway. I'm concerned this will appear to be an invitation into discussion which will lead people down a poor course of interaction here.