Do we always need to have 'accepted' answers?

Question

Roleplaying is a hobby where the players and gamemasters collectively define the game they are playing, and although there are rulebooks, the style and rules in effect are primarily determined by the people who play. And most of these people have different experience and opinions.

This makes a asking for a definitive answer moot for most of the questions. A question like

How do you handle rules lawyers?

has multiple answers, and every and none of them are right. 'Accepting' one of the answers seems awkward when there are three more just-as-good answers.

How do you think we can differentiate such questions, and make the stackengine recognize them as such?

Answer 1

If there is not a single best answer, then the question should be a community wiki; that is the mechanism SE uses for that kind of thing.

Also keep in mind that the asker can accept one answer, but everyone can continue to add and vote on them, so you will eventually get a stack ranked list of best ones regardless of the OP's opinion.

Anything designed to generate a big (and ideally living) list of answers should be CW. The best practice there (and why questions should say they're CW out of the gate) is that then answers should be one idea per answer, and voting gives you the best ranked ones.

However, in many cases, there is a best answer, especially if people use SE correctly.

1. If you have an answer that's 90% like one someone else gave, you do NOT do your own answer, you add a comment to theirs (or even edit theirs)
2. Vote for the good answers
3. Remember this isn't a forum where these questions are "one time" things, they should be revised, added to, and voted on over infinite time

I'd say with handling rules lawyers, you could indeed have a single pretty comprehensive answer emerge that the OP thinks is "best" - of course the other good answers would be voted high too. If the poster wanted to instead do it as a "long list of specific" CW, that would be fine too, but in that case not demanded I think.

Answer 2

There is, of course, a subjectivity to roleplaying. I ask for a centaur race, or build of a monster, or tool to run a campaign and I may not get any I like. In these cases, not accepting an answer is telling people you are still looking for a good answer.

My caveat to my answer is that a question still needs to be able to have a best answer. If you don't think there is one when you ask it than it either shouldn't be asked or it should be cw.