Are questions of designer intent on-topic for this site? [2014] [duplicate]

Question

Pretty much what it says in the title. I recently asked this question and it has been suggested that it is unanswerable.

A previous question of this type is here, which by my understanding was decided to be a legitimate question for the site, but I could be wrong.

Update: Based on the answers I've gotten here, I've updated the question to make it clear that idle speculation isn't helpful.

Update 2: Based on doppelgreener's excellent breakdown in comments of the issues with my question, I have reframed it to be about design intent specifically.

The comments were deleted, but here they are for posterity:

I'm voting to close this question as too broad. At the moment, it is inviting speculation on three different fronts: (a) what various benefits are there to having a stat of 19 rather than 18 (regardless of whether an item does it), (b) what benefit is there to having an item that would do that, and (c) why did the designers do it that way? (a) and (b) aren't necessarily related (as observed by JasonK's answer), and neither necessarily answer (c) which could be, for instance, a designer quote saying "I like odd numbers, they're cool." – doppelgreener 11 mins ago

I don't necessarily have a problem with (a) and (b) being wrapped up together -- except whilst (a) is objectively answerable, (b) involves opinion and speculation. The stake-to-the-chest for this question though is that neither of those will answer why the developers did it. – doppelgreener 6 mins ago

Answer 1

"Unanswerable" is never a reason for a question to be closed!

If it's truly unanswerable, then it's provably unanswerable and proving it should make for a good, solid answer. Which makes it answerable in the Stack Exchange sense of the concept.

If it's not provably unanswerable, then it shouldn't be closed as unanswerable for what I hope are obvious reasons.

However, if someone thinks that a question is unanswerable but cannot prove it... well, if the only answer I can give is unsupported, maybe the best thing is to not give an answer at all and hope someone else can. Perhaps I can link it around to experts.

Design intent is not inherently subjective.

Either it's backed up by citable designer statements and supportable extrapolations thereof, or it's probably unsupported speculation.

Unsupported speculation isn't ever appropriate in Stack Exchange answers. Thus design intent answers should provide citations or they probably shouldn't be answers at all. So we do have a solid and non-subjective path for questions about design intent to get answered in happy Stack Exchange ways. Hooray!

It's okay for questions to wait for answers indefinitely.

A question about designer intent can be answered with cited statements by designers, and usually only by that. It's very hard to prove a lack of relevant statements, which means the question may go unanswered--and that's okay.

Lack of a good answer doesn't mean it's a bad question. Sometimes that means it's a great question!

Often "unanswerable" is standing in for some other close reason like "primarily opinion-based."

This is what your triggering comment claims. It's not really relevant for designer-intent questions (as I've laid out above design intent can be addressed without unsupported opinion) but I'll talk about this for a moment: Opinion-based questions and answers get evaluated on their own set of experience/source-based criteria which are outside the scope of this meta post but well covered by the faq. (And remember that the close reason isn't "opinion-based," it's "primarily opinion-based." There's a range of opinions supportable through experience and citation which are valuable and necessary to RPG.SE's function.)

Again, if my answer can't hit the field of the question without ignoring the site's guidelines on that kind of question, it's probably best not to answer--better to vote to close and then help the querent get it into shape so that I can answer it.

Answer 2

You shouldn’t have to, but if you’re going to ask for intent, you have to be really explicit about what constitutes a good answer to the question

Specifically, you should state that you really need quotes from developers discussing the topic. You have to strictly forbid speculation or guessing. You shouldn’t have to, but it’s very common in RPG discussion for people to assume that the way they imagine things went is actually what the developers were thinking. Discussions of “RAI” often become unbridled speculation, and that is never useful.

So you shouldn’t have to say anything. People should know what a good answer is, and should know that random speculation never is. But history has shown that such questions will attract bad answers even when they take pains to explicitly tell people not to. And I think experienced users respond to that with Close votes when they see a question that seems to be inviting speculation by not setting those rules strictly. After all, the point of Close votes aren’t necessarily “this is a bad question,” so much as “this question will invite bad answers,” and those are the real problem.

Answer 3

Given the advent of the internet, I think questions about designer intent may not be off topic, but they may be hard to answer.

There's plenty of places such as designer blogs, game company websites, "Ask Me Anything" threads for designers and such that can provide a wealth of knowledge in terms of intent about how rules are generally intended to work. (For smaller, indie designers, you can often ask them directly on their own forums as well...)

That said, I think that's also a very different question than:

What are the design effects of having the rules work like this?

Part of it is that a lot of roleplaying games copy conventions from other games, often without understanding why/how it worked a certain way previously* - in which case the designer themselves may not be able to answer that question but someone with better understanding of mechanics might, which is damn useful if you're either designing a game of your own OR trying to figure out how to modify a game you're playing.

I think that second question ends up serving more people more often.

*Of course, if you look in a lot of game books, the "Introduction" and "GM's Advice" sections often is the designer pontificating about how roleplaying 'should' work and you can easily find examples in games where the rules actually contradict their own espoused philosophy which makes their intent for play count for a lot less...