Good questions that will become bad

Question

Sort of the opposite of How do we deal with questions that are currently unanswerable, but will have answers in the future?

I recently saw this question: What are some standard monsters or NPCs that can dispel magic?

It is, of course, a list question, and it isn't particularly narrowly scoped. List questions are often too broad and it is often difficult to say which list is the best, and so most list questions are bad questions.

5e hasn't been out very long. As a result, there are actually fairly few monsters published that can cast Dispel Magic. Miniman's answer there, I think, covers all of them (not counting spellcasting demihuman NPCs). That answer is less than half a page long, well within our limits for reasonable length.

5e is a game published by a large publisher with a history of producing a lot of content for its supported games. There is no reason to think that such content will not be produced for 5e, just as it was for 4e, 3e, AD&D 2e, AD&D, D&D basic, etc.

If more content is produced, the answer will be outdated, which is fine because the question will still be useful. However, it will likely not be long until the 'correct' list answer is too large and the question thus becomes too broad.

How should we handle questions like this, that are fine now but will likely become poor in the future?

Answer 1

I'm going to speak to the general policy question. I don't think the example cited is a very good question yet (it needs more than one recommendation criteria) but that's a discussion which should take place in comments, chat, or a meta post set aside for that purpose (and I'm not a 5e expert, so I probably shouldn't hold forth on it there either).

We close questions when they aren't a good fit for the site, not before.

We don't moderate based on speculation about the future, no matter how sure we are about What Will Come To Pass. We moderate the present situation, drawing on experience from the past to inform the decision. Some examples:

• We close old questions that were fine when posted, but aren't anymore because the RPG.SE policies have matured. It doesn't matter that the question was a good fit, we have to evaluate every question based on the current situation in which we find it.
• We downvote posts which are bad but can be improved, and then upvote them after they're improved. It doesn't matter if the post can become great, we have to vote on its current state.

It seems reasonable that we should apply the same principle to questions whose quality changes because of conditions outside the site: If a question is good now, we encourage it regardless of potential reasons it might be less good later. If at some point in the future it's no longer good, we stop encouraging it and take the appropriate action.

As always: If, after we have several of this sort of question devolve over time, the experience teaches us that the policy should be revisited, we will re-evaluate it without hesitation.

Answer 2

While I agree fully with BESW's answer as a general policy, I think there's room to be proactive about these sorts of things as well. Rather than let a question we know will be bad in the future sit around and, more likely than not, remain bad after said future date because nobody gets around to fixing it, you can help prevent some confusion by preemptively structuring the question (and in some cases the answer) to prevent the issues from coming up.

For example, with the question you linked, you could preemptively narrow the scope of the question and/or answer, from "What monsters have Dispel", to "What monsters in the Monster Manual have Dispel?" While this doesn't change anything about the question right now, it ensures that the scope of the question won't expand when more content with more monsters is released. It doesn't matter if there's a MM2, MM3, MM4, etc, since the question is explicitly about just the first one.

While this may seem nit-picky, it does serve a useful purpose in that, when a player two years from now finds that question through a google search, they can easily see that the question is out of date, and won't include monsters from any other sources that have come out since then. Then can then either use the information as-is, or if the question is no longer good enough, they can ask a new question that better fits their needs.