This conversation was continued two years later with a different conclusion based on the experience gleaned from enacting this one.
I was looking at What should I read/watch for information about the 1930s United States?, and I was wondering, is this really appropriate to the site.
Should we allow this type of question on the site?
So, here are some points in defence of campaign questions:
In games like Call of Cthulhu, the setting is often more important than the game mechanics. Getting good locations in, say, 1930s Shanghai is essentially how you plan a scenario. So I'd be wary of, for example, insisting that questions must ask about specific mechanics.
The answers I've got have been helpful. That's important, I think: asking the question hasn't been worthless.
Where would you draw the line? There's another question about Dogs In The Vineyard in the Holy Land: that question also asks about specific setting elements. There's a question about how to create old-looking newspaper articules: that question isn't directly related to RPGs and could apply to other types of writing.
So, although I understand the doubts, there is some sense in allowing questions about campaign settings.
A great many games have historical issues which arise from game play, and affect play, but are not actually rules issues. These should be allowed, albeit kept focused.
Pendragon sites are riddled with historical questions, usually answered quickly by the more knowledgeable, and in some cases, answered by the rules-lawyers with a "History says X, but Greg changed it in book Y" and occasionally with a "History says A, Bead and Nennius Say B, White says W, and Mallory says M, and Greg said Z."
Call of Cthulu also has lots of historical references that can make or break adventures... like the recent question At what point in the 20th century did automobiles and telephones become ubiquitous?... its highly useful for not just CoC, but also anyone running any 20th C historical or fantasy-historical game.
Alternatively, one could simply bar all setting questions, but I'm opposed to doing that.
If it's something that is best answered by RPG experts, it should be on topic. The point of the Roleplaying Games SE is to get answers from RPG experts, so if we're the best people to ask then the question is clearly in the right place.
This covers any question that is best answered by an RPG expert, even if it's a question about real-life history. Asking How late in history can I set a campaign based in the US without cars and telephones being widespread? is a better fit here than History SE, because the asker is interested in what time period would fit best for a campaign, which leads to different answers than you'd get for a purely history-based question.
I would say that setting questions are perfectly valid, so long as they aren't purely historical. But I'm quite biased because of my gaming/philosophical question set.
It's a tough one.
Campaign research and world-building are pretty integral to RPGs. They're definitely something we SHOULD be able to cover in some way. That said, I think that we should definitely be tying the RPG we're targeting into the question in some way.
So far as the CW vs. not CW issue is concerned, if the question is looking for a list of resources (Where do I go to... What do I read to...), I would favor the CW format. As someone approaching an already asked question I just don't find a group of massive lists with comments saying "+1 for this" and "+1 for that" to be terribly useful. It's difficult to parse out which aspects of each answer were actually helpful to people. As a voter I also feel constrained, because I feel like I should only be voting for the one best answer instead of up/down voting whenever I see something interesting/not interesting.
On the other hand, if the question is "How do I build a city for ...", or "how do I capture the feel of..." I think that non-CW is appropriate. That sort of question is naturally going to lead to more original content, and will somewhat sidestep the massive list of links problem.
Of course, this has just been my outlook on the matter. The community has been tending away from CW for list questions.
I'm with mxyzplk. No, such questions are not within the purview of RPG.SE
RPGs cover every period in human history.
If it's not RPG-specific and can be googled, why is it on SE?
For example: What's a Denver accent sound like? ...is NOT phrased "What would a Denver accent sound like in the setting of SR4?"
That's a generic historical question that is not RPG-specific.
Note that this argument does not apply to Future or Fictional History.
No, such questions are off topic.
In theory, they seem like they might be a good idea because the real world (or a variant on it) is the setting for many RPGs. But in reality, when the community is faced with questions like At what point in the 20th century did automobiles and telephones become ubiquitous? people immediately vote to close them, because it seems to them that it is super off topic. In reality "yes" to this question means any random question on any random topic is OK because it might be used in an RPG. If you were to ask how bicycles work on SO "because you want to write an app about them" you'd get closed tout suite too.
Now, if they are about RPG specific settings, that's different. "What is Bissel's relationship with Ketites" for World of Greyhawk deals with a question space that is specifically inside RPG settings so that's OK. But real-world-history questions aren't. Is that a double standard? Yes. But it keeps the site in topic, where the topic is RPGs.
