Game recommendation questions are sadly NOT on topic here on RPG.SE.
This means the following kinds of questions are off topic:
- I want to play (details) kind of game/story. What game should I use to do that?
- Which game does (thing) the best?
- Are there any games that let me do (thing) / have this specific mechanic?
- Does a game meeting this criteria exist? (see Can we ask about the existence of a game?)
This list is not exhaustive. If your question will boil down to “here are some criteria” and answers will boil down to “here is a game / some games”, then it is a game recommendation and off topic.
History
In 2011 we embarked upon a brave experiment. "Shopping," or recommendation, questions are generally banned on all SEs given specific meta.SE guidance on the topic in Q&A is Hard, Let's Go Shopping.
RPG recommendations are both popular and also do not have some of the more temporary attributes that make those kinds of shopping questions bad - people still play RPGs from 1974 so they don't really become out of date, and have attributes only discoverable in use as opposed to just reducing to "spec sheets." Therefore in Are game recommendation questions on topic? we experimented with making such questions on topic, as long as they were well defined and both questioners and answerers hewed strongly to the Good Subjective, Bad Subjective principles that SE uses to govern questions with subjective components. The most important part of this was the Back It Up! principle.
Back It Up! means that your answers must be based on either:
Something that happened to you personally
Something you can back up with a reference
With the theory that would prevent people from the usual issue with game-recs, which is everyone answering a) their favorite game because they're sure you could use it for that even though they never have but it's so great it could clearly handle that, or b) some game they vaguely heard of/just Googled for, both of which are crap answers.
Unfortunately now in 2015 the community was not able to maintain those standards over time. Game-recs have became contentious, 25% of them get closed anyway, and therefore our grand experiment has come to an end - see Community self-evaluation: How are we doing with game recommendations? for more details on how that decision was arrived at. Therefore game-recs are now off topic on RPG.SE.
What This Means/Does Not Mean
Old game-recs will be historical locked as they pop back up to the front page organically (we see no value in doing a proactive locking, that'll just flood the front page with them).
New game-recs, we'll get a custom close reason added for.
The game-rec post notice and FAQ will be modified to match this new policy.
This means all "shopping" questions are off topic. In many cases, however, instead of asking a shopping question (which game system/online tabletop/psionic subsystem/etc "is best"), you can ask a more focused question like "Does Roll20 do X, Y, and Z" or "How does the Dreamscarred Press Psionics Unleashed system work out balance-wise in play?"
This does NOT mean that Good Subjective, Bad Subjective is not the guiding principle on this SE for questions with subjective components. With game-recs we were deliberately curating them hard and deleting answers not meeting GS/BS. But in other questions, everyone on this Stack should be answering from experience, not speculation. Answers that show "you've done that" or have a reference will be upvoted and answers that are you just coming up with untested ideas on how you'd do that will be downvoted, and in extreme cases deleted. If you're not clear why, go read all of Good Subjective, Bad Subjective over and over until you achieve enlightenment.
