Would this question about designing a battlefield be on topic?

Question

I asked a question about creating a custom monster for my campaign's final boss battle, and webbcode was kind enough to create this awesome guy.

Although I'm quite happy with how it turned out, I was concerned when I asked the question that it was only borderline on-topic due to a high degree of locality and the subjective nature of the question.

I'd now like to ask a question about designing a battlefield for my party to fight that monster. I don't think of myself at particularly good at designing places to fight, and often forget to even do so before the encounter. For this encounter, I'd like an interesting battlefield that allows both the monster and my party to make the most of their abilities.

Would that be on topic, and what kind of information should I include? If I list all my party members classes and abilities that would make it more objective, but would also make it more local, for instance.

If you don't think it's on topic, might there be a related or sub-question that would still be helpful to me?

Update: Question is posted. Feedback is welcome.

Answer 1

I think this definitely can be on-topic

The concept of such a question seems easily as valid as questions about building a character, which we happily field all the time.

I am going to withhold comment on whether or not your question is on topic, because I’m not rightly sure myself exactly what we should expect of such questions to be useful and answerable. But I can give you some advice:

Don’t get overly worried about things being too local

“Too localized” was axed as a close reason a long time ago. There still are some concerns about it (especially things that are too local in time, where an answer is guaranteed to go stale and require future clean-up), but it is not generically a problem for a question anymore.

We want all the detail we can get. A good answer will explain its process, why certain features were added (or avoided), in reference to the abilities of the monster, the PCs, any details you can give on the timing and context of the fight, and so on. Even for future readers who probably aren’t going to replicate your boss fight, it can serve as a good example of how to design a good battlefield.

Answer 2

One thing your older question had going for it was that it was about creating an homage to a specific character/monster that you could point to outside of your own head, which the answer used as a reference to build around.

If you can include a similar element in your new question, it would be more similar (and therefore also likely to land on the right side of the line).

The description of your question above is pretty vague, and if that's all you've got for readers to work with, I think the actual question may end up too vague. Without something concrete to build towards though, the answers are likely to be opinions and stabs in the dark, and the question is likely to a) get poor answers, and b) attract close votes. (Naturally and by design, [a] and [b] tend to correlate!)

So if you can find something concrete that answerers can build around or towards, you're a whole order of magnitude closer to a solid question that'll pass muster on the main site.

Answer 3

I think this "can" be on topic but suffers from the same bad middle ground that CharOp questions can, see Are character optimization questions on topic?

If you want "a last couple details" that's easily done, if you want "general guidance on how to" that can be done, but "let's cooperatively design the whole thing" falls into the excluded middle that's both too broad and too subjective.