Are requests for specific users' house rules on- or off-topic?

Question

Recently, a user posted a question asking for a specific user's house rules. This question was promptly closed as off-topic, and I feel like the community made the right decision, but I can't put my finger on why.

Looking at our What topics can I ask about here page, the question seems to fall squarely within the description of an on-topic question for this site: It's about role-playing games, and requires the attention of an expert; And it's definitely about "RPG rules or mechanics" as well as "Techniques for running or playing RPGs." The page does list a few reasons why a question might not be appropriate, but the only one that might apply is about potentially becoming obsolete, and that one seems a bit of a stretch; KRyan is well-established as a GM, and their list of house rules is therefore unlikely to change much.

Our What types of questions should I avoid asking page doesn't seem to have any relevant guidance, either: The question is reasonably-scoped, isn't an invitation to discussion, has a single concrete answer... I can't find anything there that suggests this question should be closed.

We would have closed this question as 'Too Localised' back in the day, but that close reason doesn't exist any more precisely because it was too wishy-washy and subjective - so presumably we must have a more concrete one. Perhaps I'm just not making an obvious connection between what the help pages say and the features of this question?

Why was this question closed? I do suspect it should have been, but we need to know why, because if it's a reason that isn't explicitly stated on our help pages, those help pages need to be amended.

Answer 1

The question is off-topic because it's a very bad fit for the Stack Exchange's resources (crowds of experts) and mechanics (voting-based evaluation and sorting).

The Stack Exchange is founded on the wisdom of crowds: multiple people give answers based on their expertise in the subject, then the voting of other experts lifts up good answers and pushes down poor ones.

What we have here is a question in which only one individual has expertise, so RPG.SE's collection of experts isn't useful. And nobody except that one individual has experience to say whether it's a good or bad answer, so RPG.SE's evaluation-and-sorting process doesn't come into play either.

Having established that, it's crucial to recognise that the Stack Exchange is only interested in doing what it can do well. There's no need to become a one-stop-shop, no desire to replace other online resources, and no obligation to include everything related to the subject of RPGs. KRyan's house rules would make a great blog post, or a thread on a traditional forum.

Answer 2

For my part, I found the question... kind of uncomfortable, for reasons I cannot quite articulate? I think it may in part be that I am not interested in inviting questions or criticisms of my houserules (even though I’ll happily volunteer individual cases where I use a given houserule if it is relevant, since that establishes that I have actually tried what I recommend), and I especially don’t feel like answering every “well why not this rule?” which I might even use and have forgot to include.

In any event, as the only person who could have answered the question, even if it had stayed open I wasn’t planning to actually answer it. I don’t have a singular set of rules written down, since I use different rules for different games. There are definitely plenty of commonalities, but even there, they’re not written down; they’re just well-known among those I play with.