Here's Back It Up as originally suggested for RPGSE by SevenSidedDie
- Something that happened to you personally, or
- Something you can back up with a reference.
I feel this is missing something, namely:
- Something you can back up with careful analysis.
While personal experience is very important for questions relating to story and 'fun', it doesn't work well with mechanics and statistics-based questions. Just because some specific mechanic did work out well at a table doesn't mean it's not problematic, and only analysis can show that. But folks around here seem to often require Back It Up for all kind of questions.
Many rpg.se regulars have played RPGs for a decade or more, and so have experience with a variety of different systems, rulesets and mechanics, house rules and home brew. But often, that is not enough, and only a 'scientific' look at the rules and mechanics can help. Personal experience is not reproducible and not falsifiable, and therefore I propose this extension to Back It Up.
The famous Good Subjective, Bad Subjective post 2 features the xkcd comic about pure and impure science. RPG.se might be an outlier of most StackExchanges that RPGs encompass the full range, from soft/impure story- and experience-only questions over to the other extreme of math/statistics/rule mechanics hard/pure science. Back It Up is applied to all kinds of questions, but it's content currently only applies to soft/impure questions.
With this extension, I hope to build a bridge between the people who prefer soft/impure and those more into hard/pure questions, so that we don't lose out on so many interesting answers just because mods push the soft angle so strongly.