Is there a rpg.se compatible way to ask a question about counter organisation?

Question

I have the following problem:

I have Pathfinder Pawns (their branding for a type of cardboard counter miniature) in about 7 boxes from different sets. Some of those boxes have the same or similar monsters, e.g. different types of orcs, named orcs from adventure paths, etc..

I would like to find a way how to organise them efficiently (not digitally, that's trivial, but the actual cardboard stock pawns from the boxes), so I can just lookup my db and know where to fetch them. I am willing to spend money for a good solution, but I haven't found any yet. Keeping them in the boxes is bad because after using them, some tend to fall out of the cardboard pages.

Is there a way I can ask for the best way to organise those pawns that doesn't conflict with some rpg.se rules? How would I have to formulate that question?

Answer 1

Assuming you're talking about “miniatures”, questions about miniatures are generally on topic, so long as it's not a shopping question.

How to organise miniatures for best retrieval would be an on-topic question. But it's very hard to give advice for a hypothetical question that hasn't been asked yet.

Based on some experience, and guessing at what the question might be I can see it going a few ways:

1. How to organise and label them without us needing to care how your database works would probably turn out fine. People who use lots of miniatures would be able to draw on their experience organising their own collections for easy retrieval.

2. How to organise them for best retrieval using a custom database that we would need to care about would probably be closed as “unclear” or “too broad” or both.

   • Maybe “unclear” because we don't know how your software works, and a sufficiently complete description such that we could understand what you need is probably impossible in a question post.

   • Maybe “too broad” because crowdsourcing a bespoke organisation scheme that is tailored to your specific software system is going to have many possible answers, all equally valid.

   
   The site works best when we're asked for the best way of doing something when you don't need answers to force themselves to fit extremely specific prerequisites. That's because asking for what has already worked for people can leverage their experience; asking for a bunch of people to create something new and custom for you doesn't leverage anyone's experience, and that kind of request tends to result in a mess, a lot of discussion, and a closed question.

So if you want to ask how to organise a large number of miniatures for easy retrieval and your software is irrelevant to the question, that would work. If you want to ask how to custom-tailor the missing pieces of an organisation scheme that you've already partially devised, it will almost certainly not work as you'd hope, even if it didn't get closed.

The best way to find out is to, well, just ask the question. It's very hard to give a solid “yea” or “nay” to a hypothetical.