Compound vs. Simple Questions

Question

I asked a question: A warlock has been reduced to strength 0 while underwater. Can he activate and use Fell Flight to move while underwater?

Here is a link to the thread: Warlock Flying Underwater while helpless

It has been marked as too broad by @SevenSidedDie.

I understand his point -- there are multiple questions that need answering in order to answer this question. I can think of three that seem like important factors to me, and there may be more that I haven't considered:

1. Can fell flight be activated by a helpless creature;
2. Does Fell Flight use mechanical wings to fly or magical means;
3. Does fly provide any swim benefit, and if so, under what constraints?

He indicated I should split the thread into multiple questions. I think that is a bad mod ruling.

If I split it into individual questions, I could easily miss some important detail. For example, if I want to know whether my barbarian can toss a goat 100', under SevenSidedDie's reasoning, I might ask:

1. How much does a goat weight?
2. How much strength is needed to throw X lbs 100 feet?

And then draw my own conclusions. If I were to do that, it would preclude someone from helpfully pointing out that the goat might get an attack of opportunity, or opposed grapple check, or whatever else.

I have one question: can a warlock with strength 0 use fell flight to fly underwater. I think this single question should be in a single thread, so the responders can answer the question holistically.

Answer 1

If you want to ask Can a warlock with strength 0 use fell flight to fly underwater? ask that

It's not necessary to make a question easier to answer by pointing out all of a question's disparate parts using bullets. In fact, this question's specificity almost guarantees that the question hasn't been asked before nor will it ever be asked again. And although answering the question may allow future folks to answer a question like Can a creature take purely mental actions while helpless? and Can a creature fly underwater? more easily, there's no reason for this question to have to link to those imaginary questions first before asking Can a warlock with strength 0 use fell flight to fly underwater? It's just a complicated question with a complicated answer that requires looking at a variety of stuff, but it's not necessary to tell those folks that are considering answering what stuff needs to be examined.

In other words, ask the real question that you want the answer to. Let the folks who want to answer determine what the answer to that question is and (ahem) how deep they need to go to get that answer. If an answer fails to address parts you need, Comment to ask for expansion or downvote the answer.

Answer 2

Reading the edit history of that question gives me a headache. It keeps thrashing between asking a list of discrete questions, mods trying to workshop it into the "just one question" format you say you want, and then you reverting/adding to the edits to add lists of questions again. The close is in response to that.

If you just say "my warlock is Str 0 underwater - can he use Fell Flight to move away?" I imagine this would get reopened (SSD did that in edit 2), but you keep editing it to have more questions in it! Quit it.