There have been a few times that answers have come up with an interesting twist of the rules. They are neither RAI or RAW, but instead a novel way to use something that's cool.
Does the stack voting accommodate for those answers (with either up or downvotes) or should we try and avoid BASING answers on RAF and just include them as addendums to an RAI/RAW answer?
We don't really have — or want — more than our basic rules about how to answer. The only rules we have are very basic: it has to be an answer rather than discussion or gibberish, and it has to be at least somewhat on topic for the question. Any more rules layered on top would just be undermining the role that we've given to voting.
(We've tried adding rules on top for a few question types in the past, and it has invariably gone badly, with the system helping us to enforce them not at all. Overall it's better to not try to get in the way of voting taking care of answer quality.)
So we really shouldn't have rules about whether Rules As Fun / Rule Of Cool is okay or not in answers, or how such answers should be specially handled or written. It likely won't help, and may well make the site work less well.
Instead, I think we should do what we do best: vote our conscience on each answer on its own special merits and fittingness for the question. Good RAF answers would get voted up and bad ones voted down, and middling ones would float about in the middle.
Nope. RAF will always be a GM prerogative-based choice. Even mentioning GM prerogative in an answer is kind of silly - the GM always has prerogative, even in systems that explicitly deny it or systems that don't explicitly grant it. Trying to use it as a justification is putting the cart before the horse. Answers should focus on providing the justification a GM could use to explain an interpretation or ruling, not as the substance of the ruling itself.
If in writing an answer the recommendation solution includes a consideration such as using the RAF approach, this needs to be addressed in the text of the answer so that there is no misunderstanding about what is meant. There need not be a global rule, tag, or site policy for this.
Simply write a concise and soundly reasoned answer. (Harder than it sounds, I suppose).
