Is it okay to ask for additional possible answers?

Question

Briefly: Is it okay to ask for additional, possibly opinionated, answers to a question that I've already resolved?

Less Brief: I have a perfectly legitimate, self-resolved, solution to a problem however it would be interesting to know how others would solve it. The current struggle is that my solution is perfectly simple (i.e assign value elsewhere) but I feel like there should be a more creative way of doing it (i.e stand upside down while being tickled and throwing lawn darts at a target to assign the value).

This question is not completely dissimilar from What's the proper way to ask for new answers? except for the fact that it is not "time-sensitive" in that character creation methods tend not to change within a particular version/edition of a game.

Answer 1

Unfortunately no. That's precisely one of the types of questions our Help Centre says to not ask:

• your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers: “I use ______ for ______, what do you use?”

For that kind of interaction, a Stack is poorly suited. On the plus side, forums (which are bad at things Stacks are good at, and good at things Stacks are bad at) are a good place to have that kind of discussion. (We have a list of RPG discussion forums to help direct people when this kind of situation arises.)

However…

However, there is a related but different kind of question that you could ask instead, which might get the same end result while also serving the Stack's goals: a self-answered question. Ask about the problem in clear, full detail, and then provide your own solution as an answer at the same time. This allows others to provide competing solutions, without actually asking for a list of other ideas. It might not result in anything else (maybe your solution is the best already!), but it might.

The trick here is to avoid asking for a list of alternatives. Just present the problem to be solve, asked how to solve it, and let the normal Stack process work. Definitely avoid asking for more ideas or more creative alternatives — just let that happen naturally, if it's going to happen.

(Or, circling back to it, use a forum! That is sometimes cleaner and faster than figuring out how to fit a question into the Stack format.)