Is giving the benefit of the doubt to dice/stats questions that don't mention RPGs resulting in site scope creep?

Question

It has come to my attention that how we have been handling dice statistics, and probability questions in general, has created a perception that they are on topic even when they have nothing to do with RPGs.

To be clear, this is not asking about whether blatantly off-topic stats questions are actually on topic or not. The question isn't about topicality — it's about whether we have set misleading precedents and what (if anything) to do about that.

A representative quote from a recent discussion, responding to my asserting that mere stats and dice questions, absent RPG context, are obviously and axiomatically off topic (because we're not “Dice and Stats SE” or “RPG, plus oh also Dice and Stats SE”):

You ask me to accept as an axiom that mere stats/dice questions are off topic, but what is an example of that? To me, those last three Q's are mere stats/dice questions. […] I believe those last three Q's are on topic, and I believe they are mere stats/dice Q's.

This is troublesome, because such questions that aren't about RPGs are clearly off topic — we're not the place to come to if (e.g.) a grad student is studying dice probability academically and wants to ask about a particular complex rolling system's statistical properties, but unrelated to RPGs. Yet, that appears to be the impression that we're giving to our newcomers-becoming-regulars.

So far, the issue seems to be that we have in the past extended the benefit of the doubt to stats/dice questions that are plausibly being asked for RPG design reasons (else, why would they come here?), without requiring that the question be explicit about this. However, it seems that not everyone notices that obviously a benefit of the doubt was given there, leading to scope creep from us being RPG.se to being “RPG and also RPG-unrelated Dice Stats SE”.

If how we handle dice questions is causing active community members — and hold/open voters! — to believe that such questions unrelated to RPGs are also on topic, then that's a problem.

Is it time to make a change? Should we require questions to be explicit about the RPG nature of their dice system questions, and close any that aren't until they're cleared up?

Or do we not need to change how we're handling questions, but instead need to reassert that our topic isn't “Everything Ever”?

Answer 1

So long as we hold to the old axiom:

Would an RPG expert give me a better/different/more specific answer to this question than a Statistician/Mathematician?

I don't see an issue.

However, this comes with a caveat: our best answers to these questions should give the better/more specific advice. I'd like to volunteer an old question of mine for tribute.

Ideally, an answer to this question, in addition to probabilities, would talk about how the abilities should be priced (in relation to each other), how they might value certain levels of success with a small dice pool (you only need one to succeed versus you want as many successes as possible).

The top rated answer, at least, addresses pricing indirectly. However, I think there are many dice/statistics questions that have an accepted answer that's 100% statistics; the kind of thing Mathematics.SE could answer. We should be wary about these, since they indicate the better/more specific criteria doesn't actually apply to the question.

In any case, dice or statistics questions that have no explicit link to RPGs should be closed as off-topic, as the lack of a link makes it not possible to give a better answer than a mathematician.

Answer 2

The featured quote above is mine, and here is the full text would show I was (and still am) asking for a concrete example of a mere stats/dice question.

You ask me to accept as an axiom that mere stats/dice questions are off topic, but what is an example of that? To me, those last three Q's are mere stats/dice questions. You looked at them and you have a different perspective. So clearly, your "mere dice/stats Q's" is different from my "mere dice/stats Q's."

If I accepted or rejected that axiom, it would mean nothing, since we don't seem to agree on what to agree on. I asked you to evaluate those last three Q's, but your reluctance to evaluate them leaves me unable to establish a baseline for what is a "mere stats/dice question" in this discussion. In the absence of that baseline, my acceptance/rejection of the axiom is not meaningful at this moment.

The best I can provide you is, I believe those last three Q's are on topic, and I believe they are mere stats/dice Q's. But it seems that what a mere stats/dice Q is, is unclear and ill-defined, leaving me unable to accept that all mere stats/dice Q's are off topic. What is a mere stats/dice Q to me is evidently not, to you, and by extension, possibly to other users of the site.

Concrete examples from myself

I am interested in seeing a conclusion to this myself, and so I offer up my personal categorization of a few recently asked stats and dice questions. We shall hopefully see in the comments if the Stack agrees with my classification, and whether these are on topic or not.

Method of Classification

I will be adopting the following criteria, as put forth in WrongOnTheInternet's answer and doppelgreener's comment, to classify questions as on or off topic.

Would an RPG expert give me a better/different/more specific answer to this question than a Statistician/Mathematician?

It is presumed that, as this criteria has been established a long time ago and proposed by a diamond moderator, it should fit with the querent's criteria (another diamond moderator). That is to say I am expecting a level of equivalence between two senior members of the site. So a question that does not have answers draw upon RPG experience is a mere stats/dice question; whereas one that does, is not.

My personal illustration of this criteria runs like the following:

• Suppose Bob has no experience with RPGs (but he is capable of researching it if needed, probably via Google), and he encounters a question, Q. He provides for it an answer, A1.

• Suppose, in an alternate but nearly-identical reality, Bob has plenty of experience with RPGs, and he encounters the question Q. He provides for it an answer, A2.

• Q can be said to draw from RPG experience (or would draw better answers from an RPG expert over a mathematician) if A2 would be meaningfully different from A1.

Results of Classification: On Topic

1. Advantage on damage rolls - is it still balanced? Probability is an aspect of this question, but ultimately they want to consider a mechanical balance in a specific RPG system, and the accepted answer mentions alternative strategies rooted in the game mechanics.

2. Does Sacred Flame or Firebolt do more damage on average to a Shadow over an arbitrary but finite number of rounds?. This question can ultimately be formulated in a way a mathematician can answer with no RPG knowledge, but the accepted answer shows information about various related game effects that take familiarity with the system to have suggested in the first place.

3. What is the average benefit of this particular stats rolling scheme? You can calculate the answer of this using pure probability. However, the accepted answer doesn't stop at presenting the results of his calculation, but also offers ramifications of the answer from an RPG perspective, so it has benefited from RPG experience.

4. How can I compare the damage gain between Bless and Faerie Fire? This question received many answers which consider situations that arise at the table, on top of pure number-crunching.

5. How long can creatures with no swim speed travel in deep water before they die? The answers take into account game-related settings, on top of the actual number-based question.

Results: Off Topic

1. How can I calculate the probability of being able to purchase a card in my custom die system? This question is related to RPG game design as explained by the querent here, but it is not something that you have to draw from RPG experience on to answer. A mathematician could crank out a set of formulas the way they developed pot odds for poker.

2. How does Halfling Luck affect the probability of surviving my death saves? If a mathematician researched what halfling luck and death saving throws are (it's not that hard), they can provide the same answer the accepted answer here has given.

3. How does Halfling Luck (re-rolling my Nat 1's) affect my dice outcome? For the same reasons as (2), it is off-topic. Notice also that all the answers it drew involved no RPG-related content. It is pure stats/math/programming skills (it even drew an answer from someone who has never played D&D before).

4. Is this the right formula for the total permutations of a set of dice? This question asks about d2's and d3's (you won't find those at your typical gaming table). The answers draw from no RPG experience at all.

5. Modelling rolling for stats in Anydice This question is related to RPGs, but someone who has never played an RPG but has used Anydice before will be able to provide the same answer that has been accepted here.

Observation

From my application of the critera to the top 10 most recent, un-closed stats questions, it seems half are off topic. The ones that are off topic under this criteria are all those questions a mathematician could answer if they took the time to research some of the game terms. The list includes some Q's that have received a considerable number of upvotes.

The ones that are on topic, according to this criteria, seem to be those that ask about specific game effects or game mechanics that happen to involve random chance. But the Q's do not seem to be about the stats in its essence (and the answers it drew picked up on that), but about the impact of those stats on gameplay.

I would love to list more questions. There's a lot of highly upvoted Q's that, in my opinion, fail the given criteria. However, I think these can serve as a starting point for now.

Which of these questions have I incorrectly classified, and why? Hopefully, with a concrete starting point, we can begin to understand what is a mere stats/dice question.

Ramifications, and an anecdote

One of the first answers I gave on this site is one about stats, about the net effect of GWM and SS on average damage. The top two answers for this particular Q draw on no RPG experience at all, and are just statistical calculations. They are also the two A's that fully address the Q. It was followed by four answers that no longer address the Q, but draw upon RPG experience on how to apply the information in the top 2 answers. These four answers have received low upvotes despite drawing upon experience (one even has a negative score), and I believe it's because they did not actually answer the Q.

I believe this Q fails the given criteria. You can plainly see that the two A's that address the Q do not need RPG experience. Those that did draw upon experience did not manage to answer the Q. It fails all around. And yet it was also the first Q I came across that made me think: I'd like to see more of these, because they're fun to answer. It was my first accepted answer of the three answer's I'd given at the time, and it made a positive impact on me, thinking, perhaps naively, there is a fun place on the internet that can combine RPGs and math.

In terms of the tag usage, I seem to have reached second highest top user next to nitsua for answer score, and sixth highest for question score. In other words, it seems to be one of the tags which I am, through some metric, most expert at, relative to all the other tags I seek out.

Moving these mere stats/dice questions to become off topic (a concrete action to close; not a hypothetical "if they are... then they are...") will decrease my personal satisfaction with RPG.SE. I am not aware of any others who draw fun from RPG.SE in a similar way I do, but I do know there are some users who haunt the stats questions as well, which I have noticed personally by perusing many of the stats Q's myself.

I admit that I have been, over time, finding RPG.SE less fun to haunt. Something about the rigid nature of the Stack (that everybody agrees we can do nothing about) and the massive backlash since I gave this appropriately stats-based answer on fairness of a swingy saving throw mechanic. I am constantly re-evaluating if RPG.SE is still fun for me, and so far, of course, I find that it is. For now, the tags I look out for are statistics and gm-techniques (other than the 5e system tag, it goes without saying). It seems to me that a lot of the existing stats questions on RPG.SE are mere stats/dice questions -- specifically, the fun ones for me -- and of course, good gm-techniques questions are much rarer.

The reason I am asking for examples of what a mere stats/dice question is, is because I want to know if all these questions I see as mere stats/dice questions are aligned with what they should be aligned with.

Are those five Q's I listed as off topic mere stats/dice Q's? Yes, I think so. Do I think they're off topic? No, I don't think so. Will I vote to close them anyway? Sure, I'll go with the flow. But give me a baseline of what is a mere stats/dice Q so that I do not inadvertently VTC what seems to be half of the open statistics questions here.

Answer 3

So, I'm not gonna argue that questions without an RPG context are on-topic (they're not). However, I'm gonna say that we should keep allowing questions without an explicit RPG context, i.e. that those questions are on-topic. Not, like, despite not having an RPG context but because we are allowed to assume a relation.

Dice are a ubiquitous and quintessential tool for RPG players. I think questions about the proper use of such tools and even just about the tools themselves ought to be on-topic, as the tools have such a huge history with the RPG industry. For example, I think questions like "Who made the first d20?", "Why are all platonic solids standard dice shapes?", "Why are higher numbers 'harder to roll'?", "How many more hp does a Fighter have than a Wizard assuming identical Constitution on average?", and "How does an exploding die affect the expected result?" are totally fine questions, even though none of them have anything to do with the skill of role-playing per se. They still have a lot to do with RPGs, because they are about dice, which are intrinsically tied to RPGs.

We allow questions on the use and history of RPG paraphernalia. For example, we allow questions on how to use AnyDice, which is not an RPG, because it is explicitly an RPG aid. We similarly allow questions about the use of any other RPG aid, with the understanding that these are sufficiently related to be on-topic. If it is scope creep, I think this is good scope creep resulting from (re)growth in RPGing as an activity in society and the associated development of increasingly complex tools for use in RPGing. Basically, as the RPG community as a whole grows, people get better at RPGing and better at using and making tools for RPGing. When an RPG tool is refined and expanded and refined across many dedicated users and across significant time, it is no surprise that a skill-based barrier to entry would develop. This site should help new users by providing answers to their questions on the use of such tools, even as the basic questions become increasingly dissociated from RPGing by reason of increased internal complexity.

If we allow such questions, and we should, then this is yet another reason statistics questions are eminently on-topic. Statistics questions are inherently questions about the use of an RPG tool. That tool is randomness. Randomness has been harnessed to power conflict resolution in RPGs since the advent of the hobby. While there are games that do not employ the tool, there are many, many games that require it, and a good understanding of probabilities, to play properly. We should allow questions about randomness, even separate from dice, since dice are often just a tool for leveraging the bigger tool of randomness.

It's true there are other experts on randomness. But questions asked here should get the benefit of the doubt as regards RPG scoping, because that's how we ('re supposed to) roll. We assume good intent and expert background on the part of the asker unless they demonstrate otherwise. And even if a question turns out not to use RPG expertise to differ from the answer a mathematician would give, that's not to say that RPG expertise isn't involved in reaching that conclusion. I don't think that it's necessary for non-math RPG expertise to be superior to math expertise in answering a question for it to be on-topic, but identical answers don't show that because RPG expertise is often needed to ascertain that, in fact, no extraneous non-math thingies apply to the problem in question.

In conclusion, I think these questions are on-topic within our scope both as questions about RPG paraphenalia and RPG tools, and furthermore often benefit from RPG expertise in either an obvious or non-obvious manner, and certainly should remain on-topic.

Answer 4

The Axiom, imho, is "Players of games we represent will find this question/answer useful".

Dice questions that fail this check have, imho, no place here.

There's a thing, though. I can't, for the life of me, come up with a reasonable dice question that won't be useful under the Axiom I presented.