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A number of questions come our way, usually from D&D and Pathfinder, that are of the following form:

What are all the [spells|creatures|feats|items|...] that have the [fire|supernatural|undead|concentration|forces-a-save|...] property?

See, for instance,

which are just a few I found by searching "what are all the" in question posts.

They tend to get closed, but they also tend to have people arguing for their topicality. Thus I'd like to see a good, community-led discussion on these types of questions.


Note that I don't think these are "list questions" per se, in the Stack-defined sense. (See What are list questions? on this meta, and its linked sources on meta.SE.) In Stack parlance "list questions" are those that present the likelihood of producing a long tail of answers, each of which would present an item in the list. List questions of the Stack-type are off-topic: see Are list/collection questions on topic?.

Rather they're asking for an answer to be a big list. And there are extant examples of those questions being well-received here. I'll put mine on the chopping block and point out that my second-highest-voted question is a blatant list request: What are the playable D&D races in 5e?

So have at it: do we or do we not want Q&A that generates lists? In some cases 'yes' and some 'no'? What sorts of common features do you see differentiating good from bad, desirable from undesirable?

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    \$\begingroup\$ I would be interested in constraining this to D&D, since that's where those closed questions lie. E.g. "what are all the moves with property Y" could be trivially on topic and answerable for Apocalypse World & any of its derivatives, and for any specific Fate game I can think of, specifically because those games don't tend to be interested in large quantities of premade material. At the very least if this is deemed off topic based on D&D questions, I'd rather not make other systems unnecessarily bear the brunt of D&D's topicality concerns. \$\endgroup\$ Dec 16, 2017 at 0:48
  • \$\begingroup\$ Certainly I've seen it on D&D/PF questions, but I'm aware that may just be my own observation bias--and I didn't want to shut out any GURPS or Rolemaster or any of the other many mechanically-large systems I don't know much about. But with the traffic that D&D/PF get compared to everything else, I suppose it wouldn't hurt to examine this in that context, then handle similar cases as they come. Editing now. \$\endgroup\$
    – nitsua60 Mod
    Dec 16, 2017 at 0:52
  • \$\begingroup\$ It definitely occurs in D&D/PF. (Constraining it to the pair should be OK, since they have similar concerns re: colossal quantities of content.) \$\endgroup\$ Dec 16, 2017 at 0:55

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We have a 'too broad' close reason. We should use it more often (and more on things that are broad, not just things that are hard). These questions are usually pretty terrible in a down-vote-worthy way cause they generally show no research effort and provide no metrics to gauge the quality of content by, but when they don't do that (and when related questions that have the same sort of answer but get there a different way, like "How can I prepare my 7th level wizard to deal with a falling block trap?"/"How should a 13th level wizard protect his shop?" are asked) there's nothing inherently wrong or off-topic about them.

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