How should we handle this "fireproof worn items" question?

Question

This concerns What have designers said for why they made worn items fireproof?

Short summary of events:

• The question was asking what the RAI was behind worn items being fireproof.
• An answer arrived providing reasonable speculation without citation.
• After some brief back-and-forth with the asker, the question was clarified. (At the time of writing, all comments remain undeleted, so the full history of that brief exchange is visible.)

According to prior discussions on this topic (primarily Are questions of designer intent on-topic for this site?, also Rules-as-intended and designer intent) our community stance is that when a question is investigating designer intent, we expect answers to cite clear evidence of what the designer intent is. Reverse-engineered speculation is generally not accepted. So, that question now requests citation. That's standard practice.

In this case I gave the benefit of the doubt that maybe "they haven't said anything, here's the obvious reason" might be a reasonable way to answer the question, sort of like a frame challenge. That might have been a bad call. I was also interested in seeing whether it would be well-received, but that's been distorted by the question having hit HNQ.

There have been a handful of comments and flags (all from different users) raising concern about the question's quality and its current course.

So I'd like your input on what to do here. Do we:

• Leave it open as-is?
• Purge the answers that don't provide citation (all of them) and carry on as we normally do for questions investigating designer reasons (strictly require citation as a baseline, reject uncited speculation completely and remove it)?
• Revert the question to its first revision and close it as not workable on the site?
• Something else?

I don't personally care about purging the answers if our site quality materially stands to benefit — if we deem they're not above our quality bar we don't stand to benefit from keeping them, and reputation points can be replaced some other time.

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Following up on this: the question's been community-reopened. Only one answer remained undeleted, and was removed for not providing designer citation & consisting of speculation.

My take-away is the community here has affirmed a desire for cited designer reasons on questions that request designer reasoning/intent/etc. We cannot accept personal speculation. As an extension of that, we also cannot accept answers of the form “they didn't say anything, so here's my speculation instead” since it simply becomes an avenue to provide speculation we don't want to gather. If there's no designer commentary available, the question can remain unanswered until it is available.

Answer 1

My opinion is that we should purge the answers.

Designers are the only appropriate source for designer questions

If OP wants designer reasons, the only authoritative answer we can give them is going to be based off of designer guidance in some way. Designer guidance directly addressing this issue (or an answer based off of related designer guidance) is the only way to offer an expert opinion on matters asking why the designers did something. Thus, any answer that does not contain this is not answering the question up to our standards.

This is the best standard that we have right now for designer-reasons

I can see no way to clearly and consistently handle these types of questions in a way that maintains their usefulness as a stack Q&A other than being very strict about this requirement. I can think of no enforceable guideline that would allow answers without designer evidence that wouldn't create a situation that was incredibly confusing to the point of making moderating these questions a nightmare.

Part of the problem is that it is so easy to come up with a reasonable and logical-sounding explanation by guessing and much harder to dig up designer guidance on any specific issue. Thus, this type of question will always have issues with people speculating unless we have a clear guideline on what is allowed and what isn't. My line right now is that it must contain directly cited evidence from designers. If the community can come up with a clear but more lenient guideline I'm all ears, but, until then, non-supported answers should be downvoted and/or deleted with prejudice.

I do not think this a proper frame challenge

Regarding the frame challenge, I do not even think the question being referred to really can be considered one. You can't reasonably say to the OP that you think that they actually really don't want designer guidance but would rather just hear your opinion. There is no justification ever given for this besides the fact that designer guidance is hard to find or that the answer seems really obvious, neither of which I find compelling. The former because sometimes allowing a question to sit for a long time in order to get a right and useful answer is always preferable to just having a quick answer. The latter because it is incredibly subjective.

In fact, I think it is much more like the answers that try to answer a D&D 5e question with a D&D3.X rules explanation. A 3.X rules explanation might give an accurate answer to a 5e question, but it is essentially a guess and, maybe more importantly, not what the querent was asking for. Same goes for designer-reasons.

Addendum: Why so many upvotes?

It is worrisome to me that the community as a whole upvoted several answers on the mainsite question despite, site standards aside, ignoring a major part of the question. I think the ramifications of this disconnect between community perception and moderation guideline may be something that has to be addressed. But I think this is another discussion unto itself.

Answer 2

The argument that adding the tag makes it hard/impossible to give an answer to the question should not be allowed as a reason to ignore the tag's existence on a question.

Equally, allowing answers that challenge the need for this tag is dangerous. We generally accept that the use of the [designer-reasons] tag makes answers much more difficult to give, but some users struggle with this idea. By allowing answers that argue 'well its so obvious that we don't need to ask for designer reasons' we are effectively invalidating the whole purpose of the tag, allowing answers to speculate as to why something is the case without any clear evidence to back it up.

Answer 3

When it comes down to it, there's two things we can do with questions like this.

1. Close them as opinion-based, because they just get everyone's own pet logic-train as an answer. @korvinstarmast alleges that "he's experienced, so he can answer this question from experience" - that's a logical fallacy, appeal to authority. You may have experience with a game but you're still effectively guessing about the reason the game reads that way - "this version is simpler so it makes sense," "I had a character always getting his stuff burned off in 1986 and it was annoying so it makes sense," "I've always hated Mike Mearls so it must be his fault, that makes sense..." Answers need evidence or experience of the actual thing in question, not simply the hubris of being generally experienced. We should close as opinion-based when the question is at its heart opinion-based, and effectively saying "I (or my players) don't like this rule, justify it to me." That's forum fodder, like "sell me on this game." In most cases even getting a designer reason doesn't make these people happy, because their core problem (they don't like the rule, it breaks immersion/is too simplistic/is too complex) isn't solved by a quote.
2. Require designer commentary, as per Back It Up! This is the only way to legitimately answer a question like this. "Frame challenge" is for when someone's not asking the question they have, not a way to subvert standard site Good Objective rules. In this case, if the OP was saying "I really want to be able to destroy items on a PC, so I'm trying fireballs, but they won't burn their stuff, why not?" a legit frame challenge would be "Yeah that doesn't work but here's some other ways to destroy items on a PC." Not "whee here's my opinions on that" - that's not a frame challenge to the question, but a frame challenge to the site rules, and they don't like that. We should edit to add designer commentary requirements and keep a question open when that's really what's going to help the OP. Most commonly this'll be because they're designing themselves. "I'm making a magical flask of oil that will burn someone's gear but not their flesh. But the usual rules say you can't do that, I'd like more information so I don't screw up balance too badly - has a designer said why that is?"

Obviously we as a community have tried to "be helpful" and keep questions open by adding designer-reasons to them. This is now backfiring as people can't follow that rule (much like with recommendations) so we probably need to stop, close the questions as opinion-based, and save designer-reasons and reopening and enforcing that rule for only the cases where it really is the solution to the OP's problem.

Answer 4

I believe that this may be a place for experience based answers

I think that experience is the basis for the answer with a lot of up votes. There have been a couple of design decisions in this edition of this game that remove additional die rolls, fiddly bits, etc, that had been present in the attempts at greater simulationism in other editions. Being able to compare

• "they used to do it this way, and
• if you look at the design intent statements (not necessarily on this spell) of streamlining the game, this is a logical implementation of that intention"

makes this an answerable question on the basis of showing how this feature, or lack of it, reflects a balancing between gamism and simulationism.

It takes two things to do that in the answer, I think:

1. Knowing what the impact was on the game when everything had to make that save. (AD&D 1e, or GURPS, or any "crunchy" game, for example)

2. The overarching design commentary that we already have references to in various other questions and answers on what D&D next/5e is about.

This is similar to the 5e called shot questions

Designer quotes on the fire ball or fire bolt spell specifically are nice, but they are not necessary if one can form a well reasoned answer that fits together the pieces of the puzzle for where granular detail like that has been omitted. The lack of "hit that part of the body" feature is related to this bit about protecting mundane items on the character. We have a number of answers on the called shot. Previous editions had that feature, but this one does not. Here's one question on called shots. Here is another one.

Also, as I read it again, the question is wrong. None of the items are fire proof. Once removed from the character they are burned. What they are is protected by the player's mechanic of being the player. (A gamism) The answer needs to address that "This is a gamism" element. An approach including "There are elements of this game that are not attempts a simulating reality. This is one of them." (Similar to the lightning bolt issue ...) Comparing it to the lack of "hitting specific parts of the body" might be a good way to show similarity of intend to not be as granular/simulationist.

Answer 5

The concern I have with Designer-Reasons Questions in general is this.

If the answer is available online it is probably googleable, and any answer given will be a simple copy and paste, link, or citation. If this is the case it probably indicates a lack of research on the part of the asker, or ignorance of canon source materials.

Most games have some kind of FAQ or similar Q&A type of method for finding the answers to direct "What do the designers say about X?" Some like 5e have things like Jeremy Crawford's twitter where you can specifically ask them your question. Most of the games even tell you what they consider canon. If a person researches all canon sources and doesn't find their answer, asking on RPG-se isn't going to get them a canon answer.

This seems to make these types of questions useless as far as RPG-se is concerned. Since nobody can answer them until an official answer is published, and answers like "I looked here, here, here and here but didn't find anything" are not allowed. It does not allow any useful information on the subject. At least being allowed to say "I don't know" gives the asker the knowledge, that by and large the RPG-se community doesn't have the info they want.

My personal recommendation would be to refer the asker to the appropriate sources for official rules of the game in question, remind them that we are not the designers of their game and cannot answer their question of designer intent authoritatively, and either have them rework the question so that it can be used for constructive answers on the subject in question or close the question.

Answer 6

Revert the question to its first revision and close it as not workable on the site?

Edits to questions that invalidate existing answers - particularly answers with high votes always grate my gears.

Answer 7

I think that the question of why does it work this way, (RAI) questions are desired by the community at large, and that answers that speculate should be judged on their merits.

I think perhaps a better way to view these questions is "How can I explain to my friends playing the game with me as the DM, why this works this way?"

We can answer that question and the community can vote on the answers value. This is how the site is supposed to work. Becareful taking a SE about a creative process and trying to force it to become too much Wikipedia and not enough I have a problem and maybe solving it will help someone else in the future.

In other-words I suggest you consider backing off on the back it up rule for questions about RAI unless the original author specifically requests them. Let the community handle the RAI questions based on how the community feels about them. Remove any rules you have banning them.