How do we save designer reasoning questions? [2018] [duplicate]

Question

I think we have a bit of a problem with designer reason questions on the site.

A little history: designer-reasons questions were our attempt to save "what is this rule for" questions. Those were being answered entirely with rank opinion and causing those questions to be closed as opinion-based. The logic was that the only way to actually know what a rule is for is either direct designer commentary, or extrapolation from clear textual evidence. Otherwise it's all effectively guessing. However, as with game-recommendation questions, the set of rules we've built around these to try to maintain them is not being effectively upheld by the community.

We have 10 Meta questions about designer reasoning questions: https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/designer-reasons

And we have 66 of them on the main site: https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/designer-reasons

That's an about 15% "Need to take it to Meta" ratio.

More and more, we're having to delete answers, close questions, protect questions, take it to meta, delete long comment threads, and so on for these questions. On the last 10 designer-reasons questions, there are 10 total deleted answers. Most require editing to clarify "NO SPECULATION," add the tag, correct people asking "can I speculate" in comments... For some reason, these questions are providing a extremely disproportionate amount of required moderation and intervention as compared to normal questions.

We've gone over the "right way" to answer designer intent questions a bunch on meta and we've been trying to just set good examples with questions in the hope that the community in general will start doing the right thing (both in using them right and in using their rep-powers to effectively moderate issues with them).

This isn't happening.

Last time "it didn't happen" in this way we had to get rid of game-recommendation questions. We aren't going to heavily mod-police any specific type of questions regularly; it makes users sad and burns our limited pool of effort. If a kind of question is going to be a problem on average, we'll just ax it instead.

Does anyone have any ideas (besides "keep doing what we've been doing") to make "Why is this rule the way it is" questions from pulling disproportionately subjective answers?

I'm afraid some of the problem is that some of them are legit inquiry, and others are "I don't like this rule justify it to me." I can't figure out a way to sift the two apart (though I know them when I see them) and it's the latter that are most problematic. Or the third category that inherits a bit from both, which is "this rule seems different in this new edition, but surely it's not! Tell me it's not!"

In the end, unless you're designing a game or house-ruling something and wondering about its balance, I'm not sure what actual, practical problem these questions help people solve - and that's coming out in the answers.

Answer 1

Designer reasoning questions should be banned.

I've come to the conclusion that we should consider designer reasoning questions off-topic for the site. In brief, such questions do not have much value to the site, and there is precedent for banning developer intent questions. Additionally, the useful designer reasoning questions can be reformulated into acceptable balance questions.

Many designer reasoning questions are not about users' problems.

Our tour states,

Focus on questions about an actual problem you have faced. Include details about what you have tried and exactly what you are trying to do.

However, designer reasoning questions don't actually address DM/player issues. What actual problem does knowing why D&D's gorgon is a metal bull solve? A lot of these questions, like this one, appear to be aimed more at satisfying curiosity or settling a bet rather than dealing with a real problem.

As other rpg.meta questions have demonstrated (1,2,3,4), developers do not have any privileged status. If our aim is to address practical issues in playing RPGs, then developer intent is actually worthless; what really matters is what other people who have played the game have experienced. Developers might have some useful input through their playtesting, but there is often a disconnect between apparent intent and reality.

Useful designer reasoning questions can be reframed into on-topic questions.

A number of designer reasoning questions are secretly other kinds of questions, and can be rewritten as such. For instance, What is the rationale behind the comparatively low number of spells known for Sorcerers? can be reframed as, "Is it unbalanced to increase the number of spells known for Sorcerers?". Likewise, "What have designers said for why they made worn items fireproof? can be rewritten as, "Will making worn items flammable break my game?" (yes, it will).

These DMs are really asking about the practicality of homebrewed rules, which doesn't require a developer to weigh in. In fact, questions like these are probably better served by other DMs who have firsthand experience with similar homebrew rules. Unfortunately, their current formulation actually bans such answers.

In this way, many of the more borderline designer intent questions can be reframed into other topics. This question, about the wording of the rules, is a good example: it is a question about the rules that has some designer intent flavor, but is arguably not a designer intent question per se. Likewise, questions about game design can be asked that are about the game design itself, and not necessarily intent specifically.

Generally, then, it's asking about designer intent that's problematic here. I think it's fine for designer intent arguments to support answers, but not to form the basis of a question.

Banning intent questions has a precedent on Arqade.

The gaming stackexchange, Arqade, has banned questions centered on developer intent (1, 2, 3). The rationale given is,

The reason "Why did they design it that way?" is off-topic is because it can only be answered by the developers, either directly or indirectly. If a developer hasn't answered the question in the past then the only way the question can be answered is if they happen to be browsing Arqade and see the question.

Regardless of whether or not this rationale is compelling, Arqade seems to be doing quite well without developer intent questions. Therefore, I don't think that banning these questions will cause our site to burn down.

We can't seem to leave unanswerable questions unanswered.

The primary guidance I've seen for these questions seems to be, "let unanswerable questions stay unanswered." This argument has some precedent (1,2,3), in meta, although some think unanswerable questions are bad (1, 2).

However, as @mxyzplk has demonstrated, we can't leave these unanswered. People keep trying to answer them with speculation, and they keep having to be deleted, which wastes everybody's time. While these questions might ideally be left alone, that has not played out in practice.

Conclusions

As much as I love getting reputation for just Googling things, I believe that we should close designer reasoning questions as off-topic. They don't bring much value to the site, and they cause a lot of controversy and hurt feelings. Any benefits of designer reasoning questions can most likely be retained by rewriting the question to be about balance or homebrew, and other sites have banned these questions without issue.

Answer 2

Instead focus on: What problem are you trying to solve at the table?

When a rule looks weird or feels out of whack, a lot of different questions arise, one of which is "what were they thinking?"

"What they were thinking" doesn't matter in our RPG.SE context. I will quote @BESW for a good idea of why "we are here" on this stack:

We aren't here on the Stack to read the rulebooks to people. We're here to help people learn how to synthesize the mechanics, the non-mechanical text, the social context, our personal experience, the learning of the broader community, to apply all that to a particular real-life problem someone's having and find a solution for it

We need to get the question pointed at the problem to solve so that play at the table isn't impeded by a given rule or decision, rather than being pointed at discomfort with a given design decision.

To save them, close them until they are edited

We have a variety of question classes that require a bit of tweaking to meet SE standards. That is a feature of this site, not a bug. We have a whole community to aid and assist question askers with the asking of questions.

The issues that evoke designer reasons are often related to how a rule plays out, a perceived mismatch in tone or style, a feeling of "we didn't used to do it that way" and even a clash with play at a given table. The direction of the edit assistance is to arrive at a question aimed at a problem that needs solving.

Some of these questions are thinly disguised rants

Close these as opinion based. (Which in some cases is being done).

As an aside: if enough design decisions make people not enjoy the "feel" of a game, the option to play others games is happily available, but that doesn't strike me as where should go with answers to question like this.

Answer 3

Speaking as someone who asked one of them, I think the best way forward is to let 'em burn.

They're a hassle for the mods, they end up being a hassle for the people who ask them, and I presume it's annoying to answer them thinking it's simple and then have it deleted. And after all that, what does the site (and the querent) get out of it? Generally either nothing or an answer that is, at its core, just a link to somewhere that has the actual answer.

There are exceptions, of course, but as evidenced by the existence of this very meta question, they are the exceptions, rather than the reverse. On the whole, I think this is another example of something this site just doesn't do very well, and that's ok.

Answer 4

Designer-reasons questions should be off-topic.

An RPG expert isn't substantially more capable of answering a designer-reasons question than a non-RPG expert, because all either of them is going to do is Google until they can find the right blog or tweet or interview. Answering doesn't really require RPG expertise so much as skill with phrasing search queries, plus a dash of luck in being the first to find the right quote, if one even exists. If there appears to be no such quote, you can't prove that anyway, rendering it unanswerable.

In addition, this isn't much different than asking the community to read the book to you, except in this case the book is Google and the entire book is self-indexing.

You could easily ask a designer-reasons question of a person who knows nothing about RPG's and they could find the answer for you with a browser and a few minutes of their time.

I think these sorts of questions are off-topic. The tag should include a warning, and questions like this should be held until they are edited to be on-topic.

It's up to the person asking the question to decide whether it's worth the effort for them to rephrase the question into an on-topic form. If they're desperately in search of an actual statement from a designer, then maybe SE isn't the venue to fulfill that need.

Answer 5

Treat these questions similarly to Charop questions

The meta brain trust was able to arrive at a nicely organized "how to write a charop question" meta that helps a lot in getting the charop style of questions to fit SE format, or be closed. It ended up being a community wiki sort of answer, that has three examples of charop, and points to the kind that work well on RPG.SE. This answer is placed to collect the proposals to break down, and clearly define the various designer intent / what's behind this / was this a mistake style of questions in order to clearly identify which kind of this question class can be asked well enough to fit the SE format, and which ones need to be closed.

The following is a list of the different types of designer-intent questions, and how they should be dealt with.

1. Rants: These are not questions, and should be closed.
   • Was this a mistake?: These are either more polite rants, or rules clarification questions.
   • I don't like this rule, justify it to me: These are also a type of rant. While we can explain the practical functionality of rules, the designer-intent aspect of these questions usually are usually critical of the designer.
2. Homebrew fiddling: We can easily handle homebrew questions--developer intent is not necessarily relevant to the success of a homebrew.
3. this rule seems different in this new edition, but surely it's not! Tell me it's not!: This is a rules clarification question.

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Designer intent questions are off-topic, but your question might be on-topic.

The site prefers questions that marshal its users' expertise. A question asking only about designer-reasons doesn't marshal that expertise. Further, the site's users have no special way to communicate with game designers. Essentially, a question tagged designer-reasons asks the site's users to duplicate research that's already been done or should've been done prior to posing the question.

With that in mind, many designer-reasons questions are about modifying or understanding existing rules, which is something we can address. Examine carefully the question's premise to see if the question is actually one of the following:

1. "Why did the designers make this terrible rule?"
   An alternative question that is better suited to the site is
   What impact will it have on the game if this rule is changed?
   Keep in mind that the site frowns upon rants disguised as questions.
2. "Is this rule's outcome intended by the game's designers?"
   An alternative question that is better suited to the site is
   Have I been using this rule correctly? or
   Is there a different way to implement this rule that yields superior results?

If the only way a question can be answered is with the words of the games designers, then that question should be posed to the game's designers directly. If only the designer's words will answer the question satisfactorily, the site's users can't answer the question; the designer must instead.

In rare cases there may be a question that demands a response from the game's designers. In such a case, that question must include an explanation for that necessity demonstrating that no matter how experienced a player of that game is, a player's justification will fall short.

Finally, answers for designer-reasons questions must contain direct citations from developer statements. Do not use this tag unless you want to intentionally restrict answers in this way.

However, this is so high a bar that I (@HeyICanChan) can't think of any examples.

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Please help to build this answer

Edits to this answer are requested to improve it so that it is able to serve as the charop answer did in formulating a method to save the few designer intent questions that are worthy of saving, and give better points on which ones to close as "something we don't do well." The search @mxyxplk did shows that there are already some good ideas on how to handle some of the subsets of this general question class.

(Per @HeyICanChan's comment)

@Duck I agree that player experience can be as valuable as designer intent with regard to pedestrian questions, but for serious pants-on-head crazy nonsense rules wanting to know why they exist according to the designers before you adopt them into your homebrew heartbreaker seems—to this user, anyway—a perfectly valid use of the tag. (I totally admit, by the way, that this validity is really niche and won't stop the Has the dumb designer justified this stupid rule? questions, but I also really don't like losing a site function I may use!)

Answer 6

In my opinion the designer-reasons tag does not add enough value to RPG.SE in its current form to warrant the amount of oversight it seems to require to meet restrictions it imparts on the answers.

Because of this I decided to put together some pro's and con's for a couple options that could be considered. This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list but I thought it would be a good place to start collecting ideas for direct comparison.

If anybody wants to add more pros and cons to the ideas I had or have other possible solutions you think should be considered, feel free to add them or comment so someone who who can edit my post or I can.

Some possible solutions are:

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1. Remove the tag altogether.

The justification for this would be; most questions asked in designer-reasons can be reframed in a way that can meet the needs of the asker, without having an actual quote on the subject from the designer.
Pros:
This would remove the tedious oversight that the tag is creating.
Cons:
Those people who really truly need a designer quote because (insert reason here) can't specify that.
I don't think this is the best option but it is an option

2. Allow answers that use designer published sources but aren't direct designer responses to the question.
The justification for this would be that it allows the do or die people mentioned above a medium to request designer quotes but it doesn't restrict answers to direct quotes from the designers specific to the subject matter.
Pros:
More freedom to actually convey any information at all about the question if a direct designer quote is not available.
Cons:
Askers may never get an answer that satisfies if there is not a quote that satisfies them.