When we get a question asking what others have done as GMs or players in their games, the question is almost always closed as “primarily opinion-based”. Sometimes they’re not put on hold, but they’re still edited to ask the same things but slightly differently.
What’s wrong with asking what others have done? Don’t we want people to share their experiences?
What’s the difference between the wordings that get held and the wordings that stay open?
As a Q&A community, RPG Stack Exchange focuses on practical problems you may face. We're interested in questions and problems that can have a single best or correct answer or solution. We have voting mechanisms for sorting answers as better or worse (or more correct/incorrect), and an “accepted answer” feature for marking which answer solved your problem.
In contrast to forums, we don't handle discussion or surveys on peoples' thoughts (“let's talk about X”). We also cannot handle questions where every answer is equally valid (“What's your favorite ____?”) or where there is no specific problem to solve. Our Q&A features aren't set up for this and they invalidate our voting and acceptance features.
I have a problem with ____ in my game. What have you done when running into this problem?
Has anyone seen/run games where ____ has happened?
There is a situation or a problem presented here, but we're not being asked to solve it. Instead, we're just being surveyed for arbitrary things we've seen or done, regardless of what outcome it has. Every answer of what someone's seen or done is equally valid.
I have a problem with ____ in my game. Here's the situation that's happening. How can I resolve that problem so that I can get this specific outcome? How have you managed it in your games?
This presents us with a specific problem and a specific kind of outcome you're after. It prompts us to share our experience on how that solution has worked out in practice as part of asking for that solution. This means we can present actual solutions to your practical problem, and we can judge the best answer among them by which one seems to have presented a desirable outcome in actual practice.
You can also just ask this:
I have a problem with ____ in my game. Here's the situation that's happening. How can I resolve this problem to get this specific outcome?
You don't need to prompt us to explain how we've handled it—we usually should be telling you that anyway.
