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How to summon risk free with Gate

This post has received negative press, but had not been flagged as anything specific. I don't want to break any of the rules of the site, yet want my question answered.

I may be running into the XY Problem, but I don't think so, since the question really is how to solve problems garnered by a solution, as opposed to the question.

What is the issue with the linked post and how can I fix it to be a better question?

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I don’t know that there’s anything wrong with it to be fixed. It only has a few votes so far: two down and three up. It has no hold votes, and seems to be a viable question.

I think it’s just the nature of the question:

  • It’s long, and some people will just skip long questions.
  • It asks those who do read it to dive deep in the weeds of rules interactions.

That just means it has a smaller potential audience, and lowers the bar for those who do click the title to vote it “not useful” to them.

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A post can be stackable and yet receive many downvotes, just as the opposite can happen

A question or answer is flagged when it does not fit the stack format, i.e., the question presents some of the flagable problems - Too Broad, Off-topic, Unclear, Opinion-based. Your question presents none of these problems, thus it's not flagged.

On the other hand, votes/scores are completely orthogonal to that and present how useful and well made a post is, according to the reader and, with enough votes, according to the community.

Obviously a post that is bad for the format usually will receive downvotes as well, as it is seen as not useful, e.g. How can I improve Views and likes for my gaming

Now, about your question, although I did not downvote, I only didn't because I don't like to downvote questions - actually, if you go through my stats, I don't like to downvote, period. A few reasons I would downvote if I was more trigger happy with the down arrow:

  • It presents a seemingly unrealistic problem/scenario which is likely to be seen as "not useful" - for me it is.
  • It's unclear what is the actual problem you want to solve. You want to summon the creature just because you can, or are you summoning it for another reason? If it's for another reason, it is indeed a case of XY Problem.
  • It leaves us to imagine "what other issues might arrive", and since the scenario is, as I mentioned earlier, probably unrealistic and not useful, people don't have experience with it to actually know which problems might arrive.
  • Even if they did, "What issues might arrive?" is usually a worse question than "I tried this and I had this problem, how can I solve it?", in your case, "I tried to summon a creature with Gate and this, this and this happened and my wizard got killed. How should I fix it?" - i.e., hypothetical questions are worse than questions based on an actual problem you faced.

Probably there are more issues with the question, to be honest, but these are enough for most trigger happy people downvote a question.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Would the question be better (satisfy the common concerns) if it was simply "I want to have a formula to summon any CR <= 20 creature as a single lvl 20 wizard with no risk to the wizard, how?" and let them develop their own solution? \$\endgroup\$ – Blake Steel Oct 27 '18 at 20:35
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    \$\begingroup\$ @BlakeSteel It is still a problem you have not faced - and possibly nobody has. It also doesn't touch point 2, which is "Why?". Most of our questions which are "I want to do X, how can I do this?" have low view count and low scores, unless it's something clearly useful to anyone and with an obvious goal. Check rpg.stackexchange.com/q/123671/43856 - it has a quite clearer scope, utility and yet it's not exactly a popular or viewed-as-amazing question. \$\endgroup\$ – HellSaint Oct 27 '18 at 20:40
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    \$\begingroup\$ I guess I felt the "why" was self explanatory (CR 20ish demons and devils and such would be super useful teammates), but maybe I needed to be clearer. \$\endgroup\$ – Blake Steel Oct 27 '18 at 20:58
  • \$\begingroup\$ @BlakeSteel They are useful teammates, but you are using a heckload of preparation and using a 9th level spell for that, so I'm not convinced it is worth all the trouble. And again: What problem are you trying to solve with that? Do you want a CR 20 Devil as a team mate to beat up a bunch of commoners? \$\endgroup\$ – HellSaint Oct 27 '18 at 21:05
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    \$\begingroup\$ Counterpoint - the only person who needs to find the question useful is you. As long as this is the case, I wouldn't worry about the downvotes \$\endgroup\$ – Wibbs Oct 27 '18 at 21:46
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Wibbs The meta question is why he is receiving downvotes. It's literally written "I don't find this useful" when you downvote something. You can ask as many "it's only useful for me" questions as you want, but then you do know why you are receiving downvotes - the community thinks it is not useful and is downvoting accordingly. \$\endgroup\$ – HellSaint Oct 27 '18 at 21:53
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The question was a long chain of logic around summons, glyphs of warding, and seemed driven by a desire to use a loophole to get around the risks that serve as balancing nerfs for summoners. It's a question truly worthy of wizards, who use intelligence to do crazy things they're not usually supposed to be able to do.

I think the downvotes are mostly because you were asking people to check your work, rather than asking for clarification around a mechanic. In essence, you were asking "Is this how glyph of warding works?" and "Is this how planar binding works?" and "Is this how private sanctum works?" and "Is this how magic circle works?".

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