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A player has asked the DM to ignore the lore to enable his character concept. What are the pros and cons if the DM does so? has gone through two close-reopen cycles.

The first seems pretty straightforward: originally the post had a strong survey quality to it; it was closed, commented upon, pared down, and reopened.

But the second closure--for being primarily opinion-based--has prompted more discussion than comments seem to really work for. (Here is the full comment record.) So I ask users to discuss here:

Is the lore-modification question too opinion-based?

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First question was definitely Opinion-based at the lead, but the body was not.

There a few issues in this question that need to be addressed:

It's a second hand question

The person with the issue isn't posting. It's someone else. This can create a translation error for the problem as we don't have a first hand account of either side of what's actually happening. That makes it hard to answer in general.

The lead question requests ideas on how to handle

Which is definitely POB, but the body is much clearer in their question of asking for Good Subjective experience.

An easy fix for this is to update the lead to reflect what's really being asked in the body.

This resolves the question from being POB, but we'll need to watch the answers to make sure they stay Good Subjective.

This may also be an issue of worldbuilding

Possibly generalizing this question about is worldbuilding something the DM does alone in a box or with their players is something to consider. I have a feeling this section belongs in an answer as a frame challenge, but if OP is here, then I'd like to hear their thoughts on if this was the core of their question.

Another concern

In general, I think we also need to be careful on adjusting questions to fit the stack that change what the person may be asking. Yes, we can make a lot of questions "fit", but I think it's more important to identify what the core question is, see if it's stackable, offer different questions if it's not - but just shoehorning a question into stackable doesn't necessarily solve the original question's problems even if it allows us to answer it.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I agree strongly with your "another concern." Lots of times I see comments or chat saying "well, this would be a good question" or "this edit would probably make it stackable" when I think the strong presumption should be toward clarifying the querent's actual problem. Which, in the end, may or may not end up at a stackable question. I don't know that "artificial" questions prompted by near-neighbors really improve the repository we're building. \$\endgroup\$
    – nitsua60 Mod
    Mar 4, 2019 at 15:34
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    \$\begingroup\$ @nitsua60 It's something I've seen a lot and this seemed like a good place to bring it up(although I wonder if I should post a separate meta about it.) "Oh, you can just make this wording change and we can answer it." Sure, we can do that - but that's not really what they're asking. \$\endgroup\$
    – NotArch
    Mar 4, 2019 at 15:36
  • \$\begingroup\$ Amen on "another concern" since it can frustrate users across the whole spectrum of the site \$\endgroup\$
    – KorvinStarmast
    Mar 4, 2019 at 17:48
  • \$\begingroup\$ THANK YOU for "another concern". I did add a comment right after I posted that I could remove the question if it was deemed unsuitable for SE that everyone seemed to pass by. I posted because the group I'm from is so RP-based, requests like this would be dismissed out of hand and considered frankly insulting--my DM's world is homebrew, and had existed long before the current players did. Of the (many, tangled) issues my friend brought to the table, this was the only one I couldn't find already answered here on SE. \$\endgroup\$
    – MissMisinformation
    Mar 4, 2019 at 21:23
  • \$\begingroup\$ The core of the question is effectively "who has the responsibility of worldbuilding", yes. My group, the responsibility is with the DM, since it's his world and has existed long before the players did. When he expanded the world, he explicitly invited the players to add trivia/flavor to the new areas, but the core of each region was still all him. However, I knew this was only one perspective on it, so I offered to ask on her behalf since she is shy enough she was never going to. \$\endgroup\$
    – MissMisinformation
    Mar 4, 2019 at 21:25
  • \$\begingroup\$ @MissMisinformation I'm a bit confused with the change of pronouns from "he" to "she" in your comment. Could you clarify whether there are two DMs, or is "he" referring to the problem player? \$\endgroup\$
    – Vylix
    Mar 5, 2019 at 1:43
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    \$\begingroup\$ "She" is my friend, the DM who's having the issue with the player, and a player in the game I'm in. "He", in this comment, is the DM for the group I'm in, and unrelated. When I mention the problem player, it's usually as "this guy". I realize it's confusing and I apologize for that, but I was hesitant to make up names to refer to them by. \$\endgroup\$
    – MissMisinformation
    Mar 5, 2019 at 2:34
  • \$\begingroup\$ @MissMisinformation If the current answer(s) to your question don't solve what you're really asking about "worldbuilding", you may want to post a separate question of simply "who has the responsibility for worldbuildling?" You don't need to go into the details of your situation, but asking about whether or not it's the DM or some combination of DM+Players I think would be a great addition to the stack. \$\endgroup\$
    – NotArch
    Mar 5, 2019 at 13:33
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The original question is too opinion-based, but can be remedied

And I mean the first version of the question.

The question was asking for experience, which the answerer must provide, and how it turns out.

The missing part is "measure" which ranks the best answer, and that only has been partially provided by "not remove player from the group".

This is a matter of Good Subjective, Bad Subjective. The problem is pretty obvious, and I'm sure the experts here can answer it from experience.

I would like to add that the current revision asks for very different question that the original question. I would propose that the question is rolled back to revision 3.

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The question is fine.

Also, I'd like to rant, briefly. I spent twenty minutes typing up an answer to the original question, and then the question was radically edited and my answer was deleted. I wish you guys would quit doing that. As an answerer it's a really bad experience.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Re the rant: When you posted your answer the question was a survey of individual experiences. That was never going to be an on-topic post worth time answering. \$\endgroup\$
    – SevenSidedDie
    Mar 4, 2019 at 5:52
  • \$\begingroup\$ Dan, I feel your frustration. That's happened to me before as well, but I noted in a comment that I was not going to answer (yet) since the question wasn't quite in stackable form per the pointed comment mxy had made. I know what my answer would look like, but the questsion was closed when I had the answer kicking around in my head. As it worked out, master yogurt wrote a good enough answer that I felt any input I had was moot. \$\endgroup\$
    – KorvinStarmast
    Mar 4, 2019 at 14:02
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    \$\begingroup\$ Second point: I think this question got a little bit of a 'help-pile" because a lot of us recognized the situation and felt that it was, at its root, answerable if we could help to work shop the question into a stackable form. The question, if approached as "how do I deal with this situation" is a more stackable formulation than "should I do X?" (and IIRC, mxy pointed that out in a comment during one of the close cycles.) \$\endgroup\$
    – KorvinStarmast
    Mar 4, 2019 at 14:04

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