What Exactly Are the Classification Criteria for the [rules-as-written] Tag?

Question

I seem to have been pulled in an edit war (or at least skirmish) on my question, and would like to understand the basic principles which may or may not be broken by it.

My question is interested in a strictly literal reading of the rules, and evaluation of the consequences thereof (specifically, the whether one build includes advantages over another under a literal reading of game mechanics related to them, which seems to produce a result contrary to rules as intended). My question includes a paragraph that states as much, a bit concisely:

I would like to understand the benefits of these drives in the rules as written, without resorting to rulings, hacks, fiat or the like. (If the rules are faulty, applying changes will be the next phase of tackling this issue.)

This seems to very closely match the principles of when a certain tag should be used:

[Questions which]

• Are investigating, as a priority, literal interpretations of the rules, even if they lead to absurd situations.
• Are not usefully answered solely by homebrew or house rules, or speculation of intent.

and

when their [rules'] written form is interpreted as strictly as possible, without reference to explanations or considerations outside of the rules texts

Similarly, I've been shown another highly supported answer on when to use it, and it includes characterisations such as these (not quoting the whole answer, obviously):

• The rules are the only authoritative source of information. Authorial intent is not significant to a RAW study, nor is the experience of an individual in using the rules.
• The rules are a shared objective experience. As each reader learns to recognise and account for her own observational biases, their understandings of the rules will become increasingly alike.
• Justification is irrelevant. RAW is a tool for describing what the rules say. Its users may try to explain why the rules say certain things but this is not the goal or purpose of RAW.
• Value judgements are irrelevant. RAW describes the rules, but offers no comment on their quality.

These all seem in line with the way what my question is like, what I'm asking etc. Obviously my note on the matter isn't as long and elaborate and omnienumerative as a metadiscussion. But it's still that sort of question - one not asking about rulings, not asking about interpreting things based on authorial intent, not seeking bending mechanics to the narrative. Because it's a question that seeks out the literal reading of the rules and the effects thereof.

And yet it gets edited to remove that specification, even though (the irony) that is contrary to my authorial intent and I have said as much.

Thus I have to ask: if all those are not criteria for a question being rules-literalist, then what are the criteria thereof? Asking around in chat so far only gave either vague answers, or answers that turned rules literalists into a caricature. If all those criteria are inaccurate, then perhaps the people who often use the RAW tag should edit their wiki? If they're not inaccurate, well, I'd like a confirmation from the experts of the tag. I would like to understand the general criteria and thus become able to apply them correctly to classify both this question and any subsequent ones (since apparently tag wiki criteria were deemed subordinate to other criteria).

Related tangent: Are Tag Criteria Descriptive or Prescriptive?

Answer 1

Recommendation: change your view of questions, edits, and ownership

It seemed to me that the tag itself is a collateral issue. There are so many metas already in place on that one tag - rules-as-written - that I don't see much value in duplicating that effort. I think there's something else going on with this meta question that I'd like to address. (So that makes this a little bit of a frame challenge). I further recommend that you put in the tag, here in meta, in a search, and review all of the meta posts already covering that tag. Yeah, all of them. I've done that. Not all of it is pleasant reading. It's been a topic of some interest, and some heated interaction, for some years.

Believe it or not, for all of the gamification and rep/point scoring on SE sites, we really are a collaborative effort style site. It's an unconventional way of going about things, to be sure, and it takes getting used to, but that's what makes it work.

What war?

What you described as an edit war¹ is the site working as it is supposed to with a small problem that arises for any of us, potentially: either being too close to an issue, or not being as clear as we think we are being. As I mentioned earlier in chat, but what I probably need to add here, is:

• It took me a while to learn on SE sites that once I posted a question, due to the editing norms on SE sites, I no longer owned it. It had become a kind of community property. When I began to see the edits and revisions as "let me help you make this question better for the community's sake," and I took a look at them through the lens of "did that make the question clearer or better?" I got less worried about edit wars, and in fact did not view an attempt attempt to revise or improve a question or answer was an edit war or other hostile act².

As the Beatles' Ringo Starr might have sung it:

My rep gets high with a little help from my friends

Communication filters work both ways.

Sometimes, despite our best efforts, we aren't as clear as we think we are being. The tone we bring to our engagement with others during such times can turn out well or not so well.

Most edits I don't worry about, though sometimes I roll them back because it doesn't feel right or the edit was from someone who had not grokked my point (at times due to me not being clear enough). That's why those tools are there. I'll offer this edit stream as an example. What I can't do is replicate the entire comment stream that accompanied it. There was quite a bit of back and forth.

The "continuous improvement process" at work in an unconventional manner.

When it clicked for me

I really noticed, or I guess I first bought into, how this process worked when I first began contributing at Christianity.SE. Nice folks like athanasiusofalex, Nathaniel, Caleb, Matt Gutting, LeeWoofendon and a couple of others worked with me to put both questions and answers into better shape. That experience helped to inform my understanding of how the same process was intended to work here, albeit for different subject matter.

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¹For completeness, the SO/SE definition: Edit warring is the confrontational use of edits to win a content dispute.

²_{Now, if I could just take the same view of comments, I'd get cranky less often ... work in progress there}.

Answer 2

The bolded part of your question is "What are the game-mechanical benefits of [game feature]?" The rules-as-written tag doesn't apply because your question doesn't seem to be about how the rules are written; it's fundamentally about analysis of how game systems interact in the absence of an explicit statement in the rules. You're asking for expert analysis of what appears to be a concept omitted from the rules.

Let's flip this around and assume the question were about the rules as written, so you add the rules-as-written tag and await answers that do nothing more than cite literal rules. Then either someone would answer with an explicit quote from the rules (unlikely given that you're asking the question to begin with) or the correct answer to the question would be "the rules don't explain the game-mechanical benefit" (which isn't very helpful and wouldn't actually answer the bolded question). So the assumption would be wrong. (Unless those are in fact the sorts of answers you're looking for, but in that case you have an XY problem.)

I'm not an expert in Fate Core, but in my RPG.SE experience your question does not merit the rules-as-written tag because you've either underestimated or misrepresented the intent of your own question. You seem to think that because you have the phrase "in the rules as written" in your final paragraph then that makes the question inviolably about the rules as written. I think the problem is that the final paragraph doesn't appear to match the bolded crux of your question. You're soliciting rules-as-written answers when you're actually requesting expert analysis informed by the official rules. Those aren't the same thing, and the rules-as-written tag is not equivalent to "without homebrew" or "official rules only please."

Answer 3

Recent usage—that's not adequately reflected in the tag description of the rules-as-written tag—has seen the tag rules-as-written become appropriate only for questions that state clearly and unambiguously that the rules as they are on page or screen appear to lead either to an obvious and seemingly unsolvable contradiction or to outright absurdity.

To be clear, this is a summary of what I was told by another user who removed that tag when last I tagged a question rules-as-written, and that user's position was supported by a moderator. To be extra clear, I haven't since used the tag rules-as-written, and, further, I apologize that I can't find that question among those I've asked. (How can a user search his questions by who edited his questions?)

In sum, as your question puts forth neither textual contradiction nor textual absurdity, it's just a rules question, and there's no tag for that because the site's pretty much all rules question.

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Note: The tag rules-as-written has undergone a host of changes since the site's inception. A vast number of Meta questions swirl around it. And, in the interest of full disclosure, this user, despite his silver badge for the tag rules-as-written has opted not to engage in further discussions about the tag. That effort, he's found, is better spent elsewhere.