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I think we've agreed that questions asking people to generate content from scratch are off topic. Do we have a stance on questions asking for review of home brew content.

For example, I'm working on a port of the Artificer class to Pathfinder. Would posting it and asking for reviews be on topic, and useful. Would asking for input on specific features, or for guidance in achieving a particular objective improve the question?

While we're thinking about, can you think of examples of this type of question that would be bad (too localized, subjective and argumentative, etc).

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I would prefer that folks tried out the material before bringing it here for review. Such a question could then be phrased like:

  • This house rule was written to address XXX situation, after trying it, we found that the goal was successful, but also side effect YYY. How could we tweak this?
  • We tried house rule XXX to address YYY situation but it had little effect. We really like the flavor of the house rule, how could we change it?
  • We tried house rule XXX to address YYY. After a couple sessions, it seems to work just fine. Are there any potential side effects that we haven't seen yet?

In short, requiring experience with the rule change puts a limit on the number of such questions and helps to restrict them to changes that have merit rather than just something that was dreamed up. Discussions of theoretical house rules should be directed to regular forums.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ It's the equivalent of asking for a full program vs asking about a function/method/localized problem in stackoverflow. I like this idea. \$\endgroup\$
    – Adriano Varoli Piazza
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 13:48
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In general should be OK. The gotchas are:

  1. Someone who's just pimping their stuff. "Hey look at my new class isn't it cool?" There will be a temptation esp. from PDF publishers whose product lines are just "here's a new class in 2 page" to do this, and it shouldn't be tolerated.
  2. General/subjective. Shouldn't be "review my thing," or just "here playtest this," should be specific questions like Pat's proposed.

I wrestle with 3. Too Localized. Is "here's a lil rule for my homebrew" too localized? I guess not if there's meaningful context such that someone else could benefit either from the rule or from the theory discussion regarding it. In the end it's all case by case.

So in the end, like everything else - it it obviously related to RPGs, so it's under the big tent of site scope. But I'm not going to say "ah yes review requests are OK" - if they are questions that otherwise pass the question quality markers, and they are under the "big tent" of beign tabletop related, then they're good. If they don't, they're not. Same answer for any other "XX" in "RPG XX".

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    \$\begingroup\$ I think with RPGs we maybe should ignore the too localised issue. There are games with sales running in less than 100, it's not much smaller to just be talking about a specific group. We also don't get enough activity as is (according to the area51 stats). \$\endgroup\$
    – migo
    Commented May 29, 2011 at 18:18
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    \$\begingroup\$ I don't think we trigger "too localized" on less used systems - we do it on questions that have no future applicability. Just like on SO weird fringe programming languages aren't "too localized." \$\endgroup\$
    – mxyzplk Mod
    Commented May 29, 2011 at 19:20

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