63
votes
Accepted
Revisit III: Don’t Guess the System policy
Let experts make expert decisions.
This is the essential premise of Stack Exchange. People come here because they expect experts to be equipped to solve their problem - and they are right. We have an ...
- 141k
60
votes
Accepted
Revisit: Is "5e" a clear enough statement of game system by a question asker to determine that the question is about D&D 5e?
Let experts make expert decisions.
This is the whole point of Stack Exchange. The entire model is people who know what they're talking about answering questions. People come here to ask questions ...
- 141k
45
votes
Re-revisiting the "don't guess the system" policy
Revert the policy, and treat these edits like any other
The moderation team believes it’s time to revert this policy and restore the way we handle system information to the default way we handle every ...
- 93.5k
38
votes
Revisiting our "never guess the game system" policy
I'm a college instructor. I teach hundreds of students across multiple courses a semester in the same major. When I receive an email from a student asking what will be on an upcoming quiz or what they ...
- 30k
33
votes
Dungeons and Dragons is dominating the site in terms of page views
I think things are OK.
I'd like to offer an additional stat: we have 16,002 D&D family questions (which includes Pathfinder) out of 22,167 total questions, or 72.2% D&D family questions. (...
- 36.3k
31
votes
Accepted
Is Heroes and Dragons the same thing as D&D 5e in terms of system tagging?
It’s a “fork” of D&D 5e: based on similar fundamentals, but having split from the main branch of 5e development and thereafter developed independently of 5e. In a sense, it is not all that ...
- 343k
30
votes
Only D&D on this Stack?
Your percentages are off, but you can ignore the [*dnd*] and [pathfinder] tags.
This link tells you how to ignore a tag.
I find about 17,500 tags for D&D (and over 10K for the current edition) and ...
- 142k
30
votes
Is '5e' a clear enough statement of game system by a question asker?
I think we should be OK interpreting “5e” as “D&D 5e” when the question is also talking about D&D-isms. (If they're talking about things that don't sound like D&D 5e, like talking about ...
- 36.3k
28
votes
Are questions about Warhammer 40k Lore on-topic?
I’m gonna go ahead and just say “yes”
Warhammer 40k is a campaign setting for an RPG. It’s also the setting for a bunch of other things, which means you could reasonably ask about it on SF&F or ...
- 343k
27
votes
Revisiting our "never guess the game system" policy
We should not guess the system, for all the reasons others have stated. However, we should make it clearer to new askers that mentioning the exact system is going to be a requirement for having their ...
- 6,426
26
votes
Revisit III: Don’t Guess the System policy
Recommendation: Rescind the policy - Guessing the system is permissible, but you do so at-risk
Going forward, we will adopt a policy to allow experts to be experts, but in that vein, we will expect ...
- 33k
25
votes
You can help new users identify their D&D edition!
Recommended course of action
Turns out we have a relatively low-traffic question asking exactly this: see How do I know which edition of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) the books I'm looking at ...
- 53.7k
24
votes
Does a widely-played and well-defined hybrid of D&D 3e and 3.5e exist called “D&D 3.x”?
At the risk of being cute: Yes. It's called 3.5.
3.5 is not directly compatible with 3.0. Skills are broken out slightly differently, some of the mechanics work differently (e.g. damage reduction), ...
- 12.8k
24
votes
Accepted
Should we have a tag for Wendy's Feast of Legends RPG?
If someone asks a question about it, we can have a tag about it
We have tags for other jokey systems (or at least one, see dungeons-the-dragoning), but tags can't exist (for more than a day) without ...
- 93.5k
24
votes
Re-revisiting the "don't guess the system" policy
I think it is a terrible idea to revert the policy
I disagree, strongly, with the assertion that questions are so often “reasonably clear.” I feel that I have often assumptions made that are incorrect....
- 343k
24
votes
Re-revisiting the "don't guess the system" policy
The endless arguments across Meta show that there are problems no matter what policy is used. These problems are caused because questions that should have system tags do not have them.
We can ...
- 75.2k
23
votes
Accepted
Why do I need to specify my game system, and how do I best do it?
There are a lot of different RPGs out there (and a lot of editions of a lot of RPGs), and a lot of them use the same keywords, names, and – in some cases – book titles. As such, guessing what game ...
Someone_EvilMod
- 47.7k
23
votes
Can we generalize our policy on linking system-specific rules, toolsets, etc. as clearly stating the system?
Citing materials is a way for someone who doesn’t know there are different editions of the game to tell us what edition they’re using.
When I got into Dungeons & Dragons, I didn’t know there were ...
- 141k
22
votes
Re-revisiting the "don't guess the system" policy
It's precisely because a system tag can sometimes be assumed that it never should be.
Back-shelf RPG guy here for a perspective. Here's a couple of questions that put a certain impression on me. One's ...
- 39.6k
21
votes
Accepted
I just showed up here. Should I be somewhere else if I play other RPGs more than D&D?
Our site is for all* tabletop role-playing games, not just D&D 5e.
It is true that D&D 5e questions seem to dominate the questions on our mainsite (Role-Playing Games StackExchange) for the ...
- 31.4k
21
votes
Can we generalize our policy on linking system-specific rules, toolsets, etc. as clearly stating the system?
Yes we can, and we shouldn't even need to ask this meta in order to do that.
We already discussed that we should "let experts be experts". Stack Exchange isn't meant to run on absolute ...
- 36.3k
20
votes
Revisiting our "never guess the game system" policy
I agree with the other answers saying that we shouldn't change our policy on this but have a slightly different slant on why:
Our current policy is very clear, easy for new users to understand (even ...
- 24.9k
20
votes
Revisit: Is "5e" a clear enough statement of game system by a question asker to determine that the question is about D&D 5e?
Per a previous answer: only if 5e doesn't occur in a vacuum
If there are sufficient contextual clues to determine "5e of what?" such that a player of the game and that edition can clearly ...
- 142k
20
votes
Revisit III: Don’t Guess the System policy
I present exhibit A:
Do Kaladesh Dwarves get +4 in Constitution?
The most recent example of how we make this site a worse place by having this rule.
This question was not unclear. It could be answered....
- 22.5k
19
votes
Dungeons and Dragons is dominating the site in terms of page views
Honestly, I think D&D has eaten the front page.
Here's what the site looks like if you ignore-list D&D3/4/5, Pathfinder, and D20. (N.B. I'm not ignore-listing "general"/"legacy" D&D ...
- 28.9k
19
votes
Is '5e' a clear enough statement of game system by a question asker?
Get clarification first / promote better engagement with new users
One of the advantages of asking the question "What game/system/edition are you playing?" and waiting to get that answer is that we ...
- 142k
19
votes
Is '5e' a clear enough statement of game system by a question asker?
Yes. Pragmatically, the system known in wide circles as 5e is D&D 5e
It is correct that there are many different systems that have a fifth edition.
However, D&D is the most widely known TTRPG ...
- 12.4k
19
votes
Re-revisiting the "don't guess the system" policy
I wrote an answer about this a while back, here's a shorter version
Get clarification first / promote better engagement with new users
One of the advantages of asking the question "What game/system/...
- 142k
18
votes
Accepted
At what point in development is a new system tag added?
A tag actually can't even exist until there's a question on the subject, so in all likelihood, that means when playtest actually begins.
For reasons we discovered after the D&D 5e playtest, that ...
- 242k
18
votes
Accepted
Is it against policy or bad practice to attempt system-agnostic answers to questions whose system has not been specified?
Yes, it is bad practice.
In the end the answer poster tried to answer a clearly terrible and under-specced question. They should know better and that how you get spells is totally game dependent, and ...
- 175k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible