Tag Archives: stack exchange

RPG Stack Exchange Launches!

Posted on April 11, 2012 | 3 comments

After a long 600 days, RPG Stack Exchange (RPG.SE) is out of beta.  It has a spiffy new design and is ready for your RPG questions and answers.

For those of you not familiar with the Stack Exchange concept, the original Stack Overflow was born out of a hatred for how crappy forums are when you have a real question that needs an answer – not people threadcrapping, or telling you your choice of language isn’t right, or people babbling on about irrelevant stuff, or flamewars over “the best,” and you maybe getting a decent answer on page 10.  SO was a huge success, and they’ve expanded (via community voting) to many other kinds of topics.

So if like me you’ve gotten sick of the sheer noise when trying to pose a real question on RPG.net, ENWorld, or the Paizo forums, give RPG.SE a try.  You post a question, which can get commented on or edited by you or high rep users, and then answers get voted up/down as well. No babbling or flamewars, just answers, and you get to choose the most helpful and the community gets to vote up the ones they consider the most helpful. I don’t go to forums any more unless I just want to hobnob – the SE format has made me impatient with trying to conduct real Q&A there.   Check it out.

You can also follow it as @StackRPG on Twitter!

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RPG Stack Exchange – A Year Later

Posted on October 3, 2011 | 1 comment

If you are familiar with Stack Overflow or the other technical Q&A sites powered by the no-nonsense engine Joel Spolsky came up with, you may want to know that they’re spreading the idea to many other subjects.  RPG Stack Exchange has been in beta for a year and has garnered more than 2000 questions.  Here’s a sampling of the top ten!

  1. Who created the idea of Experience Points?
  2. What tools are useful to organize a GM’s campaign notes?
  3. How many people does it take to steal a Star Destroyer?
  4. What approaches are there to lessen or eliminate reliance upon dice in an RPG?
  5. How do I get my PCs to not be a bunch of murderous cretins?
  6. As a man, how can I roleplay a woman better?
  7. 3d6 vs a d20: What is the effect of a different probability curve?
  8. How do you help players not focus on the rules?
  9. What alternative monsters are there to replace orcs, kobolds, and hobgoblins in low-level encounters?
  10. Playing 4th Ed D&D for the first time, what should I read to avoid holding everyone back?

Go check ’em out – lots of good collected wisdom here. 90% less crap than forum threads!

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Do You Have A Question About Gaming?

Posted on April 20, 2011 | 1 comment

If you have a burning question about gaming – rules, player or GM techniques, game recommendations, and want answers without a bunch of nonsense, consider coming to ask that question on RPG Stack Exchange.  It has a bunch of experts standing by eager to answer your question.

It’s not a forum, it’s a Q&A system based on the preeminent coder tool Stack Overflow. You ask your question, be clear what you’re asking for, tag your question, and maybe revise your question based on comments from the community.  Everyone else provides honest to goodness on topic answers, nothing else is tolerated, and people vote those answers up based on how good they think they are.  You as the question asker get to select what you think the best answer is too.

I’ve despaired of asking questions on RPG forums any more. It always gets bogged down in endless threadjacks, people saying “but you shouldn’t play that way,” and dozens of posts of nonsense for every post that kinda actually tries to answer your question. RPG.SE fixes that problem in spades; it’s not for hobnobbing, it’s for serious analysis of specific questions.

Want to know about good tools for a GM to use to organize their campaign notes? Or how to reduce dice reliance in a game? Looking for ways to get PCs angry without also annoying your players?

Come ask your question, it’s free and easy, and I bet you’ll get more solid answers than if you go ask the same question on any given gaming forum!

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RPG Stack Exchange!

Posted on August 26, 2010 | Leave a comment

Woot, it’s live!  The RPG Stack Exchange is now open for business.

If you are a techie you may have used one of the other Stack Exchange sites – Stack Overflow, Server Fault, and Super User.  They have turned that into an open technology and this is the newest launched site.  In seven days of private beta there were 263 users who have asked 234 questions and written 954 answers!

It’s not the usual messageboard.  It’s for expert Q&A format only.  Hobnob on other forum sites, this one you ask questions and people answer.  The community votes up or down the questions and answers based on their usefulness.  The gold rises to the top, and the crap gets ejected.  Come one come all!

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