I see this question being asked about actual podcasts of games and want to ask if there are any podcasts with x criteria. Is this regarded as off-topic or will it be otherwise closed due to some other failing (too broad, subjective)?
If so, how can I post a good enough question for a recommendation of a podcast?
General recommendations for podcasts are, being shopping questions, off topic.
However, like tool-recs, some of the questions asking for recommendations for podcasts of type X are really trying to solve an underlying problem which we could help with if we knew about it. These kinds of questions can often be rewritten to be about the underlying issue, or in some rare cases will be fine without rewriting because the underlying issue is already plain.
An example of the latter is Actual Play of Don't Rest Your Head one-shot exemplar: this question's underlying problem is clearly “I don't get how DRYH works/fits together in play.” Now, this could be rewritten to be something like “how do I figure out how DRYH works”, and possibly it would be better helped that way — but I rather doubt it. Pragmatically the answer is going to be some type of “observe other people playing it,” and given DRYH's niche appeal making attending a live demo close to impossible, there really is only one kind of answer possible: pointing to a session recording or summary.
But the exception also demonstrates the principle: general podcast recommendation requests that lack a visible underlying problem can't be answered except with a laundry list of podcasts. These suggestions will be based on no more than guesses at their usefulness for the asker (because we don't know what problem they're supposed to be solving!) and the answer author's personal tastes. A set of answers like that defeats the purpose of using RPG.se instead of a forum because the voting will just be noise, and beyond being an ineffective use of the site, the sharp uptick in noise degrades the signal-to-noise ratio that the site's coding and rules revolve around protecting.
So if you want to ask for podcasts that satisfy criteria X, the best way to ensure the survival of the question is to reorient to focus on explaining what problem you have (which inspired the desire for recommendations) instead, and leave the request for podcasts as a tangential mention: that you were thinking maybe a podcast would help you. Then the question's problem would be clear, and answerers would be free to answer with all their expert knowledge, podcast related or not, instead of just being a hive mind container to extract web links from (which is what a discussion forum and other social media excels at). As a bonus, mentioning that you think a podcast might solve the problem — assuming you've explained the problem in general already — can help give readers a bit more insight into your experience of the problem and possibly improve answers thereby, even if they don't end up being links to podcasts.
Yes, they're on topic. They need to cover an actual RPG-related problem, which will usually mean you're requesting actual play examples. Those are covered in session-summaries, and are valuable teaching instruments in learning how a game actually gets played, or how certain parts get handled. Podcasts in general also get covered in podcast.
(If you're just looking for a cool podcast to listen to, it'll be closed as primarily opinion based because that's not what we're here for, but that should come as no surprise.)
There hasn't been much major problem with them yet making them need to be off-topic. We only rule things off topic when a significant amount of historical evidence shows they're non-viable. With only 17 questions between the podcast & session-summaries tags, we've hardly tried them out yet. Until then, we just close problematic instances for our standard applicable reasons, if they apply.
Your question won't be too broad or primarily opinion-based by default, so unless it really is a close-worthy criteria, it could totally stay open. How to keep it open is a big question we can't answer fully, but it will help to remember there's a lot of podcasts and they're not all neatly gathered together in any one place. Otherwise, stick to business as usual: tell us the actual problem you're facing, ask us how to resolve it, say if there's anything specific you need from us. You may want to review existing session-summaries questions to see what they did.
(Incidentally I've voted to close that question you linked because I feel that particular one is too broad, it's just arbitrarily requesting any sort of podcast collection.)
I'll borrow from the close menu here, specifically the "off-topic because" bit:
“Shopping” questions and other recommendation requests are off-topic, but can be asked on any one of a number of role-playing games discussion forums. For more information, see Are Game Recommendation Questions On Topic, Revisited.
If you want to find podcasts, a question about how to find podcasts could be on-topic, or you could just try a forum instead of this site.
Are podcast recommendations off topic?
Sadly, yes.
All recommendations are off topic, not some specifically enumerated list (well, you didn't mention GM screens...).
Historical reading:
The reason is the same reason for paid products, Web resources, tools, etc. Questions will tend to poorly define their criteria and generate a long list of soon to be outdated options (like the linked podcast req in the question). Or people will helpfully just "Google that for them." Or... All the other reasons.
Rec questions, also known as "shopping questions," are banned network-wide. We tried to allow them under limited cases. While the discussion was about "game recs," given our reasoning we allowed other kinds of recs under the banner of that experiment. But when that experiment failed because we couldn't do them well, that experiment ended, again the discussion was mostly about "game recs" but it applies whole cloth to all the recs brought in under that experiment's banner. Therefore "game recs" now banned means all recs banned. There aren't any meaningful changes when it's "but its an X-rec" that eliminates the issues with them.
So the answer is "no, same reason," and what can we do about it is "same thing." "What's the best way to learn Savage Worlds by watching people play it" could be legitimately answered with "Among other options watching podcasts, and here are two good SW APs I listen to..." But "I want a SW AP podcast" fits into the exact same req category and will have the exact same problems, in fact nearly identical to tools in that they tend to go dead more often.
You are trying to argue through false analogy that "well then anything where anyone is asked to give some opinion is banned." That's not true, it's requests for classes of off-site resources where there is no other more high quality answer possible than a list of one or more resources. "I want your recommendation, as in your expert opinion, on this character option" is not a "rec question" in this sense. Consider it a "resource recommendation" ban if that helps you.
We tried to allow curated rec questions. It didn't work. We're not going to then try to re-allow it in corner cases, it takes way too much work for the value.
Please note that shopping/rec questions are off topic Stack wide as a general policy - we allowed game-recs (which was left as a deliberately vague term instead of having "adventure-rec, setting-rec, etc. per a previous meta conversation) as an experiment, but once that experiment was ended there's nothing else rec-cy left on topic we need to explicitly remove. That was one umbrella exception and that umbrella's closed. We had to say that out loud in the tool-rec discussion, but don't really need to say it again for every *-rec discussion.
I love podcasts, I hope this poster gets an answer somewhere, etc. I championed us trying to do recs and keep them on topic here. We as a community failed in that, which disappoints me too but it's water under the bridge and we need to move on.
