Should this dice question be open or closed?

Question

This meta is about the mainsite question How I can I roll a number of non-digital dice to get a random number between 1 and 150?

1. It was closed by five users,

2. then reopened by five other users. (Many of these first ten users are very high-rep and -experience users--you can see them all in the revision history.)

3. Then it was closed by an elected moderator with comment-reference to not really being about RPGs, but just a pure math/dice question. I tend to agree, and left the following comment:

   This is one of those cases (it seems to me) where "we have expertise in this" runs up against "real questions have real answers." If someone's running an RPG and they want a good way to generate 1-150 at the table we'll answer that question. Because the answers to clarifying questions like "how much math are your players comfortable with?" and "can the die be different colors?" and "how quick does this need to be?" and "does this happen once a session or every couple of minutes?" all of which could impact answers and votes, have answers in the real case and don't here. – nitsua60♦

4. Five more users reopened it.

So I've gone ahead and locked it and opened this meta: we have two close-reopen cycles with plenty of rep/experience on either "side" of the disagreement. We also have an existing meta--Are general statistics or dice questions on topic? seems (to me) to clearly point in the "close" direction.

Let's hash it out here, then apply the result mainsite: Should this question be open or closed?

---

Some other related metas:

• Is giving the benefit of the doubt to dice/stats questions that don't mention RPGs resulting in site scope creep?
• Are questions learning about loaded dice and creating and detecting them on topic?

Answer 1

Open. Polyhedral dice are within the purview of roleplaying games.

Polyhedral dice are a piece of equipment integral to tabletop roleplaying games. The primary use of those dice is for tabletop roleplaying dice, with only a minority of alternative uses such as board games inspired by tabletop RPGs.

RPG.SE is the primary site where you would expect to find experts on polyhedral dice. I would not expect Math Stack Exchange to know that there are 15-sided dice, or custom 3D printed dice, or to know about the practice of rolling percentile dice and how they are read, or to have practical experience of the pitfalls of rolling and reading very large dice. All of this expertise was critical in giving good answers to the question.

This particular question involves an unorthodox use of RPG tools and systems, but it's still about RPG tools and systems, and a good answer to the question relies on an understanding of those things which no other Stack Exchange can provide.

Answer 2

We are not Dice.SE. It should be closed

(according to how our current site is scoped)

Here's what the tour has to say about the purpose and mission of this site:

RPG Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for gamemasters and players of tabletop, paper-and-pencil role-playing games. We cater to hundreds of tabletop RPGs including D&D, Fate, GURPS, World of Darkness, and more. RPG Stack Exchange is built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about role-playing games.

Right now, we have defined ourselves as a site laser-focused on one narrow slice of Q&A content: stuff inherently about RPGs.

This question explicitly is not about RPGs:

This question is not actually related to RPGs but is more of a real-world dice rolling scenario I'm looking for help with, from dice rolling experts.

I'm currently memorizing the Book of Psalms, which is divided into 150 chapters.

I'm looking for an analog, elegant way of quizzing myself, by rolling some number of dice (or whatever means, really, just nothing digital) to get a random (equally likely) number from 1 to 150.

It is about dice and statistics for the purpose of memorizing psalms. This is a lovely and commendable question, but this site isn't built to field questions requiring only general expertise in dice just like we also don't field questions about graphic design not related to RPGs, social problems not occurring in an RPG context, and pure math/statistics problems.

This question again explicitly had nothing to do with RPGs. We are not dice.SE. We wouldn't handle questions about Liar's Dice, identifying what version of Monopoly a set of dice came from, or Statistics 101 homework problems about dice probability. Nor should we be accepting question about solving everyday problems with dice.

Changing the scope could allow these types of questions

Now, dice questions explicitly not about RPGs don't have to always be off-topic here, but by our current definition they are. If we want them to be something that is allowed and encouraged here, we are going to have to have a discussion about widening the scope of the site to allow them and come up with a proper definition of what is allowed and what isn't.

No matter what the scope of the site is, it should be widely understood and agreed upon such that we can manage the site content to remain focused on that scope. Doing so allows us to keep our noise level very low and to maintain a high level of interesting and relevant content for our target audience.

The lack of a migration target has no effect on what is considered on-topic

It is good to remember that even if a question may not fit on any other Stack, it does not mean we have to default to expanding our core focus to "adopt" them. The presence or lack thereof of a migration target does not at all factor into what we consider on topic here.

Not every question has a Stack that has the focus and expertise to answer it. And that is inherently a characteristic that comes from how the focused Q&A sites of Stack Exchange are built.

Answer 3

This question is off-topic, for the same reason many historical-settings and campaign-development questions are off topic.

Way back in the antediluvian days of 2012, we discussed an issue we were having centered around questions that only vaguely brushed against RPGs by saying that they were asked for campaign research. I suggest that you read the question and top answer, but to summarize: A question is on topic if and only if it is best answered by RPG experts specifically.

While many RPG players spend time figuring out how to make dice do interesting things, the specifics of this question do not require any knowledge about RPGs to answer. This question doesn't require knowledge about how dice mechanics work in play, how players react to different dice mechanics, the threshold at which a mechanic is too complicated to use in play, or any of the other RPG-specific metrics by which we could judge answer quality.

If the question was something like "my players have to roll on a table of 150 options several times a session, what can I do to make that work in play", there would be no question of topicality. This question is not about RPGs at all, and so should be off topic.

NB: It's irrelevant whether or not there is a better Stack for this question than ours. Topicality has never been, isn't, and should never be determined by whether or not the querent has a better to place to ask, either on a different Stack or outside the network.