Are questions about homebrew card creations allowed?

Question

Would questions in this format be allowed?

What's you favorite dominion kingdom card that you thought up yourself?

What interesting new Citadels characters have you added?

What roles have you made up for Pandemic that aren't in the base game or expansions?

All of them would be a one-suggestions per answer deal.

Questions about house-rules or suggestions to solve a specific problem are usually allowed, but I'm afraid that these will get cracked down on for being in a poll/list format.

If they are not allowed, could they be rephrased like this to be more 'objective'?

What's you favorite home-brew dominion card to add more inter-player interaction?

What interesting new Citadels characters have you added to make the offensive cards a little less devastating?

What effect will adding this home-brew card to pandemic have?

I ask because I think there could be an interesting question, but I'm not sure if the rules currently allow it. If they don't, could someone please explain how disallowing questions like this improves the site?

Answer 1

Having seen two examples now,

• https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/2519/custom-citadels-characters-the-usurper
• https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/2459/custom-citadels-characters-the-gambler

I have a couple concerns

• Both creations have been edited based upon the first answer received.
  • That appears to be "forum-like" behavior. While editing questions to improve them is cool, changing the meaning of them invalidates previous answers
  • Doesn't scale well, I envision a succession of edits that interest fewer and fewer people continually being bumped to the front page, ie "How does this card look NOW?" If a discussion like that is going to occur, it should be done through comments, if at all.
• With the quick edits, I surmise there has been no play testing on your part.
  • My preference would be that this site not become the initial feedback mechanism for any proposed house rule/change to all games.
  • I think limiting ourselves to discussions about cards/items that have undergone initial playtesting would lead to more interesting questions.
    • "This card seems to work well for our group. Is there something we are overlooking?"
    • "The concept for this card really resonates with my group but in this one situation it seems broken/weak. Can you suggest a fix?"

Answer 2

I would strongly prefer the latter set of questions over the former, because (as you suggest) the latter are more objective and the former sound a bit too much like GTKY questions. I would consider the more targeted questions to be acceptable.

Answer 3

The first set of questions is rather .. imaginary.

https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask

we are being asked an open-ended, hypothetical question: “What if ______ happened?”

The concepts are more interesting, so long as the concepts are based on the actual game as it exists in reality.

Answer 4

I'm currently finding your Citadels homebrews to be a little fatiguing; in the sense that you ask "what effects would this card have on the game, and would you play with it", which requires an extensive, well-thought-out answer - you can't answer with a one-liner! Having said that I like considering the implications of homebrews and house rules, and I'm a bit sad that someone is downvoting these questions (perhaps because they don't think much of your card ideas?)

I think to be more valuable, your homebrew card questions could start with "this feature of [game X] could be improved. Would [my card] improve things in this respect, or else what would you suggest that would help the situation?" To be honest I'm not seeing how your Gambler and Usurper cards make Citadels better - they both seem to want to add a big whack of randomness to a game that thrives on the fact that you can (or hope you can) predict what's going to happen. But I guess if you're jaded enough with Citadels, the mere novelty of new cards might re-enliven your games!