Can I post a question if I have no intention of ever including the answer in a book, picture, game or interpretive dance routine? My impression is that those who post answers enjoy the process in and of itself, but that's just an assumption. I don't want to mislead others or waste their time.
(For more context, I was thinking that posting "pointless" questions will help me learn more about world building, and how to frame good questions when I finally decide to write the big novel!)
Yes, with a caveat
Many questions are posted here without a greater framework, a master plan, or the intent to use the answer in a novel (or anything else). Your intent to use the information for any specific purpose is not relevant to the use of this Stack.
However...
One of the prohibitions in the Help Center is that questions are expected to be constructive and more than mindless social fun.
This puts the burden of being constructive on you, the original poster (OP). If you're not trying to solve a problem for your own worldbuilding efforts, please consider how your question will benefit others in theirs. We've had a number of users over the years who, literally, were simply using the Stack for mindless social fun. The result is many low quality questions. That, we'd like to avoid.
We have no requirement on what you do with the worlds you build. It's sufficient for you to just imagine the world in your head. We do however expect that you're actually building a fictional world.
If you frame it right, most questions can be about worldbuilding. For a question to be appropriate here you must make sure that as written is about worldbuilding. As long as your question shows clear worldbuilding purpose it will be considered on topic for this site. You may still want to avoid asking questions that can be answered with a simple Google search, or that are entirely about real world physics, chemistry, etc.
Please don't ask pointless questions. The SE model is all about creating a repository of high quality answers. Good answers tend to come from good questions, and the best questions are those that are motivated by some specific need. This allows the answerers to provide additional explanation and relevant context, which is part of what distinguishes a satisfactory answer from the truly great.
In short as long as you come to us with a good question about a real worldbuilding problem you're having you shouldn't have any problems on this site.
