So the enchantment tag was created today, and assigned to five questions. We already have conjuration (Conjuration spirited away), divination, illusion, and necromancy tags, so it’s not without precedent, and I can buy that enchantments, as found in D&D, lead to a series of issues that can raise related questions and a tag may be worth grouping them. There are probably more questions deserving of the tag, but that can be worked on naturally.
However, I would stress that the precedent here is for “a type of spell,” not “something D&D calls a spell school.” The tag excerpts for illusion and necromancy make no mention of “spell school”—they just focus on spells that deceive and spells that animate the dead in unlife, respectively. Notably the latter doesn’t actually cover the entirety of the D&D spell school Necromancy—other effects in that school should not be tagged necromancy, but rather curses, or in AD&D and 5e, healing. These terms are used because they are the natural, English-language terms for these kinds of spells, not because they are used by D&D as spell schools, and they do not necessarily match the D&D definition. (The tags conjuration and divination lack tag info entirely, but should be defined similarly, probably about summoning and magical information gathering, respectively.)
Which brings me to my issue with enchantment, the name. “Enchantment” is the term in WotC-era D&D for mind-affecting magic, charms and compulsions and the like. There is some narrative precedent for that, and AD&D used the term for a weird hybrid for a wizard kit (The Complete Wizard’s Handbook, TSR 1990), though that was specifically “Enchantment/Charm” and it was the charms, not the enchantments, that were used to affect people’s minds.
Basically everywhere else that isn’t directly derived from D&D seems to prefer to use “enchantment” to the process of imbuing magic into an object. Video games use it that way, other game systems use it that way, and even The Complete Wizard’s Handbook used it that way. So tagging such questions enchantment seems heavily D&D-centric.
On the other hand... this site is heavily D&D-centric. Not in any official way, certainly not in any way that should suggest other systems are unwelcome or second-class here, just by pure coincidence of the questions that get asked here, are more often D&D questions than they aren’t. And D&D players may very well be looking for this subject under the name “enchantment.” After all, that is the name chosen by the emergent folksonomy.
My point is that, no matter what this site wants an enchantment tag to mean, it’s very likely to be misused. If we decide to reject the D&D-centric definition, D&D players will misuse it thinking it means what it does in D&D. If we don’t reject the D&D-centric definition, non-D&D players (and, to be honest, some new D&D players as well, since we have had plenty of D&D players use enchant to refer to items) will misuse it, thinking it means what it does... pretty much everywhere outside of D&D.
We could instead block the tag from use altogether; blocking the tag solves the issue of misuse. But then that leaves people who search for “enchantment,” whatever they mean, unable to find the correct tag, assuming we do want to create tags that group these sorts of questions (magic-items probably covers imbuing items with magic already; mental-magic or compulsion or something could maybe be used for the mind control stuff).
Does anyone have thoughts on how this should go, or any suggestions for handling it beyond what I’ve thought of?
