##It's precisely because a system tag can sometimes be assumed that it never should be.

Back-shelf RPG guy here for a perspective. Here's a couple of questions that put a certain impression on me. One's about a druid who wants to turn into a blink dog. One's about mitigating the effects of critical hits.

Neither of them's about D&D - the first one is admittedly kind of cheating, because it was inspired by a recurring theme I saw in D&D questions and I thought it would help to share my perspective about a similar thing that happened in Dungeon World. The second one's about Genesys. Both of them were properly system tagged, and both of them have two deleted answers that gave a curt but correct answer to the question as though it was about D&D 5E.

I can't speak for any of those four answerers. I don't know what they were thinking about how the site operated or how questions worked. All I know is that since they were downvoted and their answers deleted, none of them have put questions or answers on the site, and I feel guilty about accidentally tricking two of them, one of whom joined the site to give an answer, into eating downvotes and deletes.

If we require a system tag for questions that are about system rules rather than the social activity of playing an RPG, then we can at least say to people who are answering a question "one of these tags will be the game's system; please don't answer the question if you don't know the system". If we require the querent to add a system tag rather than some helpful editor with the best intentions -- well, I mean, that's here already, and if it wasn't, would I have had to strip a dnd-5e tag from my question with even more "I only play games you've never heard of" swagger?

I just worry that if we let it be assumed that questions are about dnd-5e and that be how the site works, then people are going to assume questions are about dnd-5e even more than they already are right now, and people who want to ask questions about other systems are going to have to, well, either proactively confront that assumption or lash out with downvotes and reversions after the fact, and neither of those options seems like a friendly thing to be.

It's precisely because a system tag can sometimes be assumed that it never should be.

Back-shelf RPG guy here for a perspective. Here's a couple of questions that put a certain impression on me. One's about a druid who wants to turn into a blink dog. One's about mitigating the effects of critical hits.

Neither of them's about D&D - the first one is admittedly kind of cheating, because it was inspired by a recurring theme I saw in D&D questions and I thought it would help to share my perspective about a similar thing that happened in Dungeon World. The second one's about Genesys. Both of them were properly system tagged, and both of them have two deleted answers that gave a curt but correct answer to the question as though it was about D&D 5E.

I can't speak for any of those four answerers. I don't know what they were thinking about how the site operated or how questions worked. All I know is that since they were downvoted and their answers deleted, none of them have put questions or answers on the site, and I feel guilty about accidentally tricking two of them, one of whom joined the site to give an answer, into eating downvotes and deletes.

If we require a system tag for questions that are about system rules rather than the social activity of playing an RPG, then we can at least say to people who are answering a question "one of these tags will be the game's system; please don't answer the question if you don't know the system". If we require the querent to add a system tag rather than some helpful editor with the best intentions -- well, I mean, that's here already, and if it wasn't, would I have had to strip a dnd-5e tag from my question with even more "I only play games you've never heard of" swagger?

I just worry that if we let it be assumed that questions are about dnd-5e and that be how the site works, then people are going to assume questions are about dnd-5e even more than they already are right now, and people who want to ask questions about other systems are going to have to, well, either proactively confront that assumption or lash out with downvotes and reversions after the fact, and neither of those options seems like a friendly thing to be.