is God Machine a good tag?

Question

A new tag: god-machine has been created by xenoterracide.

This is distinct from nwod-god-machine because it about the setting element/entity/character known as the God-Machine.

Which while is a staple of the nwod-god-machine system, is not intrinsically linked to it and plenty of games of nwod-god-machine are played without interacting with it.

And conversely games in other systems, such as nwod 1.0, have been played with it, there are published adventures, and I personally have run a game (and I am sure I am not unique).

This question which is about nwod 1.0, deserves the tag (if we keep the tag), so I have added it.

Are we in agreement that this is a valid tag?

It is a bit like rokugan and l5r.

Answer 1

Community Concensus seems to be that the tag is not good. There have been no answers posted infavor of the tag, And only 1 downvote on each answer ssupporting removing the tag.

I will delete it from the 2 questions it is on at the end of this week, unless something changes.

Someone with the rep might like to make it an alias for nwod-god-machine, in the future, but i doubt it, since the referring to the system that way will stop soon when the rebranding to nWoD 2e happens, over the next few months.

Possibly the time to review this will return to us in the future, but by then a better name for the tag may also have come to us.

Answer 2

We have very little precedent for pure "lore" tags that are smaller than a game setting. The few lore-ish tags that we do have are typically about mechanics or a mechanical context—sr4-matrix and (arguably*) feywild come to mind.

Precedent aside, we don't have an unmet need for purely lore tags more granular than a setting either—a setting tag and asking their question in the body is plenty to identify what they're talking about, both for users, SEO, and searchability. We don't need to collect together all information on drizzt or gandalf for browse-ability, and neither do we for the God Machine.

Rather than remove or burninate it, we can use it as a synonym for the God Machine / NWoD 2e system—it will be mistakenly used as a one anyway.

^{* The feywild tag has only four questions, and it looks like it isn't actually useful on three of those, and questionable on the fourth. It may be worth killing off too.}

Answer 3

It's almost certainly going to get misused as if it was nwod-god-machine instead. The name is just too similar and doesn't do anything to distinguish what it's for. The tag wiki description does do that, but we all know people will use it without reading that.

Then we've got nwod. So we've now created a situation where a question tagged nwodgod-machine is a fundamentally different thing than one tagged nwod-god-machine. I find that more confusing than it was before, when the intention was to make it clearer.

Also, is Google going to understand the difference between them, or are we going to muck up search results in this case?

IMO, I'd call the tag something like the-god-machine (just to throw out an example, there's probably a better name), which makes it's intended use more obvious. While it's impossible to totally prevent misunderstandings, we should try to be clear and obvious with the tag purpose when possible.

Answer 4

It seems odd to me. The analogy would be having a cthulhu that was separate from call-of-cthulhu or any particular Lovecraftian game. More specifically, since the God Machine exists in only one game line, it'd be like having a tag for a specific D&D deity.