I think we should burninate [campaign-settings]

Question

I think we should burninate campaign-settings. It seems to be overloaded and doesn't actually say or do much.

From what I can tell, it gets used in the following situations:

• “I am asking about a (non-default) setting”, e.g.: How common is faction membership in Planescape? or Which Golarion features are important to Curse of the Crimson Throne?.

  However the same questions have tags for the actual campaign setting being asked about: planescape and golarion. The campaign-settings tag isn't doing much for us there.

• “I am asking about some lore details of the game's default setting”, e.g. What is the default date of Fireborn? or (initially, before I removed it) How large are the Shards?. This doesn't seem to do anything meaningful in these situations; we can use lore instead for “I'm looking for information about the world” and we can also use just the game's tag alone when we're asking about its setting.

• “I am asking about a mechanic from an expansion setting”, e.g.: Do Edges and Rippertech stack?, but the campaign-settings tag alone here doesn't seem particularly meaningful either.

• Six publishing questions that are in some way about settings: https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/publishing+campaign-settings

I think instead we should be using:

• Lore tag when it's about in-world lore
• A tag for the specific setting or expansion or mechanic, as and when it seems appropriate based on our judgement
• Optionally just the game tag itself when we're asking about its setting
• Publishing questions can still be tagged as publishing or IP
• campaign-settings gets burninated

If I'm missing something and we should keep it, please do speak your mind in response.

Answer 1

It should stay.

For one, I fail to see any problem mentioned. Messing with tags should be restricted to when there is a problem affecting their use.

For another, it helps signal the question is about the setting. Many people tag their general questions with the setting they’re in out of completeness.

Third, “lore” is a super non obvious tag and not something I’d come up with when asking my first Greyhawk question or whatever.

Fourth, as a devotee of campaign settings and not caring much about rules lawyering, it is a tag that tells me “you are probably going to be interested in this question.” I personally consider myself a "campaign setting expert" as I enjoy and have delved into the history and lore of Greyhawk, FR, Golarion, Eberron, etc.

Fifth, many smaller settings have less recognizable setting names and we don’t get many questions on them leading to disappearing tags for settings other than D&D settings.

It’s like every single other roll up tag. ‘Spells’ instead of just each individual spell. ‘Monsters.’ ‘Npcs.’ The tag conveys taxonomic value whether a D&D spell and an arms magica spell have anything to do with each other or not.