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At time of writing, the tag has only 27 questions. Searching "bonus action" (in quotes) yields 1119 results.

Is there any benefit to a retagging project here? Do we just try to use it more going forward? Do we even care?

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No need to fix what's not broken

Bonus action questions and answers do not exist in a vacuum. They are associated with a wide variety of things in D&D 5e across a wide variety of classes, skills, spells, feats, monsters, etc. The key issue will be something that has bonus action, but it's the feature, the class, the monster, or the feat that is what matters. It is those features (etc) that matter in terms of the 'optimization' and 'Does it work like I think it does?' questions. With that in mind, the tag is fine as is. We need not require anyone to use it, and, it's there if needed by the question's asker.

I've been on this site for about five years. I fail to see any site problem that this tag has caused. I have seen some problems that other tags have caused, so I'll close by saying: there isn't a problem to fix.

Let it ride.

Coda

I am not sure how to say this last thought, but here goes: I am not comfortable with the meta/community taking a stance of "we need to use this tag more" - not sure why I feel this way, but it just doesn't feel right.

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    \$\begingroup\$ "I am not comfortable with the meta/community taking a stance of "we need to use this tag more" - not sure why I feel this way, but it just doesn't feel right." - Heh, I agree with it feeling like a weird stance to take. Something that's often mentioned is that tagging is an "emergent folksonomy", and trying to force that seems a bit off. (Obviously, blacklisting/merging tags is a slightly different matter - and usually only happens when tags are causing problems or are serving the same purpose, respectively.) \$\endgroup\$
    – V2Blast StaffMod
    Sep 9, 2020 at 19:22
  • \$\begingroup\$ @V2Blast Thanks, I wasn't sure if I was alone in feeling like that. \$\endgroup\$
    – KorvinStarmast
    Sep 9, 2020 at 19:48
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    \$\begingroup\$ ‘I am not comfortable with the meta/community taking a stance of "we need to use this tag more"’ — I figure you'd be uncomfortable because it may come from a place of, like, “we have usage quotas people, let's meet them!” or something, as if tags have to meet some kind of minimum usage to justify their existence. \$\endgroup\$
    – doppelgreener
    Sep 11, 2020 at 12:43
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    \$\begingroup\$ In this case I think it might instead be coming from a place of a couple of observations: first, we appear to have generally forgotten the tag existed, so maybe there are a lot of places it belongs that we haven't used it, so maybe let's use it in those spots because it belongs there. Second, there might be the concern that because we've totally forgotten about it, it might not actually be that useful. I figure it's fine to keep, and maybe it's worth looking out for whether there's questions about bonus actions that should have the tag (there probably are), but that's not use for use's sake. \$\endgroup\$
    – doppelgreener
    Sep 11, 2020 at 12:46
  • \$\begingroup\$ @doppelgreener Your second one may be closer to the truth. If we burninate it, do we do actual harm? No idea. \$\endgroup\$
    – KorvinStarmast
    Sep 11, 2020 at 12:47
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    \$\begingroup\$ Possibly because there is no purpose to forcing such a tag? So it's adding busywork for the sake of the work alone, not for any higher purpose. \$\endgroup\$
    – fectin
    Sep 11, 2020 at 12:59
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    \$\begingroup\$ @doppelgreener I’m amused somewhat by your comment solely because once upon a time, we did have usage quotas for tags to justify their existence (to the Stack Exchange software, which would otherwise delete them). We even had a site “event” to shore up some orphaned system tags that would otherwise be deleted; I remember asking some questions about some Final Fantasy RPG I’d had the misfortune to be playing at the time. All that changed, though. Anyway, +1 here. \$\endgroup\$
    – KRyan
    Sep 18, 2020 at 4:32
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Lots of questions using the phrase “bonus action” without using is, to me, entirely expected and normal. After all, lots of things use bonus actions, which may well be mentioned in questions about those things (particularly if the rules specifying their use are quoted), without the question being about any bonus action or the rules for bonus actions or how bonus actions work or whatever. If a question is asking “this thing is a bonus action, does that mean I can use it at the same time as that other thing?” then yeah, it should probably have . But if it’s “this thing says ‘as a bonus action, you can summon a thingamabob,’ how do thingamabobs work?” then it absolutely should not have .

And, prima facie, I would guess that there are vastly more questions for the latter sort than there are of the former sort. Your numbers confirm that expectation. Seems like the tag is probably mostly used more-or-less correctly.

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It looks like a few of the questions that don't feature the tag do have the tag. This makes sense to me since bonus actions are actions. This is reinforced on page 6 of the Sage Advice Compendium:

Does using a bonus action break invisibility from a warlock’s One with Shadows invocation?

Taking a bonus action breaks the invisibility of a warlock’s One with Shadows. A bonus action is an action.

That brings the number of truly problematic questions to 923. It also makes me wonder if, perhaps, there's any merit to making a synonym for the tag?

I'm not sure if there's a way to filter by the tag count but a quick glance through the first page shows that only a small number of these have reached the five tag cap which would prevent the tag from being appended. So most would be fixable.

I think one of the main benefits of the tags is that it allows users who are wanting to learn about a topic to focus their search results fairly easily. To that end, I think there it is worth adding the tag on when there's room.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I improved the search query, it yields 1119 questions, the 3500 or so included answers too. \$\endgroup\$
    – Thomas Markov
    Sep 8, 2020 at 18:23
  • \$\begingroup\$ Yeah, that does narrow it down pretty well. Not nearly as big of a list. \$\endgroup\$
    – Rykara
    Sep 8, 2020 at 18:33
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    \$\begingroup\$ It's worth noting that [actions] has existed much longer than [bonus-action] - by 7 years. Of course, the term "actions" is also a lot more generic, whereas "bonus action" is a term specific to D&D 5e, as far as I know. (The [action-economy] tag is also non-system-specific, and has existed for almost a year longer than [bonus-action].) Perhaps most importantly, not every question that mentions bonus actions is primarily about bonus actions in general, but rather about a particular bonus action (or about some other tangentially related issue) - in which case the tag may not be necessary. \$\endgroup\$
    – V2Blast StaffMod
    Sep 10, 2020 at 5:03
  • \$\begingroup\$ @V2Blast That's a concise way of saying what's in my answer, Maybe I ought to plagiarize \$\endgroup\$
    – KorvinStarmast
    Sep 10, 2020 at 15:56
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    \$\begingroup\$ bonus-action really feels a bit over-specific as a tag to me. I like the suggestion of making it a synonym of actions. \$\endgroup\$
    – Ilmari Karonen
    Sep 14, 2020 at 18:51
  • \$\begingroup\$ @KorvinStarmast: Feel free! \$\endgroup\$
    – V2Blast StaffMod
    Sep 18, 2020 at 23:48

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