I notice that the simulacrum tag has been added again. My personal opinion is that it is unnecessary. Seeing as the user who has added it most recently rolled back my standard procedure removal edit, I want to try to get a consensus before going ahead and rolling back edits to the questions where they added it.
If simulacrum turns out to be useful, then it might apply to about 60 questions - how should we approach adding the simulacrum to those questions?
The reason we don't have too many tags like this (and thus usually don't tag like it) is that we decided not to have tags for individual spells. You'll see one of the artefacts of that in the spells tag's synonyms.
However, certain systems will implement certain concepts as specific spells, and (for one reason or another) the name of the spell will be the same as the general concept. Star examples here are wish and polymorph. Whether a given concept is worthy of a tag is something handle on a case by case basis.
And I think simulacrum passes muster. Specifically, the concept of a constructed (partial) copy or duplicate of a creature. And while 5e classes it as an illusion spell, it isn't really an illusion as makes sense outside the classifications of that game.
As a possible excerpt to help its usage:
For questions about simulacra, illusory or constructed replica or duplica of other creatures etc. as they appear in various RPGs, such as with the spells of the same name in different editions of D&D and Pathfinder.
Per our help,
A tag is a word or phrase that describes the topic of the question. Tags are a means of connecting experts with questions they will be able to answer by sorting questions into specific, well-defined categories.
Tags can also be used to help you identify questions that are interesting or relevant to you.
As such, questions about whether this tag matches some weak consensus from six years ago are red herrings: we need to ask if this tag will help connect experts to questions that play to their expertise.
For most spells in D&D, the answer is "no." No-one has peculiar expertise in Scorching Ray, becasue there's not much confusion or controversy there. Any questions someone has about Scorching Ray have an overwhelming tendency to really be questions about how spells work generally (e.g. "can I light a candle with it?").
A small handful of spells are just complicated, deeply situational, or both. The 3e Polymorph series of spells and every incarnation of Wish fit this description, and both come up very frequently. I can easily imagine someone following either of those tags, because they do require specific expertise and they do come up all the time.
Simulacrum is harder to imagine fitting that mold. However, that there are 60 questions which could reasonably be tagged with it suggests that it comes up often enough to be worth tagging, and that RevanantBacon is defending it as a tag suggests that he is interested in following it.
So, underall, Simulacrum sounds like it should be a tag.
This comes with a big caveat: I think it's worth looking hard at scope for these spells. Does the "simulacrum" expertise apply to all editions, or is it specific to the 5E spell? The same applies to other spells too: Wish is likely fairly universal (despite the different costs between editions), but Polymorph behaves fairly differently in 3e/5E.
Simulacrum in 5e is an illusion spell that makes a construct. Both would work. A tag for a single spell is not good and it is general consensus not to do it: with some few exceptions, single spell tags are far too narrow to be useful. It currently is the only question with that tag, making it even less useful to find others. The other two tags cover the use, I don't see a reason to add a single spell tag.
Even worse: simulacrum can be literally anything entirely different from a list:
While the first two can be protected against by proper tagging, the other are going down to make finding an overarching concept that covers all (but the RPG and magazines) almost impossible.
If it should be a good tag, it needs to be non centered on D&D one, and here's the crux: the only overarching concept that anything but the first 4 have in common is, that they use the word literally as "in the likeness off", but coin it on artificial constructs or the means to make a character.
[dnd-simulacrum] or even [5e-simulacrum], or [simulacrum-spell]. (@Medix2). Adding a context word to the tag-name is what we do on Stack Overflow when we need to disambiguate tags, or even just to prevent their getting mis-tagged e.g. in a question about the Simulacrum RPG, if there's no [simulacrum-rpg] tag. So these are arguments to choose a better name, not against the existence at all.
\$\endgroup\$
May 8, 2021 at 20:21