Should the Glyph of Warding questions get a spell-specific tag?

Question

There is a general discussion if we want spell tags or not over here: Should we be tagging individual spells?, that concluded spell specific tags should be avoided in general.

Wish and Simulacrum are existing spell specific tags for which an exception was made.

This question is specifically about Glyph of Warding. At time of writing, 40 questions are tagged by me as I missed that decision and there are 68 more without the tag mentioning the spell (it is likely not all of them would need the tag if we move forward with it).

Should there be an exception for Glyph of Warding or not?

Answer 1

I think it's a Trap

A piece of tagging theory which isn't invoked very often, and which is hard to apply directly to things, is that we're (generally) tagging for concepts as opposed specific in-game content pieces. It's just that very often D&D's name for things is the de facto name for the concept. Or that a different game system's name becomes a name for the thing.

Wishes and Simulacra are things onto themselves to a greater extent than which glyph of warding really is (I'll get back to that). And related to spells and our tags, it's just that D&D (and by our extension most of our questions) implement those concepts as spells. D&D implements quite a lot of stuff as spells. I will admit this is close, and worth a full consideration, but I'm landing on not quite.

I'd like to bring you along with the journey I went on. I started out being for the tag, for pretty much the arguments laid out. However, applying the above notion to 5e's symbol spell should also fall under the same tag as it's doing basically the same thing. And that's where the tag name fell apart for me. While no one is gonna bat an eye at a question about limited wish is tagged with wish, tagging a question about symbol with glyph-of-warding seems wrong. Much too artificial.

But is there a better name? Well, the short description for the effect would be spell trap, which would make a fine tag bar two things. Firstly, we don't like inventing our own terminology. The second is that we already have that covered. spells traps as a combo should cover that perfectly.

And I'm aware that glyph of warding has some uses which aren't strictly as a trap (how much of that is for actual play and how much is theory-crafting I can't say). If the traps tag is wholly inapplicable, leave it off. Tag the question with what it is about. If it's purely about the spellcasting process, tag it with spellcasting; if about creating a permanent effect, permanency. But often I'd think a question about using a trap for something other than its original purpose is still about traps, magical or not.

Answer 2

Glyph is like the other spells that have this exception

Glyph is a build-around spell

Glyph of Warding is in the same class of spells as wish, and simulacrum: these are spells that can create complex, persistent effects. They are build-around-magic, tools that create loopholes in what normally would be possible to do with spells. They are spells people try to break. No single category captures these spells as a tag.

Because of this, they cause a high amounts of rules questions related to a broad spectrum of issues. For glyph of warding, there are questions about what can trigger the glyph, what the glyph can know (for example the nearly unique ability to detect alignment), how and if a glyph can or cannot be moved, what it can be inscribed upon. It does not help that glyph also had errata that used to make it work slightly differently in older printings.

But more than anything there are lots of unusual interactions with the spells stored inside it, which spells can be put into glyph to begin with and how glyph works on their targets, areas, and effects.

Some of the reasons I saw in related discussions for keeping spell tags open were:

Does it do weird?

• Antimagic field: "antimagic is a large weird subject with lots of weirdness connected to it, so I feel the tag's worthwhile" was the core of the accepted, single answer. Glyph has a lot of weirdness connected to it in affecting other spells with strange effects due to the absence of the caster and known targets, too.

Is it complex enough to have expertise?

• Simulacrum: "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." I think this easily can be said for glyph, too.