Fate tag redux: The Archive Trawl Blues

Question

So, I'm doing research for a behavioral meta question about answering Fate questions, and that means slogging through Fate posts on the site for examples and precedents. ALL of the Fate posts.

I can track down about a dozen Dungeons & Dragons tags which are actually used. If I went through them, I'd feel like I'd probably seen every D&D-related post on site. I'll have waded through something like 3,000 posts and may soon perish of Acute Alignment Poisoning (tell your friends about AAP; the life you save may be your own), but I'll feel like I got a pretty complete grasp of the site's D&D catalogue.

In order to do the same for Fate, I have to learn the name of every individual game ever produced using the Fate engine (and apparently there are debates about that; for example, the Wikipedia article which sites this post as its source ignores the post's caveats). It doesn't seem like I could ever confident that I'd seen most of RPG.SE's Fate game posts.

Now, perhaps my comparison is faulty, and I should be looking at d20 System tags instead of D&D tags. But I don't see dnd-4e questions getting answered with call-of-cthulhu-d20 rules nearly so often as I see dresden-files questions getting spirit-of-the-century answers. So if my comparison is faulty, there's a behavioral issue that needs to be addressed about Fate answers and I'll open a meta question about that.

Although the fate tag was never very comprehensive, this meta discussion leaves me with the impression that I now can't even hope for a single tag, or a small group of tags (and let me point out that under the circumstances D&D's round dozen tags are a small number, since they feel comprehensive), that'll let me feel like I can track down all the Fate questions. Instead I have to round them up tag after tag after tag after interminal guesswork-discovered tag and just hope not to go mad over the astonishing number of duplicates that are wasting my time and brain.

Is this correct? Am I missing a search function? Am I misinterpreting that meta discussion? Or should I just suck it up and accept that this is a necessary casualty of the tagging policy?

Answer 1

We should keep a list of the various Fate systems within the fate tag's wiki.

In that meta discussion you mentioned I expressed my stance that everyone asking a Fate question should always use the system tag for the system they're using. We know that using the dungeons-and-dragons tag when asking a dnd-4e question isn't very helpful and I'm sure similar issues exist in Fate systems, but that leaves us having to trawl through all the different Fate system tags to find all the Fate questions. Hence: let's keep track of those systems.

Answer 2

Fate-related tags that we have, in descending order of use as of right now:

• dresden-files
• fate
• fate-core
• aspects*
• diaspora
• stress*
• fate-accelerated
• spirit-of-the-century
• fudge*
• legends-of-anglerre
• thresholds (only one question, may disappear)

^{* Denotes a tag that's not strictly Fate-only, but in practice is full of Fate questions.}

This set of tags isn't a complete representation of Fate-based games, of course, but it's will get you nearly every question we have about Fate-based games. (It's a useful place to start from to fill out the fate tag's wiki and tag-usage guide, too.) New tags are added infrequently, and can be caught by keeping an eye on the front page for new questions.

You can query that entire Fate-based game tag set by clicking that link, or by copying and pasting this search into the search form:

[dresden-files] or [fate] or [fate-core] or [aspects] or [diaspora] or [stress] or [fate-accelerated] or [spirit-of-the-century] or [fudge] or [legends-of-anglerre] or [thresholds]

For a full list of Fate-based games beyond what we have tags and questions for, the RPGGeek database entry for the Fate family of RPGs is one of the most maintained references.