Should the [gm] tag be burninated?

Question

I've been looking through the gm tag, and it looks to me like it's not a particularly useful tag. Here are my thoughts:

• The tag is not specific enough, as it doesn't say much about the question.. Saying that it has something to do with the GM doesn't really help anyone in looking for questions. Additionally, as far as metadata goes, this isn't that great.
• The presence of tags like problem-gm, gm-techniques, new-gm, gm-preparation, gm-tools, gm-less, etc. obsolete the gm tag.

The second point obviously needs a bit of justification. So, here goes.

• Many (most) questions tagged with gm are also tagged with a more specific gamemastsery tag. This makes the GM tag itself entirely moot on these questions.

• The questions which do not have the gm tag should either not have the tag at all, or should be retagged with a more specific gamemastery tag. I will take four examples from the front page of the questions list as anecdotal evidence:

  • "What information a DM should have at hand when in an encounter?" should probably be retagged with gm-preparation or gm-techniques.
  • "To what extent is reskinning acceptable?" may not need the GM tag at all, as it's more of a game mechanics question. It could potentially be reworded to fit the gm-techniques tag, though.
  • "How do you scale up a premade adventure's difficulty when you have additional PCs?" is very obviously gm-techniques.
  • "Knowledge (Local) or Diplomacy to Gather Information?" is another mechanics question, and probably shouldn't have the GM tag.

What are the community's thoughts on this? Should we begin (slowly) retagging these questions where appropriate, or should we keep the gm tag?

Does this tag have a purpose I'm not seeing?

(Quick note: I've read this question and I think this needs significant revisiting. I don't think a synonym will cut it, in this case.)

Answer 1

Yes.

I don't think the tag has any real value, and I think burnination would be useful. The more specific "gm"-based tags will show up when someone starts typing gm into the tag field, which right now are often ignored because there's gm. With that tag gone, people will more often stop and consider the more specific tags the interface suggests to them.

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The only drawback is that currently dm synonyms to gm, to catch people who use the D&D-derived term. People typing dm aren't going to get any of our gm-tags suggested to them. Fortunately, there are only six relevant* tags that contain gm, so we can easily set up synonyms for their dm equivalent. (Big credit goes to Ellesedil for suggesting this when I was staring too hard at the trees to see the forest.)

* I'm not counting gm-less because "DM" doesn't ever see use in that term/meaning.

Answer 2

So, here's my plan for dealing with this:

There should only ever be a couple of these at the top of the list at any time. We don't want to flood the front page and active tab with old questions. As such, I'm making a goal to edit two of these questions every day. No more, no less. This should be enough to get the job done, but (hopefully) not enough to irritate anyone.

However, there are 160+ questions with gm. So, this would take ~100 days to complete. In order to expedite this process, the following questions do not need editing:

• Questions with the gm that do not need any other GM-type tags
• Questions with gm that are properly tagged with other, more specific GM-style tags

In other words, we don't need to remove gm from questions if removal is all we would be doing. That can be done all at once without bumping through burnination, should we decide to do so.

This should significantly limit the amount of work to be done. Yay.

Does the community agree with my approach? Anything which needs improving/obvious holes?

Answer 3

You know, maybe we shouldn't, after all.

It's been almost a year since this proposal to burninate gm was made, and we still have (as of this writing) 88 questions tagged with it, more than half of which don't have any other gm-related tag.

Yes, it's still a big mess, with many questions using the tag gratuitously, just because the asker happen to be a GM, or a GM is somehow otherwise tangentially involved. But so are the other gm-related tags, too, and we can't just burninate all of them.

^{(Well, technically, we could. I'm just saying that we probably shouldn't.)}

Part of the reason why the gm tag hasn't gone away, and also why it's stayed a mess, is that it had a simply awful tag wiki excerpt that just defined what a GM is, but offered zero guidance on how and when to use the tag:

"The Game Master runs the game, including having final say over how actions are resolved. Also referred to as Dungeon Master (DM), Referee, Storyteller, Master of Ceremonies (MC) or other titles, depending on the game."

I just submitted an edit suggestion to improve it, so that it'd recommend using the tag only for questions about the role of a GM, not for any random rules / play-style / etc. questions that just happen to somehow involve a GM (usually as the person asking the question):

"Questions about the role of the Game Master (a.k.a. Dungeon Master (DM), Referee, Storyteller, Master of Ceremonies (MC), etc.) in a role-playing game."

^{(As usual, further improvements are welcome; it's called a tag wiki for a reason.)}

As it happens, that was before I found out about the existence of this burnination proposal. The edit is currently pending was just approved as I write this, and I do believe that it's an improvement even if this tag is to be eventually deleted, as it should at least cut down on its rampant misuse.

However, it also seems to me that, with a more focused tag wiki, further cleanup of the worst misuses and enforcement of its proper scope for new questions, this would actually make a perfectly good tag.

Furthermore, having a general tag for questions about GM-ing would allow us to tidy up the current mess of tags like gm-techniques, gm-preparation, new-gm and problem-gm.

In fact, there's now a proposal going on to burninate new-gm, and one of the arguments originally made in favor of its deletion (besides the fact that it's also a huge mess, and kind of meta by its definition) is that, when used properly, it's basically redundant to gm. (That proposal, which is now featured on the community bulletin, is actually how I came across the gm tag and, subsequently, this meta thread.) Meanwhile, the gm-techniques tag also has its share of problems, indeed not unlike those that have plagued this tag.

In fact, even at the risk of inviting downvotes by being too specific, let me present my own modest and tentative proposal for dealing with this mess of tags:

• Keep gm as the general tag for questions about GM-ing. Remove it from any rules questions etc. where it's just used because the asker happens to be the GM.

• Merge gm-techniques into gm; when used properly, those tags are all but synonymous. (Yes, gm-techniques is arguably a bit more specific, but IMO not enough so to warrant two distinct tags.)

• Burninate new-gm as a pseudo-meta-tag (or mod-merge it into gm). As typically used, it's essentially synonymous with gm + "I'm a newbie," and even when not used so, it IMO still adds no significant value over just using gm, assuming both are cleaned up, anyway.

  (This is probably the most controversial part of the proposal, so let me explicitly note that it's also an optional one. If the community feels that we really need a separate new-gm tag, then let's keep it; it'll be a bit redundant and meta-ish, but no more than it currently is.)

• Leave gm-less, gm-preparation and problem-gm as they are for now. Yes, problem-gm has its, well, problems, but those are probably beyond the scope of this proposal. The others are, IMO, pretty much OK as they are.

Answer 4

I've burninated away the few dozen uses of this tag. Nowadays with our more developed tagging taxonomy we had no shortage of more preferable tags. The only questions I felt might still deserve the gm tag in some sense were closed, which I don't think is worth keeping the tag around for: How do DM's avoid burning out? and How to make the GMs job easier?