Should there be a "starter-set" tag?

Question

In my experience, starter sets often contain explicitly 'wrong' versions of the rules for the sake of simplicity. Now, I understand that people certainly don't want to see something like dnd-5e-starter-set, adnd-starter-set, dnd-3.5-red-box. But we do have other examples of what I like to think of as cross reference tags; such as new-gm, magic, problem-players and a host of others.

I've already gotten into one minor argument about this, so I wanted to run it by meta to see what other people think. It might need some synonyms for ease of finding the tag, but it seems well within the context of the existing tags.

Answer 1

As proposed it fits the definition of a meta tag: meaningless if it was the only tag on a question, and requiring some other tag to give it needed context.

Meta tags are considered harmful and very rarely survive the community's scrutiny for long, so we avoid creating them in the first place if we can.

Alternatives that you mention, like [dnd-5e-starter-set] aren't meta tags, so they pass that test. In practice though, we rarely end up making/keeping tags for single line products. I don't think such a tag is necessary, but my objection isn't stronger than that.

Answer 2

Generally, this would only be a good idea if the rules for a starter set were typically different from the basic rules of play for a system.

So in the case of, say, the 4e starter where the characters were actually built with slightly different powers and mechanics from the AEDU and Essentials classes, that might be a good tag.

For the 5e starter set though, all the rules are the same as the ones in Basic D&D so having a starter set tag for 5e's starter doesn't make sense.

In general though, a common starter set tag should be for questions about the starter set. The question you thought might merit it was asking about something that's going to be a fairly common issue (why don't these HP come out right, oh right, Hill Dwarf), even though the context is the starter pre-gens, it actually informs something that will come up, both in Basic and Advanced D&D.

There are some questions about the 4e starter set (the Red Box one), but they are largely handled with the dnd-4e tags and other appropriate tags.

So to sum up, I don't see a compelling reason to add a starter-set for this kind of thing. It's much better to just use the edition and other appropriate tags.