Okay, the title is a lie, I'm not actually convinced (yet) that we need a tag for questions about looking for groups and players.
But we do have a problem with these questions, which is that their tags are not very good and are all over the map. Not only are they not getting grouped together in any useful way, but the randomness of their tags implies to me that people are flailing when trying to categorise them, and our experienced users are for whatever reason not stepping in to fill the void of tag chaos with tidy order.
Just look at these questions' tags:
Finding online RPG players for a play-by-chat RPG Campaign?
online-roleplaying play-by-chatbest place to find RPGs on skype? [duplicate]
adnd-2e online-roleplayingHow do I find players and game sets in my area? [duplicate]
dnd-4ehttps://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/31114/how-do-i-find-roleplayers-for-ddo-com [duplicate]
dnd-4eWhere can I find online playtesters to test encounters before presenting them to my group?
dnd-3.5e gm players gm-preparation online-roleplayingHow to gather a group of players in a foreign country?
dungeons-and-dragons social group-dynamics
And the one that prompted my tagging conundrum:
- How can a young player get into a gaming group? [duplicate] (as of this writing)
dungeons-and-dragons
(I list the duplicates because the tags are important there for searchability, so that people find them and find the open frequently-asked questions they're duplicates of.)
As you can see, the tags are all over the place, and often they're not properly describing the actual problem to be solved. Are any of these really about new players, as we normally use the new-players tag? Are any fundamentally about D&D 4e, AD&D 2e, or any other system? Are they really about group dynamics, as we use that tag?
It seem to me that these are about how to find groups, form groups, advertise for players, advertise campaigns… whatever we want to call the sum of those activities. Yet, there is no tag that describes that core problem around which all these questions fundamentally revolve and which they all have in common.
From the perspective of grouping them, there's another thing to consider: look at all of them! There are probably more—I just stopped after a pageful.
So do we need a tag? I normally wouldn't even ask, I'd just tag 'em and move on, but I'm frankly stumped on what I would call it. This isn't the usual request to pre-create a tag either—the need can be in theory demonstrated to already exist, but I suspect that the lack of a good name for such a tag is more the reason why one has never been created spontaneously.
So, do we need a tag, or do these questions just need to be cleaned up and future ones better sorted? If we need a tag, what should it be?