burninate new-gm tag

Question

The new-gm is a meta-tag and should be burninated:

The criteria:

• Only Tag: If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag.
  • new-gm doesn't really describe any area of a problem.
  • It just describes who is asking about the problem
  • a tag: experienced-gm would be a meta tag, so thus as new-gm is also
• subjective meaning: If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it’s probably a meta-tag
  • what is a new GM? is it first session, first campaign, first time with a new system, is it getting a new GM, it it having only GMed for 6 months, or 6 sessions?

Looking as the questions there seems to be no clear pattern amongst them. It is closely tied to the gm and the gm-techniques tags. Also to some of the social and related tags.

However do correct me if I am wrong and we should keep the tag.

Answer 1

The low-hanging fruit has been...

SSD made a great point: there are usages of new-gm where it isn't a meta tag, but it just gets overwhelmingly used as one.

I've gone through [new-gm] and eliminated it from the questions using it as a meta tag. I've targeted questions where it's been used as a meta tag simply to describe skill level because the GM happens to be new, not because it's describing a critical part of the question.

When in doubt, I've erred on leaving the tag present. There may be more meta usages yet to burninate.

I still think we can do better than [new-gm] for a tag to describe these questions. Now that its meta-tag usage has been mostly cleared up, we may be in a state to actually work out what to do.

Usage patterns

What remains are 75 questions, 22 of which are closed (leaving 53 open). The questions that remain seem to fit generally into the following categories:

• Literally asking about a new GM (or a potentially new GM).
  • Player/DM who is having trouble letting go of an old campaign
  • Transitioning from GM to Player; or how to recover from GM burnout
  • How to encourage the GM-curious?
  • Your friend wants to learn the ways of the Dungeon Master, what do you do?
  • How can I decide whether being the GM is right for me?
  • How do we tell our new GM that we don't like some elements of his campaign?
• I'm new, what do I play?
  • Challenging pre-made campaign for veteran players but easy on new GMs
  • Fate/Freeport as a first RPG?
  • Good games for inexperienced players and GMs?
  • Easy to GM Harry Potter RPG
  • This includes "I've finished the basics, now what?" questions:
    • What do I need to keep running D&D after finishing the Red Box?
    • How do I start DMing a new game after the Red Box?
• I have barely done this yet and I have no clue
  • How many creatures should face a party of 6 PCs?
  • Differences Between Freeform and Rules-heavy Roleplay
  • How much custom content is too much
  • As a newbie DM, is it OK to borrow plots from MMOs for my game?
  • Advice for AD&D 1e without miniatures or tiles?
  • How much are the players supposed to know?
  • AD&D 1e and "Skill Checks"
• I'm really new and I want to improve
  • How can I work on my improvisation skills in regards to running a campaign?
  • How to get my Paranoia players to stop cooperating and start killing each other?
  • How do I analyze and improve myself as a GM?
• This is overwhelming primarily because I am new, how do I deal with this?
  • How to remember all the rules?
  • Learning to use spells comfortably

Whew, that's 24 of the 53 open ones. There's others that might belong here, and some of these might still be meta tag usages.

Answer 2

It's not a meta-tag…

It's possible to use new-gm alone on a question. Consider the hypothetical question, "How do I start GMing?" Assuming it was asked in a way that wasn't too broad, it would need at least one tag, and the only one that would fit is new-gm.

Hypothetical demos aside, there are a number of questions we have where the newness of a GM is an inherent part of the problem, and those do justify the tag's existence. A hypothetical [experienced-gm] tag isn't symmetrical to new-gm: there are no problems inherent to being an experienced GM,† so it unlike new-gm it would only be a meta-tag for labeling the asker.

It's not a great tag, but it's not a bad tag either and doesn't deserve burnination.

^{† You could argue that being experienced can lead to becoming a hidebound GM, but that's being a problem-gm, not being an experienced GM.}

… It's just being misused as one

For questions where the tag is being (mis)used only to indicate who is asking, or as an apology, the usual solution suffices: remove the tag.

To that end, the tag wiki should probably be worked on to emphasise that it's not for describing the asker, it's for tagging problems that are inherently entangled with being a novice GM. That won't stop it from being misplaced on questions, but correct tagging is the job of experienced users anyway and new-gm gets misused way less than a tag like dungeons-and-dragons, which we're fine with having to clean up after constantly. It only looks like a lot of misuse now because we haven't been paying attention and have let it get out of hand. Going forward, it'll be easy to keep it from being abused as a meta-tag, just like it's easy to keep dungeons-and-dragons from being used for the current edition. (Easier, actually, because we don't need to wait for the asker to clarify before we can fix misplacement of the new-gm tag.)

It's extremely valuable in Search

Unlike [beginner]-type tags on sites like SO, where searching on it would get you a useless mix of problems about disparate, unrelated programming languages, searching on the new-gm here effectively provides an ever-improving guide for new GMs. Provided we're curating posts properly and taking the tag off questions where it's being misused as a meta tag, what remains is a selection of common problems and pitfalls of novice GMs, with ready solutions.

Right now that search doesn't look so great here, but the tag is way overused and due for cleanup to eliminate its meta-tag mistags. A selection of our top-voted new-gm questions shows what we could have after cleanup:

• Your friend wants to learn the ways of the Dungeon Master, what do you do?
• What is role-playing, and where do I start?
• How do I learn to become a good GM?
• How to remember all the rules?
• How do I analyze and improve myself as a GM?
• How to guide a new DM through his first game (as an experienced DM turned player)?
• I'm fairly new to D&D but want to GM; where do I go from here?
• How to encourage the GM-curious?
• Challenging pre-made campaign for veteran players but easy on new GMs
• What major differences are there between convention DMing and home DMing?
• Advice for a new GM taking over for an old one?
• How can I decide whether being the GM is right for me?

See how awesome those are, when they're grouped together like that and the unrelated questions are cut out? Quite frankly, I actually didn't expect them to be that great a list, but now that I see what the tag could be, what kind of resource we've been sitting on and neglecting, now I'm actually quite excited to tackle pruning the tag to bring out this list of awesome on the actual site.

We should keep the tag, and aspire to make it a small, well-curated set of questions that maintain high value and are immediately useful to someone learning (or stumbling over) how to GM, kind of like a set of frequently-asked... questions!

Besides which we'd have to keep it anyway, so no burninating

For discoverability, any replacement for the tag would need to have new-gm as a synonym, because that's the most natural phrase people think to type when looking for or asking the sorts of questions above (and why it was folksonomied into existence originally). Burnination prevents the tag from being re-created, so what we'd end up with is more people just putting the reviled gm tag on more things for lack of any other tag they can find.

I don't think we can synonym or burninate our way out of people trying to label themselves in the tags. For a tag that has a mix of good non-meta uses and bad meta uses, burnination doesn't improve the situation and might make it worse. That brings it back to the same conclusion as way up above: it's our job to fix question tags that new users misapply. We do it all the time, and adding new-gm to the "regular offenders" is a drop in the bucket.

---

TL;DR

• Leave the tag alive because it's useful,
• clean the ever-loving crap out of our questions that only (mis)use it as a meta tag,
• then just keep it in mind during the usual cleaning edits on new questions.

The questions that still have the tag after that will be a collection of solid gold awesome.

Answer 3

It is a meta tag

Stack Overflow's [beginner] tag is one of the canon examples of a meta tag from our canonical meta tag blog post. As a reminder, I'll quote part of that blog post:

The reason meta-tags are a problem is that they do not describe the content of the question. They describe some other aspect of the question, like the author’s skill level, or the author’s motivation for asking it, or generally what “kind” of question it is (poll, how-to, etc.).

[beginner] was used alongside questions like "[c#] What is operator overloading?" to indicate the person asking the question was new, but it never added much substance to the question. It described the author's skill level, rather than the content of the question.

All of that is exactly the same as how new-gm is defined (see their tag wiki extract) and how it's used. It's the same for new-players.

SevenSidedDie brought up the hypothetical "How do I start GMing?", suggesting that [new-gm] was the only valid tag. That's not the case though: this is a question asking for an introduction to the arts and methods and skills of GMing, which fits gm-techniques. [new-gm] on the other hand doesn't describe the topic, just says the person's new. Perhaps a general tag on GMing would fit better, but this might be the only case we use it, and we're already busy eradicating that one (gm).

As SevenSidedDie pointed out, lots of problems arise because someone is a new GM (or player). But that doesn't make it tag-worthy. A lot of our [new-gm] questions take the form of "I am new to this game and do not understand {thing}," but that's not substantially different to a straightforward "I do not understand {thing}." The latter could be asked by someone at any skill level. If you're a new GM, you're new and asking about something, and there is probably a tag for that something, and you can just use that, describe your situation (and confusion), and we'll explain.

Try it, and see what [new-gm] actually adds: Go through the new-gm questions. Imagine the [new-gm] tag falling off, pretend the person's been playing for a few months, see if it fundamentally changes anything much.

Questions on newness: let's find a new tag for them.

SevenSidedDie collected a bunch of questions that are inherently about newness to the game. Those are pretty awesome. So it's clear our site has a subset of questions specifically about newness.

However, for those questions, we can and should do better. [new-gm] is still a meta tag on those, because it describes the author and not the topic of the question. The topic is "GMing fundamentals" or something like that.

And it still gets used as a meta tag everywhere else to say "I am new, here is my question." Its usage sucks. So for these newness questions, we should find a tag that won't be misapplied by every new GM to every question they ask just because they're new.

We should work out what new tag we can use, retag those questions with it, then burninate [new-gm] from everything else.

Answer 4

Speaking from the standpoint of answering questions, I'm fine with New-GM being on the list of tags. Quite frankly, I assume anyone I'm answering is knowledgeable about their system and wants to broaden their scope. When I see "new-gm" I see the need to be more specific, articulate, and to offer things that aren't inherently in the question because the OP might not even know the analogous options are even a thing. There's a lot that I think regular users on this cite take for granted as sources and lingo and as of yet, there is no master index saying "look here first" by system.