system-for-setting scope and difference from game-rec

Question

While reading What is a good system for a political espionage game?, I saw the system-for-setting tag, and I don't see the difference to a tightly formulated (i.e. correctly asked) game-recommendation question.

It is currently used 5 times in total, 4 of which are also tagged game-recommendation

• The aforementioned What is a good system for a political espionage game?
• I want to run an RPG inspired by Monáe's 'Metropolis' concept series
• Alternate class system for MtG inspired setting
• System for Setting: Misfits
• System for Setting: Joe Abercrombie's The First Law

The last two questions were both asked by gomad, and he added the tag to both questions in Sept. 2011, which means the tag might have missed some game-rec-reforms and -metas.

game-recommendation questions need to be specific, with the asker clearly stating which part of the game is important to him and asking for a system that has mechanics that supports this kind of thing. This is not much different from specifying a setting, though potentially less precise ("Interstellar space warfare, where the players are working for the underdog faction" vs. "Star Wars Rebels").

In fact, many game-rec-questions are about recreating the feel of a specific movie/TV series/book/...

That being said, I doubt that the tag has any merit and vote for burnination or synonymization.

Answer 1

I'm not sure why we need to eliminate the tag. Some people have clearly used it and found it useful. Does it meet any of the objective bad-tag criteria? If not, just let it go. The point of the emergent tagging system is that it doesn't need over-curation. Sometimes, tags are subsets of another tag, and that's OK.

Answer 2

It doesn't seem to be hurting anything (the tag isn't replacing a more useful tag, for example), and I think it's a useful tag for attracting experts and for sorting questions. [game-rec] has an extremely broad mandate: a quick glance over recently active questions finds questions about systems for a particular group makeup (size, experience, age), the difference between two systems, and systems which support particular moral themes, as well as many questions which could use the [system-for-setting] tag.

As someone looking for a specific question, [system-for-setting] narrows this down so I don't have to slog through "Game for my 11-year-old who likes Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter" questions when looking for the best system to run a game about Rangers of the North.

As an answerer, it helps me sort out the kind of experience I should have in order to answer a question.

And as a site user, favouriting or blacklisting the tag helps me focus on the kind of [game-rec] questions I'm interested in: the ones I may be able to answer or improve, the ones I'm most confident voting on. (If I only work in homebrew worlds, hiding the [sys-for-set] tag could be really helpful in bringing my attention where it's useful).

I think we could tag this more aggressively.

...but it's not a tag that querents are likely to stumble across while writing their question, which brings all of this into doubt for me as it hints this isn't a natural tag. Or maybe it just needs re-phrasing.

Answer 3

With only a few instances, this is one that we should just remove and let it age away.

No need for outside intervention. A few edits and we're done.