How can we make sure [new-players] and [system-introduction] are distinct?

Question

Right now these two tags have significant overlap, in that they both 100% equally apply to "I'm teaching a system to players for the first time" questions, with no distinction I can see between them to help choose the right tag.

• new-players: "Players new to a specific system or to RPGs in general."
• system-introduction: "Information, methods and tools for introducing GMs and players to a system and to help them pick it up."

Those are just the tag wiki excerpts (the popup when you hover over the tags in the tag chooser), but it illustrates the overlap nicely and the full tag wikis don't lessen the overlap.

Can we figure out how to separate these two tags into distinct usages, so we can unambiguously say that this question takes one and that question takes the other?

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A working example:

I just retagged this question to have system-introduction instead of new-players, and only after noticed that new-players wasn't actually wrong according to its usage notes. It's a nice clean example question that should only take one tag or the other and I have no idea which.

Answer 1

You would use [new-players] when you have new players. This can mean brand new to gaming, or new to your group, or whatever. You would use [system-introduction] when introducing a new system. You may be doing one or both at any given time. Therefore one or both tags may be appropriate. If you're dealing with brand new players on their first system, then I'd tend toward new-players and not system-introduction just because the latter has a slight connotation of not really applying to a bunch of new players' first game, but I see no reason to mandate it one way or the another or to fret over it.

Tagging is an emergent folksonomy. It does not need to be a strict logically correct hierarchy and overlap between two tags is not something we must do something about. Let people use the tags they find helpful and make sense to them. Overly curated tagging is IMO harmful to the point behind them and turns it into an advanced-users-only Dewey Decimal system instead of just letting people use terms that are meaningful to normal players.

Answer 2

That question you linked can be tagged with both, because it's about both. Like mxyzplk pointed out, if the tags have overlap that's okay. Remember we have [magic] and [spells] too, and we manage having those just fine.

Rest assured the [system-introduction] tag does have its own unique use: for when someone needs an introduction to a system, or is introducing others to it. That's distinct from [new-players], and it's possible to have questions tagged only [system-introduction] or only [new-players].

I used [system-introduction] a lot during my partial burnination of new-gm, for instance. There were a lot of [new-gm] questions saying "I am totally new, please give me a basic rundown on this system" (or "a rundown on this part of the system"), and "I am new, also here is my question" is the exact kind of meta-tag usage I was targeting. I retagged these to just [system-introduction].

If it helps, here's unambiguous usage guidelines:

• new-players: Adapting BESW's answer on our discussion about new-gm, we should probably only really be using [new-players] when the question is literally asking about new players. If someone says "I have new players! I have a problem relating to them.", that's a [new-players] question. However, simply being new ("I am new, also here is my question") is not appropriate usage of this tag.

• system-introduction: You need us to introduce you to something, or you need to introduce someone else to something. Introductions to a system is involved, somehow.

  • This could be a new GM needing a general idea of a system: What are the main differences and similarities between Pathfinder and RuneQuest? or Shadowrun 5e breakdown/tutorial or How to get a new group into the spirit of the game Paranoia?
  • This could be a new GM needing a critical game mechanic explained: Written Example of Pure AD&D 1e Combat
  • This could also be about introducing new players to a system (How to quickly introduce character creation mechanics to new Numenera players?, which you found), which is a point of overlap with [new-players] because it is literally discussing new players.
  • Bearing in mind that we have questions literally asking about a GM who is new, from a player perspective (e.g. Your friend wants to learn the ways of the Dungeon Master, what do you do?), it is entirely possible that one day we will have a system introduction to a new GM rather than a new player.

As you can see, not every type of system introduction question is about new players and deserves a new-players tag. And as you can see from a search, a lot of questions about new players have nothing to do with introducing them to a system.

But when a question's about an introduction for new players, it should totally have both tags. And that's ok.