We need to kill the adventure tag with fire. It's generic to the point of uselessness. Most of the questions that are tagged with it are either asking for recommendations (now considered off-topic), or are much better described by gm-techniques.
2 Answers
It's generic, yes, but that seems to be part of the (tiny, withered) core of its usefulness, so I'm not sure it merits complete removal.
If we keep it though, I think it need some overdue pruning and TLC.
Filtering out off-topic questions and closed questions, and ones that were posted before published-adventures and adventure-writing were created and now should be switched to one of those, all the remaining questions seem to be about running adventures or (in the lone case of “What is a "funnel"?”) directly about a type of adventure for which we don't have a dedicated tag.
Those cases seem to accurately use adventure to categorise the questions' core topic: “my question is about an adventure.” If we removed it, I think we'd lose some categorisation and sorting strength by not having some kind of tag for the purpose.
I think we'd be OK leaving the tag as-is, if we also:
- retag a bunch as published-adventures and/or adventure-writing
- close (or ignore until bumped) the open recommendation questions
Optionally, we might also make the adventure tag more self-explanatory and distinct from those former two by renaming it to running-adventures, if we can figure out what to do with the remaining “just about adventures” question, “What is a "funnel"?”. (Maybe leaving it a bare terminology question would be fine?)
-
\$\begingroup\$ That approach isn't unreasonable, but I still think the tag is too generic. Aren't 90% of questions about GMing ultimately either social or about running adventures? \$\endgroup\$– Oblivious Sage ModSep 29, 2016 at 21:06
-
3\$\begingroup\$ @ObliviousSage Usually only tangentially, and tangents don't go into the tags. Only when the problem is specifically about the adventure (and not about using a published adventure or about designing an adventure, since we have more specific tags for those), would the tag be merited on a question. I think renaming to [running-adventures] would alleviate the generic-ness problem somewhat. \$\endgroup\$ Sep 29, 2016 at 21:08
-
1\$\begingroup\$ Just watch out for the GM who wants to ask a question about adventures that involve rapid bipedal locomotion. \$\endgroup\$ Sep 30, 2016 at 6:30
-
1\$\begingroup\$ After doing some exploratory retagging, I think [running-adventures] might be a good replacement. you run them or you write them or you buy em, mainly. \$\endgroup\$– mxyzplkOct 18, 2016 at 1:21
I'm going to work through this tag retagging things with other tags where they're appropriate. From looking over the 17 [adventure] questions we have, I agree [adventure] does not seem to be a useful tag -- [adventure-something] might be.
For example I've removed [adventure] from What is a "funnel"? mentioned in SSD's answer. This question isn't about adventures, it's about terminology (that, coincidentally, shows up in places such as adventures).
If it's useful in its own right then there will be questions I can't improve by removing the tag or retagging with something more accurate. We'll see if it survives its questions receiving some gentle tag revision. If it doesn't survive, we'll call this tag burninated.
Flambé status
Retagged (or had another tag) such that [adventure] is redundant/unnecessary:
- What is a "funnel"? terminology as mentioned
- Where can I find a list of Fantasy Grounds mini-dungeons/adventures, by level? published-adventures
- Is there a repository of fan-made adventures for Numenera? published-adventures
- How to build an interesting Dungeon that exists to kill the players? adventure-writing
- Make NPCs hard to interrogate encounter-design
- How do I make random adventures relevant to player motivations in a Sandbox Hexcrawl Campaign? adventure-writing
- Free Pathfinder low-level urban adventures? published-adventures game-recommendation [closed]
- Converting a 3.5e Campaign (Shackled City) to a 4e Campaign adventure-path
- Are there any megadungeons available for non-D&D systems? published-adventures game-recommendation [closed]
- How do I run a maze scenario without using a map? adventure-writing
- How do I help my players not get caught up on smaller plot points? story gm-techniques
- Adventuring within Cthulhu Mythos without realizing it? campaign-development investigation
- Collections of two-player free-form adventure ideas? published-adventures game-recommendation [closed]
- What should be included in a standard 4E D&D encounter? How would this be written in the adventure? adventure-writing
- What happens in adventure locations between adventures? world-building
Running a senate-based game has been deleted rather than retagged; it's an idea-generation with no lasting value or significance to our site.
This leaves Where can I post a d20 adventure? as possibly the one and only question here that might actually benefit from a adventure tag. It's closed as a recommendation request, has no special significance, and the only reason it's not already automatically deleted is because it has a score of +2, where auto-deletion ignores questions above a score of +1.
… I don't feel like keeping the tag around just for that one closed abandoned off-topic question, so I've opted to delete that one question. Maybe in the future we'll have cause for an [adventure-publishing] tag or something.