Should we be tagging individual spells?

Question

I came across a question today tagged with the (partial) name of the specific spell the question contemplates. Now I like a tiny-hut as much as the next sheep, and I do believe in emergent folksonomy.

But is this a point where we, as a community, say "hmm... maybe not?"

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To be a little clearer, here are the uses I see tags performing:

• help direct expert eyes to a question (from the help center on tagging)
• help browsers find questions (from our meta on the TPK tag)

On the first point, I have a hard time understanding what expert we could be catching with your-spell-here that we aren't getting with system+spells. On the second point, I don't see what we're getting with your-spell-here that we don't get with a search for the spell's name.

I leave you with another quote from the tagging article:

As a general rule, you should avoid creating new tags if possible.

Answer 1

Ditch 'em.

Having specific spell tags make people think they need to do that, and as this isn't "D&D Stack Exchange" it's going to take way too much word-space away from other games. If you want to find, for example, all "tiny hut" questions we do have site search, it's not like it's impossible.

Answer 2

I don't think we should make a habit of having tags for specific spells.

Short version: too many specific nontransferrable names which overlap with fundamental game concepts of those very same games let alone other games, which takes up tags we should be using for those fundamental concepts instead.

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Our tag taxonomy is predominantly high level game concepts, portable between multiple editions or even game systems. This is a great sweet spot to go for because it's unlikely a question will be about more than 2-3 of these concepts.

Some of our tag taxonomy is about games & editions, and some of it is about specific printed products (e.g. hoard-of-the-dragon-queen as a published adventure tag).

Spells are beyond that sweet spot. An awful lot of our questions about spells are about how 2-3 different spells interact — in addition to the system tag, possible spells tag, and other mechanical systems that would interact such as optimization wizard armor.

They also use up common names while not being even a little bit transferable. D&D 5e has 400+ spells, Pathfinder has 1,700 spells just in the official list (excluding third party products), D&D 3.5e and 4e have also gone similarly bananas. These spells cover common names like witness, veil, status, refuge, rage, jump invisibility, fear. That's me just picking out a handful from the Pathfinder list. These are all names of ordinary gameplay concepts, real-world experiences, or even features of the very same game system.

By eating up those names you're also causing trouble for people who play other games and don't need tags for their basic game concepts to be taken up by existing games. Did you know Spite is both a Pathfinder spell and a fundamental mechanic of great-ork-gods?

Answer 3

So, ultimately, I think the answer in an ideal world would be Yes. Some individual spells in certain games get a lot of distinct questions just about them. For example, I bet we have more upvoted questions about the mechanics of Pathfinder's Blood Money spell than involving Human Occupied Landfill (3:2 by my count). If the community is asking so much about an individual spell that we end up being like "okay, this really needs its own tag", then yeah, it makes sense to have a tag for that specific spell and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It helps both of your use cases, at that point. For comparison, we have 153 questions tagged wild-shape, and that's a single specific class feature a tiny minority of classes get in some but not all D&D systems. It's reasonable we might want a tag for e.g. Wish.

However, mxyzplk is right. We already have a pervasive D&D-rules-all problem, and letting people do this will make it worse. I think it's better to lose the tiny benefit spell-specific tags might have if it helps to encourage system diversity.

Answer 4

We only can have 5 tags.. Let's see how tagging goes on:

We need at least one tag for the edition, let's assume pathfinder, one for magic, possibly to narrow it down a tiny bit more to damage as we ask about magic missile and maybe one for the class of the caster, who's a wizard. Wait, we only have ONE tag left! Do we need that for bard because we ask about a bard buffing the wizard and how that changes spell damage or do we use it for magic-missile?!

And then: D&D/Pathfinder alone has over 500 spells. The Dark Eye has about 150 in the german 4.1 edition, Shadowrun has a technically infinite number because you can make spells. That'd demand us to make about that many tags, identify all questions about each of them, then retag appropriately and run into the 5-tags-only problem a lot.

tl;dr: It is not worth the effort you will have to make as you'll run into the tag limiter, most tags will have just one or two questions at all and even tagging just one spell with its name opens a can of worms I don't want to be seen opened. Not until we may have 10 tags at minimum.

Answer 5

Spell tags make more sense than the generic terms

If you look at the list of top users for spells and ask them to answer a question like How does ‘Pocket Dimension’ work? or even ask if they want it appearing in a watched feed, then the response would likely be "of course! Oh wait, what?"

Because of course, more systems use spells than D&D!

Now let's look at glyph-of-warding (a more common tag than tiny-hut... Ok we have some overlap with pathfinder-1e but if there is confusion we can create two new tags to divide them out.

Even https://itch.io doesn't have a game that overlaps with one of the spell specific tags.

Separately, if the reason we don't want to have spell tags is for fear of being too D&D-centric, I have some bad news for you. The blanket ban would effect the non-D&D systems too. If somebody felt the need to make pocket-dimension we should let them, and if there's an issue we can rename/split into pocket-dimension-mta and pocket-dimension-dnd.

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You also can't watch, ignore or subscribe via RSS easily without tags. It's a core part of interacting with question topics! Don't take that away!

Answer 6

The tag system is emergent, and if we're getting a substantial amount of questions about a single spell, a tag should be made for it. To say that any question asking about a particular spell needs a tag for that spell though, is asking too much.

Answer 7

It's not needed if spell names are specific enough, but does it hurt?

I think for something like wish it is actually useful, as that is a common English language word that can show up in a lot of posts and makes it harder to find those posts related to the wish spell.

For something with a specific name like "glyph of warding" you can probably rely on the search function and is:question to find those posts that are related to the spell. Same goes for "simulacrum".

The advantage of non-tagging is also that tagging needs to be maintained, and new posters very likely miss rarely used tags. So this taxonomy will never be comprehensive.

I don't know if a policy here needs to be very simple, or if it is OK to have some nuance. If it needs to be super simple, than probably all spell-name tags would have to go, including the useful ones.

On the other hand, does it hurt to have those tags? As long as someone is willing to add them, I do not see them being a problem either.

As per request I see these problems pointed out by other posts here

• They take up common English word space: I think that is a feature, not a bug. It helps me to find posts about the wish spell, rather than posts where someone wishes to do something.

• They take up tag slots: In updating 40 posts this morning, there was exactly one that had all five slots filled. That seems not to be any issue in practice. (Some of the people here with the requsite mining skills can probalby provide a quantitative answer on what share of posts has all 5 tags).

• They reinforce popular systems by having them squat on tags for things like invisibility, which could be applicable to super hero powers and such, not just D&D spells. This has a bit of substance. But this would not be any issue with tags for spell names that are clearly from D&D pedigree like "tiny hut" or "glyph of warding". Those will not be squatting on anybodies turf.

I in general feel it is easy to be tempted to establish rules and regulations in a well-meaning attempt to improve things.

This is a community maintained site. There may be wisdom in letting the community maintain things as they like, instead of regaling them with well-meaning rules. In my experience, that can easily feel exclusive, and while I understand the need for some rules, I would suggest to keep it to those areas that really cause problems.

(That I updated like a bazillion posts this morning - well, 40 - has more to do with my stupidiy about how to do it than it being an issue of spell tags, that could have happened with any kind of tag).