Is [Wall] a good tag?

Question

The wall tag is relatively small, but it is currently split between two types of questions. There are 10 questions that use the wall tag in reference to a wall of X spell from D&D or Pathfinder, which seems a little against the spirit of not having tags for individual spells. There are also 3 questions on actual physical walls. Since these are obviously two different topics, it seems like this tag is causing confusion.

Is this a problem, and if it is, what can be done to clean it up?

Answer 1

It's not a great tag, but it's fine (and maybe we can improve it!)

First a point of order: the “tags for individual spells” idea is a red herring: “wall” isn't an individual spell, just a category of thing that (presumably) comes up enough here to warrant collecting together in someone's view. This makes it like illusion (named for the effect type, not the school), teleportation, or polymorph (named for the effect type, not the spell polymorph).

In that way it's in the pattern of some of our harder-working tags.

It's not great, but it's a valid tag

I noticed it when it was made. When I saw it I didn't think we strictly needed it, but somebody did and I didn't see any reason to override that.

That's because despite my reaction, it ticks a number of big boxes that I look for in a new tag:

• It represents a problem category that keeps coming up. For whatever reason, wall-type spells tend to generate questions, and the confusion is frequently due to the “wall”-ness of those spells: things like placement rules, spacial interactions with other rules, and other things based on it being a “wall” spell.
• It collects together a set of questions with commonalities, that might be helpful for a reader to study as a set.
• People can have spent time getting really good at understanding how wall-type effects work in a given game, so it's possible for there to be experts looking for the tag.

So despite my reaction, it actually seems like a pretty decent tag to me!

There's one fly in the ointment that I've been ignoring until now:

It's getting misused

That's not a great thing. The tag is getting used for things that aren't a natural set: it's getting used primarily for wall-type spells and effects, but also for physical walls. That indicates a problem.

Is it enough to sink the tag though?

No, because it's a fixable problem, and fixable in a way that's less involved than tearing out the tag.

1. (optionally) Rename wall to wall-effects to more accurately reflect its meaning as representing wall spells and wall-type effects. This should prevent it from being misapplied in the future.

   If we don't do that, that's fine too. The size of the tag means that the frequency of it being misapplied is so low that we can easily fix it with manual retagging as we notice it.

2. We remove it from these two (I don't see a third) questions:

   • What effects can hit a phasing creature in a nonmagical wall square?

     This should have cover at best (I think it's a stretch), or no replacement tag.

   • How long does it take to build a wall?

     This should maybe have realm-management, or a hypothetical construction tag (if we have more Qs that would merit such a tag), but probably no replacement tag.