Should we introduce tags for specific Metamagic options (such as Twinned Spell), and what happens to the [metamagic] tag?

Question

As discovered by @Xirema, we have a significant number of questions about the Twinned Spell metamagic. More specifically, searching for 5e questions about "twinned spell" ([dnd-5e] is:question twinned spell) yields 50 results, while we only have 75 metamagic questions for 5e altogether (although not all twinned spell questions are even tagged with metamagic).

I realize that there are arguments against adding the tag; more specifically, I don't think there is a precedent for a tag as "low-level" as this tag would be. While we do have tags for certain class features already (such as for Wildshape, Eldritch Invocations, Sneak Attack or Metamagic), I haven't found a tag for another "sub-feature" like Twinned Spell is (as in, an option of a class feature).

However, since the Metamagic class feature offers so many different new options (not just twinning spells) that are otherwise unique in 5e, I think it's worth splitting the tag up. As far as I know, no other class feature in 5e offers that many hugely different possibilities. Fighting style or a Battle Master's Maneuvers offer various options as well, but they're mostly mechanic and don't offer anything game-changing. Eldritch invocations, on the other hand, have a bigger impact on how you can approach problems or combine them with other features, but there are so many of them that creating tags for specific ones is not viable.

Specifically, the following metamagic options can have a huge impact on the game:

• Twinned Spell: for less experienced or entirely new users, it's often difficult to tell whether or not a certain spell is valid for Twinned Spell, which is by itself an extremely powerful feature.
• Subtle Spell: Relevant for silenced areas, Counterspell, etc.
• Extended Spell: Several spells have a duration of 8 hours, so that they last pretty much the entire adventuring day - but not beyond a long rest, so you can't cast them, take a long rest, and then have them active AND full spell slots. Examples include Mage Armor, Foresight, Aid, etc. Doubling the duration obviously breaks this design principle.

In my opinion, these options - while being made available through the same class feature - are distinct enough to warrant having their own tags. Especially considering that there would be roughly 30-50 questions tagged with Twinned Spell alone, and that we have many tags with far less questions.

Either way, since creating metamagic-option-specific tags creates the issue of what to do with the existing metamagic tag, I think we should define the tags as follows:

• metamagic: For questions that are about Metamagic in general, i.e. if you substituted any mention of e.g. Twinned Spell with another Metamagic option, the question would still work.
• twinned-spell and other option-specific tags: For questions specifically about Twinned Spell, i.e. if you substituted any mention of Twinned Spell with another Metamagic option, the questions wouldn't make any sense.

Therefore, the tags would be mutually exclusive. I'm not entirely positive users would recognize this distinction, even if it were directly in the tag wiki summary, so maybe we should just use twinned-spell in addition to metamagic. I don't think we can remove the generic Metamagic tag, since not all metamagic questions are about a specific option.

Of course, distinguishing the tags in this way also makes tags for the other metamagic options necessary. I haven't searched for those in detail, but from what I can gather by counting the number of results when searching for [dnd-5e] is:question "metamagic option here", most questions about metamagic options are about twinning spells, followed by subtle spell in second place and quickened or empowered spells in 3rd and 4th place. The other options are in the single digits, question-count-wise.

Anyways, my question boils down to: Do we think that such a tag is a useful addition?

Assuming we do, I have identified a bunch of questions that would need to be edited to take the tag. Below is a list of questions that should get the twinned-spell and/or metamagic tags. The lists assume that the twinned-spell tag would be used in conjunction with the metamagic tag, since that's what I had in mind when I created them, but I've sinced figured out that it might be a good idea for the tags to be mutually exclusive.

Needs twinned-spell, and has metamagic:

• Can the spell Enemies Abound be twinned?
• Can I make independent spell-effect choices for a Twinned spell?
• Can you use Twinned Spell on Fireball and target the same creature with both attacks?
• Can a persistent spell cast using the Sorcerer's Metamagic Twinned Spell affect both spells?
• Can Hex be Twinned?
• Can a Twinned Hex be targeted at or moved onto a single creature?
• When do I have to declare that I want to twin my spell?
• How many sorcery points does twin spell use when copying a spell cast with a higher level slot?
• Can a Sorcerer Twin Telekinesis, Eyebite, and Bigby's Hand?
• What happens if you Twin Spell a spell that requires concentration?
• Can you twin Counterspell in response to a Counterspell counter chain?

Needs twinned-spell, doesn't have metamagic:

• Sorcerer: does Twinned spell allow you to cast 2 concentration spells?
• Can you deal damage to two targets each round, using Twinned Spell and Witch Bolt?
• Casting a Smite, then Twinned Spell on a Booming Blade?
• Can Eldritch Blast be Twinned?
• Can you choose to cast a lower level version of a cantrip?
• Does a Ring of Spell Turning work on spells upcast to target an additional creature?
• Does the Tempest domain's Destructive Wrath maximize ongoing damage from a twinned Witch Bolt?

Is about Metamagic and potentially needs the metamagic tag (or a metamagic-option-specific tag), but is not specifically about Twinned Spell or already has the twinned-spell tag:

• Does Twinned Spell work on Hellish Rebuke?
• Does a sorcerer's metamagic work for non-sorcerer spells?
• Are there any major balance issues with Sorcerers having access to these non-sorcerer spells?
• Does replacing Metamagic with a delayed Arcane Tradition have glaring balance issues?
• How can I deal with the inability to speak caused by the pink bubbles Wild Magic surge effect?
• Does using a Spell Scroll always include a verbal component?
• How many damage rolls do you make for the Prismatic Spray spell?
• Subtle spell and saving throws
• How much of an arcana difficulty check would be necessary to recognize a silent, still spell being cast?
• How to calculate the expected damage increase from Empowered Spell?

Has the maximum of 5 tags already; should we replace an existing tag with twinned-spell?

• Can a multiclassed Wizard/Sorcerer use the Twinned Spell metamagic option on Simulacrum?
• How does the Twinned Spell metamagic option interact with the Draconic Bloodline sorcerer's Elemental Affinity feature?
• Can a Sorcerer/Paladin use Twinned Spell with Find Steed to affect more than two targets?
• How many attack/damage rolls does a sorcerer make when using the Twinned Spell metamagic option?
• Can Twinned Spell be used on Plane Shift when it's used to banish an unwilling creature to another plane?
• Does the grave cleric Circle of Mortality feature cause a twinned healing spell to heal the maximum amount to a second target who is not at 0 HP?
• Which yields higher average damage, an Empowered or Twinned Chaos Bolt?
• What happens when I Twin Life Transference?
• Can a Sorcerer twin a spell to hit a creature with two heads with both attacks?

Answer 1

In accordance with the consensus on this meta being fairly well settled in the negative (against the tag is at +15/-0, for the tag is at +0/-7) the tag has been burninated from the six questions it was on:

• If I use Twinned Spell to target two creatures with an attack, do the attacks occur simultaneously?
• Can you use twinned spell on the same target?
• When casting a spell using Twinned Spell does it use one or two spell slots?
• Can Twinned Spell affect Chain Lightning?
• Does Twinned Spell work on Hellish Rebuke?
• Does the Twinned Spell metamagic option work with the Magic Missile spell?

Those that were missing the metamagic tag have had it added in place.

This was done via a diamond moderator tag merge so the burnination won't show up in edit histories.

Answer 2

Don't create twinned-spell.

twinned-spell seems to be not a useful tag

When looking at metamagic for D&D5e only twinned-spell makes up a vast majority of the metamagic tag. But that isn't an issue, we don't need a tag for every single feature or subfeature. A simple search of "twinned spell dnd-pf-edition-of-choice" will immediately bring up a list of twinned spell questions for answering.

There appear to be no issues with questions not being found by alternate wordings either. Searching for "[metamagic] twinned spell is:question" gets the same as for "twin" and "twinning" (in this case 31 questions). Though "[metamagic] "twinned spell" is:question" results in 7 fewer questions being found.

There's no need to have a tag to help find this material, just like we don't need to add a tag for the vast majority of spells and monsters that people ask about (though we do have a few of those as well).

I also don't think that twinned spell is that commonly asked about in the grand scheme of things. As a point of comparison, we have other confusing features in the game that are oft asked about and don't get their own tags. The Arcane Archer subclass has 50 questions. The 5e feat Spell Sniper feat has been in 39 questions. Another 5e feat, War Caster, has been in 84 questions. None of these should get their own tag, and I don't think that something with fewer questions and more issues (see below) should either.

The topic is easy to find in a search, completely encapsulated by another tag, and thus I just don't see how it is a useful addition as a tag.

This may not have been damning for me if it weren't for the issues also raised by the creation of the tag.

Creating the tag causes issues with metamagic

As you have noticed, creating twinned-spell causes problems with metamagic. Essentially, as currently written in each tag description, every question about Twinned Spell should get both tags. Since every question about twinned spells is also inherently about metamagic this essentially makes the tag an extra tag that must be added on.

Contrast this with sorcerer and metamagic. In 5e, metamagic is a sorcerer ability. Despite that, metamagic can stand in a question apart from sorcerer. In fact, there are 119 questions that do this (and this is despite the my observation that class tags are overapplied).

There aren't any viable solutions to this that I can see

The solution you propose of making them mutually exclusive would actually cause more issues:

1. The mutually exclusive definition is unintuitive and will lead to many questions having to be retagged and possible edit wars over whether the tag is appropriate.
2. The unintuitive nature of the new definition would also make it hard for new users to search for questions about general or specific metamagic abilities since they would be likely unaware that they needed to use specific tags only. (thanks @SevenSidedDie)
3. If metamagic would only work in the general sense of a non-specific metamagic then it leaves the tag with almost no questions in it and no other way to tag the questions about specific metamagic abilities (which it seems people really want to do) unless we...
4. Create a tag for each other metamagic option as well which we definitely shouldn't do.¹

And, if you don't do #4 (which we absolutely shouldn't), then you end up with questions about quicken or silent or any other specific metamagic question besides twinned that end up having no tag at all about their metamagic-ness. This seems to be a distinct step backwards in tagging coverage and quality to me.

If there is another solution to the issue of the metamagic / twinned-spell overlap, I'm not seeing it. The best solution, as I see it, is to not create the problem (tag) in the first place.

Maybe I'm just throwing the baby out with the bathwater here, but it seems like the tag adds little to no value and it causes issues that need to be resolved (but seemingly can't be) and it just doesn't seem to be worth it to me.

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^{1 - Note when you look beyond the D&D5e-centric view of the tag, the problem gets even worse. Pathfinder has an enormous amount of metamagic options and thus #4 is even more completely unfeasible and unnecessary (and I don't think anybody would or is proposing it) when taking PF and 3.5 into consideration.}

Answer 3

The case for the twinned-spell tag is that the Twinned Spell Metamagic is unique among Metamagics for its complexity and the questions it raises

The complexity of this particular Metamagic is a lot greater than the complexity of the other Metamagics in 5th edition D&D. Just for comparison:

• Subtle Spell: removes Verbal and Somatic Components
• Careful Spell: allows some creatures to automatically pass their saving throws
• Distant Spell: doubles the range, or +30' for touch range
• Empowered Spell: reroll the damage dice, may be comboed with other Metamagics
• Extended Spell: doubles the duration
• Heightened Spell: confers Disadvantage on Saving Throws
• Quickened Spell: cast an Action spell as a Bonus Action
• Twinned Spell: Cast a copy of the spell
  • But only if the spell cannot target more than one creature at its current level
  • And the cost scales with the level of the spell slot used to cast the spell
  • And also the nature of what a spell "target" is is nebulous and difficult to pin down, and the game's lead designers have been contradictory over what constitutes a "target", meaning different spells often have unexpected interactions with this particular Metamagic
  • AND ALSO the spell must not have a range of "self"

Clearly, there's an outlier in this group in terms of how much "and/but/however/therefore"'s need to be handled when adjudicating the feature in play.

The Twinned Spell Metamagic has seen extensive debates both on this stack and elsewhere in a way that the other Metamagics simply do not

The closest I've ever seen for the other Metamagics have been Quickened (because the 5th Edition Bonus Action spellcasting rules are weird) and Subtle (because removing Verbal/Somatic components has logical narrative implications), and even then, neither of these Metamagics produce nearly as many questions, nor do they produce questions that dig so thoroughly into the minutiae of their self.

For example, a question like "Can I quicken out Haste so that I may also cast Erupting Earth on the same turn?" is functionally equivalent to "Can I cast Misty Step and Magic Missiles on the same turn?" The fact that one deals with a particular Metamagic is immaterial; both are, fundamentally, about the Bonus Action spellcasting rules. Similarly, two questions like "Can I subtle-cast Cause Fear to avoid being noticed?" and "Can I cast Hypnotic Pattern (a spell that has no Verbal Component) to avoid being noticed?" both tap into questions about how to adjudicate the ability of enemy creatures to identify the source of a cast spell, and the incidental details of how the Subtle Spell metamagic works is important (because you need to know that it suppresses both Verbal and Somatic components) but not Fundamental (because the basic question could be applied to any spell that lacks either a Verbal or Somatic component).

Conversely, questions about Twinned Spell have to deal with the very specific details of how Twinned Spell works. For example:

• We sometimes get questions like What happens if you Twin Spell a spell that requires concentration?, an issue that does not come up for other features or other Metamagics because no other [officially published] feature allows a character to sustain the equivalent of two Concentration spells at the same time.
• We sometimes get questions like Can Eldritch Blast be Twinned?, an issue that comes up because no other feature has the highly restrictive "must be incapable of targeting more than one creature" language.
  • See also questions like Can Hex be Twinned?, which pop up because the semantics of a spells' "targets" is finicky

Conclusion: twinned-spell is weird enough that it deserves its own tag

The Twinned Spell feature represents an outlier among Metamagics, both by volume of questions and by the semantics of its behavior, and should receive its own tag for these reasons.

I agree with the proposed usage of metamagic in conjunction with twinned-spell

If the specific metamagic being used is immaterial, then the tag metamagic is good enough. If the specific metamagic has notable consequences on how the question resolves (i.e. the question would be very different if Subtle Spell were being invoked instead of Twinned Spell), then it should be tagged twinned-spell instead.

I'm generally agnostic on whether other Metamagic features deserve tags of their own. As I made the case above, I don't think the other features reach the same level of complexity or edge-case-ruling that twinned-spell reaches, but I do agree that in some cases it could be beneficial to call out those effects in particular.