Should we have a [food-and-drink] tag?

Question

We have 212 questions about food within the context of rpgs, but no tag to connect them.

A question was just asked where the definition of food and drink will be important to the answers. I was looking for tags for the question and couldn't come up with anything better than the generic spells tag. I haven't been able to find anything that indicates we used to have this tag and removed it, or that we declined to create it.

Should we create a food-and-drink tag for questions about food and drink within rpgs?

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The food-and-drink tag has now been created. We are slowly re-tagging all the old questions. You are welcome to help with this effort but please remember not to flood the front page with multiple edits.

Answer 1

Yes, we should.

I actually asked about this in chat back in December to help me refine my suggestion before posting it to meta (but ended up forgetting to actually post on meta):

What would you guys think about having a [food] or [eating] tag? Maybe [food-and-drink]? There seem to be a lot of related questions about that, but I'm not sure what would be a good tag to capture those questions about eating food and drinking water (without including stuff like potions; not sure where alcohol - or other drinks - would fall in the categorization).

I explained my reasoning:

I mean, I've felt for a while that there are a significant chunk of questions about how much characters need to eat/drink, how often they need to do so, what they can eat/drink, etc. It seems like a useful categorization...

Glazius helped me refine my thoughts:

Well, to the extent that tags can be useful for searching where plaintext is not, a food-and-drink tag would make it easy to look up previous questions about food and drink if you don't remember the exact wording of them and don't, say, always talk about the same gimmicky foods and beverages whenever you answer a food and drink question.

nitsua60 replied:

Yeah, this is one where I think the "just browsing" rationale holds up pretty well. I don't want to have to search "starvation" and "food requirement" and "foraging" and "hungry" and... if I'm poking around that part of the ruleset.

In short, there are many questions about the topic but under a number of different terms, and having a single tag to classify them under would help for browsability so that people don't have to search a bunch of different terms to find questions about the topic.

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doppelgreener did point something out in response to that conversation that we should be aware of:

fyi this is also something people would ask about as a social thing: How to handle plates and drinks on the game table?, How do I get my players to clean up their mess after the game?. Not a dealbreaker for such a tag but something to be aware of.

That's an easily solvable problem, however. If the tag is meant to focus on questions about food/drink in-game (rather than out of game), that can be clearly delineated in the tag info/wiki.

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Note: My quotes of others in this conversation shouldn't necessarily be taken as meaning that they still/currently support this idea - the quoted users can speak for themselves and/or vote on answers accordingly to indicate how they feel about the idea.

Answer 2

Yes

The creation of this tag seems like it would be very useful for linking so many similar questions together. However, whilst I support the creation of this tag, we need to nail down what the tag would cover.

We know that IRL food is off-topic, but, to play the devil’s advocate, would potions fall under the “drink” portion of the tag? What about the consumption of typically non-edible substances or materials? What about the consumption of living creatures? My answer to the question you linked would suggest d&d 5e does not consider creatures to be food as they are not objects. Do non-physical substances or energies which provide nutrition count as food?

As user V2Blast said in their answer, the tag will need a clearly defined description/wiki to explain it.

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Also, we need to ensure we understand the scope of a potential re-tagging. As you rightly pointed out, there are currently 212 questions about food. However, there are also 195 questions about “drink”, excluding food (111 if we also exclude “potion”), 126 questions about “eat”, excluding food, drink and potion and 60 questions about “swallow”, excluding food, drink, eat and potion.

I’ve searched for other synonyms as well (again excluding the terms “food” and “drink” to avoid duplicates) such as sustenance, nutrients, nutrition, provisions and goodberry but all these produce single digit or low double-digit numbers, a negligible amount. Other terms such as consume or sustain are too broad to narrow down to only questions about food and drink.

This leaves us with a total of 593 questions which may need to be re-tagged, just under 280% of 212, the number of questions you estimated in your question.

I have not been around long enough to know if a re-tagging process would be so extensive. Indeed, 593 may be a trivial number compared to previous re-taggings, though I would not know as I have no frame of reference. My point though is that the number of questions which may need to be re-tagged is significantly higher than what you may have thought.

This also helps to demonstrate why such a tag is needed, there are around 600 different questions about food and drink but there is nothing to link them all together. There are probably more hidden behind overly obscure or overly broad synonyms, rendering them almost impossible to search for. A tag to collect them all in one place could help massively.