What does the d20 tag cover?

Question

Prior to the publishing of D&D 4e, "d20" was widely understood to mean games compatible with or derived from the d20 SRD. Wizards of the Coast decided that they were going to keep trademarking D&D 4e as a "d20" game, even if that meant contradicting the definition they created in the first place and that the community had been using for the past decade.

This gives us a dilemma for tagging. Should d20 refer to the d20 SRD family of games and material, or should it refer to the SRD games family + D&D 4e?

Whichever it is, the d20 wiki should be filled in to make it clear how to use the tag here.

Answer 1

I think in all ways but Wizards marketing, which I don't care about, d20 means derived from the d20 SRD - D&D 3e, 3.5e, M&M, Spycraft, etc etc. It is not helpful from a technical point of view to include 4e as it is quite different from that ruleset, and at that point you should probably be just tagging dungeons-and-dragons or roleplaying-games-in-general.

Answer 2

I think it would be most useful to minimize its use, or in other words, not to stick it on every 3.5 or 4e question. Instead, it should be used to indicate general questions whose answers would be useful to multiple games from the d20 srd family, for games in that family which don't have a prevalent tag, questions which might be answerable with knowledge from other games in the family, and for questions the asker wants to limit answers to games within the family.

Answer 3

I would honestly leave that to individual posters (so that's a vote for d20 + 4e, I guess). While all "true" (SRD-based) d20 games theoretically have a common core of rules, in practice they tend to pick and choose which parts of that core they include. As a practical matter, very few "d20" questions will apply to ALL d20-based games. A question focusing on, say, D&D 3.x and Pathfinder will probably not apply at all to Mutants and Masterminds.

The result of this is that most questions tagged d20 will need to be scoped explicitely in the question description (either to specific games, or to games with a specific characteristic). Looking over the questions that have been tagged d20 so far, most of them restrict the scope of the question in some manner.

Regarding the hex grid question that brought this issue to light... While Brian's answer was littered with 4e-isms, and was overly negative to the point of being a little hyperbolic, the core of his points still applies.

When Brian references close bursts being weaker due to adjacency, this still applies. Eight surrounding squares dropping to six is a non-trivial difference for tactical games (which most d20 games are).

Likewise the notes about blast and burst targetting areas still apply. While 4e uses by far the most square area effects (3.x mostly uses pixelated circles), various d20 games DO still make use of squares. The most notable instances being monster sizes.