We've talked about meta tags a lot here. One thing that the last round highlighted is that we have a lot of tags that are impossible to use without a system tag. It's been said that tags like spells or rules-as-written maybe shouldn't exist because they can't be the only tag on a question. Perhaps those are debatable, but more system-specific tags like aspects and prestige-class are more clearly unable to stand alone.
Normally, the wisdom is that this makes them meta tags. But is that true here?
The thought I'm chewing on is that, perhaps, we can't use that test for meta-tag-ness unless we give a 1-tag discount for a system tag. Why we might have to do this, is because many questions require a system tag before you can reasonably talk about all sorts of things, and tagging for all those other things is incredibly useful. (q.v., spells's existence.)
It's worth noting that the original SE Blog post on meta tags formulated the test as a heuristic, not as the stronger hard rule that we sometimes treat it as (my emphasis):
If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag.
Is the strong only-tag test for meta-ness broken on RPG.SE? Can it be un-broken by this hack or is it more complicated than that?