User:Oznogon/PathfinderWiki is not for players
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This is an essay. |
Concerns about the wiki's spoiler policy are cyclical discussions that date back to the wiki's beginning. Especially with the Pathfinder Remaster, it feels like every new book Paizo releases resolves some prior adventure, Adventure Path, or organized play scenario or season to create a new kind of spoiler that is assumed to be common knowledge among the players of one adventure, but would completely spoil another adventure for a different table of players.
This evolving nature of the Pathfinder campaign setting, which now has nearly two decades of monthly releases comprising more than a thousand works, almost all ostensibly represent real-time changes to the setting that make it impossible to describe it and its history comprehensively without spoiling an adventure player's or fiction reader's potential experience of a previously published work.
This Europe contains spoilers for the following products: It's similar to suggesting that describing France or Germany as it exists in 2025 spoils the outcome of World War II, which is not useful information to the 100 percent of people not emerging from a time capsule buried 80 years ago.
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Events occurring in a linear order that resolve past events and change the state of a world is a normal symptom of the natural passage of time. The Pathfinder campaign setting has now been around long enough to have an entire adult generation born and grown inside of it.
This reality contains spoilers for the following products: babies; those born 18 years ago usually grow up to become adults.
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Moreso than PathfinderWiki's spoiler policy needing revision, it needs to reconsider who its audience actually is. Specifically, it has to reckon with the fact that the Scope of the project policy is fundamentally wrong on one point:
“The scope of the project should be dictated by the major ways in which it will be used. These might include ... a player discovering more information on a topic to enhance their character.
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It is for:
- GMs, to run adventures in the setting for players and reference information to distribute to their players.
- Fans of the setting, its history and events, and its characters and their evolution over time.
- Paizo staff and freelancers, as an informal setting reference.
But because we act like PathfinderWiki is also for players:
- GMs send players to PathfinderWiki for research. Those players read and respect, or ignore or miss, spoiler warnings, or they encounter unflagged spoilers, and then complain to their GM that the wiki is unsafe. The GM then stops using the wiki.
- Non-player fans of the setting, put off by player-focused spoiler warnings about encounter or mechanical details that don't concern them, avoid the wiki as a resource altogether.
- Writers complain that by attempting to accommodate players' concerns and edition-specificity over providing an objective and current description of the setting, the wiki has become an unreliable reference.
And instead of resolving these issues for GMs, fans, and authors, we instead wind up in circular debates over whether and how to flag, mask, or redact content for player safety, instead of refocusing our limited resources on delivering useful, accurate, updated, and comprehensive information for GMs. We go on a spree of adding {{Badges|spoiled=...}} to everything remotely definable as a spoiler. Eventually the pendulum goes the other way, or an editor shows up on a crusade against spoiler warnings, and they start going away again. Then complaints about spoilers rise again to restart the cycle.
All of this, however, ignores a major factor not limited to PathfinderWiki:
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Major setting events that spoil adventures are not for players
The death of Gorum event is the example of the year; if you know about it before you start playing Prey for Death, the entire adventure's plot is telegraphed and its climax is deflated. Paizo's also posted an image depicting the act itself to its blog, incorporated it into the origin stories of two new iconics, and discussed it at length in third-party media and on streams. Is it a spoiler?
We can't answer that, and neither can anyone at Paizo; only GMs can, because they are the only arbiters of spoilers at their table. The only thing we can do on the wiki is point out that an event in one work might spoil a plot point, encounter, or character development in another. That information is useful only to a GM, and hiding the ensuing content (or worse, removing it from being found via search) only throws an arbitrarily defined obstacle up for the GM's use.
This has happened again and again and again, for more than a dozen years: Eodred Arabasti II, Grandmaster Torch, Empress Ameiko, Nocticula, Arazni, everything Tar-Baphon, Xin-Edasseril and Crystilan, Sorshen and New Thassilon, countdown clocks, the Gray Gardeners, Vidrian and Ravounel, the death of Gorum, soon the Inner Sea War—instead of two setting-changing APs a year, we get four, they increasingly resolve each other or rely on specific events occurring within each other, campaign setting sourcebooks and even mainline rulebooks include events that advance the setting, and people can and will still play and use them in any order because they're designed to be used that way, because GMs have been and will always be the arbiters of the campaign setting at their table, in the actual game about these events that people actually play.
Paizo also aren't the arbiters of canon at the table
I dare you to find one instance where a Paizo staff member has told a player they can't use drow, alignment, chromatic and metallic dragons, theSlohr, or whatever else has popped up in a canon work and then been demoted, dismissed as lies or hallucinations, or retroactively shot into the sun.
Every single time, Paizo staff consistently defer to GMs as the sole arbiters of the setting at their tables. Paizo creates adventures and setting details for GMs to create worlds and stories for their players. Paizo's own decisions about the setting are driven by the stories they want to tell, but they don't lose track of the fact that they sell tools to GMs to make games work better for players.
If you're a GM who wants to bring Aroden back from the dead, you can do it and Paizo will cheer you on. If you want the death of Gorum to be the death of Zyphus instead, hey, that's your accidental death and dismembership on the line but go for it. If you want Starfinder to be the canon future of the campaign setting, great; if you don't, great; if you want the immortal spirits of your PCs to fly to Earth and possess 1920s paranormal investigators in a Lovecraftian story using a different TTRPG system, great.
What we can do as a wiki is provide a reference of complete, internally consistent, updated content that reflects the current state of the setting canon, alongside the history of that canon.
For example, if a GM wants to pick up any random Pathfinder work set in any random point in the setting, great. The wiki should help them understand the context of that time, the people of that time, and the events between then and whenever the GM wants to set it.
If a GM wants to know why a book they picked up calls lycanthropy or ghoul fever a disease, great, we should provide the sources and context for what it was and what it is now. If a 1E GM is confused about what happened to Shensen's backstory about being a reincarnated drow, great, we should provide context for that, too.
If a GM wants to know what Nocticula was up to as a demon lord, great. Just how bad slavery was in the setting before Paizo ditched it as a plot driver? Great. Those are the in-universe history of the setting; the wiki should help them—even if Paizo works themselves no longer support those concepts.
The only things the wiki shouldn't facilitate are errors and inaccuracies, even published ones. The progression of the setting and canon works is its in-universe history; its typos and acknowledged mistakes are merely production context (and hey, how convenient, we have a space designed to capture errors, retcons, and production context, too).
Comprehensive details of the setting's real-time advancement are not for players
Tar-Baphon has been out of Gallowspire for a long time now, I think the same amount of time or even longer now than the Pathfinder campaign setting had existed when this policy and similar concerns about Curse of the Crimson Throne were discussed in 2012. Is there a proverbial statute of limitations on spoilers for Tyrant's Grasp and Gardens of Gallowspire? Are there details of those adventures that will always be spoilers; are there spoilers from that adventure that will eventually stop being spoilers because they're common knowledge?
We can't answer that; only GMs can, because they are the only arbiters of spoilers at their table. Comprehensively updating content is a greater service to GMs than trying to mitigate, write around, or avoid spoilers. Only GMs can and should decide what content to give or withhold to their players, and only GMs should reference spoiler-filled published adventures for information relevant to their campaign. We shouldn't make that decision for a GM by arbitrarily masking, withholding, or avoiding the documentation of certain assertions because they might spoil a work for a player.
The details of long-running metaplots and plot twists are not for players
The spoiler banners on Aslynn and Willowshore are similarly ludicrous. Likewise I haven't even tried to resolve The Hidden Current, the Waterfall, and Csilla, and I'm afraid to even begin to describe the nature of that problem because it would spoil some still-ongoing PFS plots.
Although the setting advances in real time for everyone, wiki content about certain subjects cannot remain simultaneously current, accessible, and safe for players, because Pathfinder adventures—including PFS scenarios—aren't experienced in a linear fashion that perfectly aligns with the campaign setting's timeline.
By design, players might play characters and adventures set in an older period of the campaign setting than they've previously experienced. PFS scenarios do not need to be played, and are not always (or in my experience even frequently) run linearly by coordinators in their stated order.
PathfinderWiki is therefore not for most players
The debate always starts on whether and how to redact or flag information to protect players, but always seems to dance around the fact that the Scope of the project policy—not substantially updated in its content since it was hosted on Wikia in 2008—is no longer accurate.
Most players shouldn't be on PathfinderWiki at all. Those who are here, should be here with the knowledge of and at the discretion of their GMs, and both the players and GMs should be aware that every page—no matter how innocuous—can and probably will contain a spoiler to something else.
The wiki's goal to comprehensively document the campaign setting is now—and emphatically now, compared to before Pathfinder Second Edition or even before the Pathfinder Remaster—fundamentally incompatible with any desire to protect players from spoilers of published adventures. Paizo has been forthright about intentionally resolving prior adventures and APs more frequently in new releases in order to create and tell more explicitly serialized and ongoing stories.
The player-safety cake can no longer be had and eaten too, as it was when canon resolutions of past APs were exceptional events instead of standard operating procedure. If we continue to document basic facts about recently published adventures and sourcebooks, then players are not and should no longer be a primary direct audience of the wiki, because those basic facts now frequently include details that constitute spoilers for prior adventures.
PathfinderWiki is for GMs
Published adventures are GM-only resources by their nature. If we truly want to be spoiler-free, we shouldn't incorporate them, just like players shouldn't read them. But if we don't incorporate them, we're not a useful resource to GMs. I would much rather the wiki be a useful resource to GMs than to players, because GMs should be the primary player resource for setting canon at their tables anyway, regardless of whether the sources they're using include PathfinderWiki.
GMs should be the only audience for spoiler warnings, and to be frank the entire wiki. Because we remain divided on that point, this discussion keeps returning without ever resolving the tension of formally defining our audience as being GMs and not players. And by the time each of these prior discussions reaches that point, the only player-safe solutions that present themselves are either:
- redacting articles to such a point that only their lede is visible
- a separate wiki for players that doesn't include spoilers in any form
Either would result in a wiki that is in many ways even less usable, complete, and updated than the wiki we already have. Both would require more volunteer labor, which we already don't have enough of to maintain or complete the content that's already here.
Updating and completing the wiki for GMs is more useful to players than reducing and masking it for players
The wiki's missing and outdated content are bigger problems by every measurement for GMs than protecting players from spoilers. That includes the volume and severity of complaints about the wiki perpetuating bigotry from past Pathfinder products that Paizo and its freelancers have actively worked to undo or remove. Documenting the setting's history, both in- and out-of-setting, is valuable; updating that content to the current state is urgently necessary; spending time instead masking, hiding, and removing content on behalf of GMs is not.
Fiction and spoilers
Only fiction content falls outside of this concern for GMs, and Pathfinder Second Edition has also dipped its toes into spoiling fiction content; off the top of my head, Spore War and likely The Burning of Greensteeples confirm things about Queen of Thorns that spoil elements of its plot and ending.
But Paizo also publishes serialized fiction that spoils plot points of its own past works; this isn't a new or unique concern. Likewise, unlike players, fiction readers want to know information about new works or a continuing subject that might spoil elements of past works, in service of telling a relatively linear story.
Fiction readers who use a wiki about that fiction's setting expect it to reflect potential spoilers about its subjects. Spoiler policies on such wikis for other settings are less restrctive because they know and define their audience and serve them appropriately, usually with a single, top-of-article spoiler banner and time-based spoiler expiration.
Beyond the linear progression of individual issues in adventure paths, nothing else from a player standpoint in Pathfinder works like fiction does.
Our peers haven't bothered with this debate for more than 15 years
Forgotten Realms Wiki's Spoiler policy is that they don't have one. This is it in its entirety, emphasis theirs:
“For now, no individual spoiler warnings will be given. Therefore, if you are adamant that you don't wish to encounter spoilers on a particular topic relating to the Forgotten Realms BE WARNED. It is suggested that you avoid pages which common sense would imply carry spoilers for material you would prefer to stay uninformed about. We are not to be held responsible for your perceived diminished enjoyment of a Forgotten Realms product after you read one of our articles.
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Any spoiler warnings encountered on FRW are "left over from a time when it did", which is before 2008.
Wookiepedia (Star Wars) expires its spoiler banners 1 month after a work's release, and has done so since 2008.
“Since we're in a fictional universe, technically anything could be a spoiler. The whole site would have to be tagged in order to make it completely spoiler-free, since reading about any character, book, movie, fictional event, would have spoiler material in it. It's impossible unless you set an arbitrary standard.
— Esahr on Wookiepedia, Wookiepedia talk:Spoilers, 2008.”
Memory Alpha (Star Trek) administratively reviews spoiler banners for removal two months after a work's release. Memory Beta, which contains more paracanonical and apocryphal information from Star Trek TTRPGs from an in-universe point of view, limits spoiler banners to only major introductory topics and doesn't require any warnings elsewhere else.
We have spoiler banners that are old enough to legally drive a car. We burn time and effort relitigating it every couple of years. Nobody else with a similar scope or goal seems to bother with it. Why do we?
The only meaningful spoilers are of content published before its release date
The only spoilers meaningful to GMs are content published before its street date. Subscribers with early copies posting content before its public date spoils even a GM's ability to read the source work in its full context. Such spoilers are hidden on Paizo's messageboards, with admin enforcement.
Just like they are, and should remain, hidden and opt-in on Paizo's website, pre-release content is the only content that could feasibly warrant masking or redaction on PathfinderWiki. Even then, those {{Unreleased}} spoilers would be meaningful only until shortly after the work's street date a few weeks later.
Summary: Only GMs can adjudicate spoilers; PathfinderWiki cannot and should not
GMs telling players to avoid PathfinderWiki is a solution, not a problem to solve, because GMs should be providing content from the wiki (and published official books, and any other sources) that's relevant and appropriate to their own campaigns, at their own tables, because GMs are the only arbiters of spoilers at their tables.
Spoiler warnings should exist primarily to inform GMs that certain content might spoil an adventure for their players, so they can then curate and distribute that content to players themselves. No MediaWiki extension, collapsible content solution, or redaction policy will change nor facilitate that, and if players spoil themselves by coming here anyway—well, we warned them.