Should the [pathfinder] tag be renamed to [pathfinder-1e] (with the former as a synonym)?

Question

Pretty straightforward question. Pathfinder's 2nd edition has just been released, and correspondingly there is a pathfinder-2e tag (as well as the pathfinder-2e-playtest tag for the playtest version(s) of the 2nd edition).

The tag pathfinder has traditionally been used for the 1st edition, namely because there was no 2nd edition when the tag was made. However, now that Pathfinder 2nd edition has been released, the term Pathfinder could refer to either the first edition alone or the category that covers both editions of Pathfinder.

Should we rename the pathfinder tag to pathfinder-1e for clarity (and consistency with other such tags)? The former would then become a synonym of the latter.

Answer 1

Yes, we should.

To avoid confusion on the part of both question askers and question answerers. The use of edition tags has generally been very helpful for this site.

Answer 2

Yes, rename it! But we don’t want the edition-less synonym confusing things.

pathfinder should be renamed but without leaving it as a synonym. We should just not have a Pathfinder tag without an edition marker.

All that keeping a synonym pathfinder→pathfinder-1e would do is give us a bunch of new 2e questions accidentally tagged 1e as well, which we would have to clean up every time, possibly with closes involved.

Having only pathfinder-1e or pathfinder-2e to choose from will empower new askers to tag accurately from the start.

We also don’t need to keep pathfinder as a pan-edition tag for a game with only two editions. Even if we did need it, we’d still see it mostly misapplied, more often than correctly used. Without needing it anyway, we should just avoid that headache and not keep pathfinder around for any use. (We can re-examine that in ten years when/if PF3e happens.)

Answer 3

Yes, with a caveat:

We should use a similar system to how we organize the D&D tags.

We would need to rename the existing pathfinder tag to pathfinder-1e, as proposed, but create a new, generic pathfinder tag for questions about the topic of Pathfinder that do not necessarily pertain to a particular edition, exactly how the dungeons-and-dragons tag is used.

Ultimately this will look like this:

• Current pathfinder will be renamed to pathfinder-1e to ensure that old-edition questions are properly captured/tagged
• A new generic pathfinder will be created and used for non-edition-specific questions
• pathfinder-1e and pathfinder-2e will be used for edition-specific questions
• pathfinder-2e-playtest should remain as-is, for the relevant material