Which system is better for beginners: Pathfinder or 5E?

Which system is better for beginners: Pathfinder or 5E?

Gonna be running a game for a group most of whom have never played tabletop before.

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mediafire.com/download/p5w885sa9a869ma/Barbarians Of Lemuria - Legendary Edition.pdf
mega.co.nz/#F!CtQR2bST!y_awB-GHCiL3CdK4iLCV7A
4shared.com/office/T5OnHAlMce/1011b_dd_basic_rules__moldvay_.html
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Neither.

Give them an easier entry into the hobby with Risus, Everyone Is John, or a D&D Basic retroclone.

Between the two 5E. 5E is also the most newby friendly D&D edition.

5e.
Or you may indeed try simpler non-D&D system, like pdf related

110% 5E. Super easy system to pick up and it's fun.
Pathfinder is a nightmare of math and trap options and bloat.

5E by several lightyears. You can read a single book in a day and know what you're doing, how to make a relatively competant character, and play a balanced game that's fun for everyone.

With Pathfinder it'll take months and you'll get 2 out of 3 of those things at best. Don't start newbies out on Pathfinder, it will forever ruin newbies' idea of what TTRPGs are by indoctrinating them with ideas that "ivory tower design" and "system mastery" are "normal".

another edition wars thread incoming...

What war? The only people who defend Pathfinder are drones who have never played anything else. To call this is a war is like North Korea is a world power just because they throw fits and scream really loud all the time.

It's not a war, PF was just designed to cater to people who want to play a "build" instead of a character that's all.

What is ivory tower design? I keep seeing the term thrown around but I can't find a proper definition.

In so many words, it's the idea that it's a GOOD thing to design a roleplaying game like a videogame, where instead of the rules accommodating to what the player wants to do, the rules instead reward the player who knows the rules inside and out and treats them as something to be exploited and mastered. Rather than the rules existing to empower the player, they're an obstacle for the player to "beat" or "master".

Basically they completely missed the point of roleplaying (except for Autists who enjoy this sort of thing). DnD was, thankfully, smart enough to get as far away from the philosophy as possible after 3e. Pathfinder, unfortunately, decided to double-down and incorporate this even deeper into their games, treating the endless rules-bloat, overpowered character builds, and freedom-discouraging rigidity of the rules like a "good" thing. If you're not having fun, you just need to get "better" at the game.

The term "Ivory Tower" refers to how the game seperates the "normal" people from the people who have "system mastery" (the ones who are looking down from their ivory tower)... when the real point of a roleplaying game should just be being able to make a character you want to play and telling a story with friends, not min-maxing a set of videogame rules for MAXIMUM DPS.

The phrase Ivory Tower is about elitism. Ivory Tower game design means that there are non-obvious good choices and bad choices to make in the game. The easiest example is in D&D 3.5e, the Toughness feat. It gives you a few more hit points. It is a trap option. Compared to other feats you can get instead of it, Toughness is a very weak and poor choice. But players will look at it and think, "hey my wizard has very little HP, I should get this feat and help shore up that weakness." This is a bad decision, and one that you don't realize unless you've studied the game enough to know why.

What this can and does lead to is the situation where some people know the good choices, and some people don't. Some characters begin outstripping the others in their party, and the players of the weaker ones start having less fun.

5e.

Not even really a contest, Pathfinder is literally a mess of frequently contradictory rules that only make sense if you've already run 3.5 games and need a pre-existing set of houserules and are fine running "all caster/no caster" games.

Even palladium/Rifts is easier to run for the first time.

There isn't a correct way to play tabletop, I just said 5E is better than PF for new players because it gets you right into the game and doesn't require so much meta planning or mastery of the system to truly appreciate it

SHIT NIGGA THAT CAT CUTE

I'D PET THE FUCK OUTA THAT CAT

5E

This. And this is coming from a Pathfinder player. This is coming from someone who played Magus and took Shocking Grasp + a Maximized Spell Rod + Magical Lineage + Empowered Spell to do a guaranteed 60 lightning damage + melee damage each turn while the other people in my party were only doing 20 damage a turn if they were LUCKY.

Ivory Tower Design is like building a map in a shooter game, hiding a rocket launcher or sniper in a barely noticeable obscure piece of geometry, then inviting your friends over to play and laughing at them when they get blown up or spawn-sniped constantly.

Sure, it's fun when they eventually learn how to do it to the other players too... but that's the problem, the only way it's really fun if if you're one of the few people who knows how to do it, and it's not fun at all for the person on the receiving end.

>being this much of a pussyrubber

5e, no contest.

Of the two, probably 5E.

Me, I'd suggest Ryuutama. Unless it's too cute looking for your group and they'd be shitting themselves with rage over the idea. After that, maybe Lady Blackbird or the fantasy hack of Lasers and Feelings?

>alien web-claw paws

5e is as simple as I would ever go.

Does OpenD6 have a WWII era module?

5e hands down.

Pathfinder is like learning to sail a yacht while building it in the middle of the sea.

5e is better for new players, but that's like saying that bleach is less poisonous than cyanide.

Try an easier game. Playing only DnD variants is like being taught basketball and then never trying football ever in your life. Who does that?

5th edition. PF, or rather 3.5 it's based on, is designed to reward "system mastery", which is a fancy way of saying there's a large amount of international imbalances (like some feats are just flat out worse than others) and complex rules, with the idea that players familiar with the system can take advantage of their knowledge and avoid the intentionally bad "trap options".

>Playing only DnD variants is like being taught basketball and then never trying football ever in your life. Who does that?
...a lot of basketballers I assume

"It's so people who master the game can sort out the bad cards!" has always been the dumbest excuse for shitty cards in MtG.
People that have system mastery can deckbuild better than those without, fullstop. Don't make up excuses for filling sets with 90% horseshit.

Dont play either if you purely want simplicity pick up a micro system. If you are hell bent on having one of these two 5e character creation is much more streamlined.

Dogs, pls go, this is now a cat thread.

No, I'd compare D&D to a place like Olive Garden.
It's not as cheap as something like fast food or a family diner so you can't use the price argument.
It's pretty bland.
But it's everywhere so you always have the option to eat there, which is why it stays in business.

Whoops, wrong pic.

NEVER play anything else?
Basketballers never kick around a ball with their kids? Never give baseball a shot in high school? Never play darts in a bar?

This is accurate. DnD is expensive, bland, but somehow everywhere thanks to marketing.

>Which system is better for beginners
Basic D&D or any given retroclone.

This.

5e is easier by far, and it's not a bad place to start. I wouldn't exactly call it ideal though, just not bad. It's still far more involved than I'd like it to be. If you're not dead set on D&D, you might want to look at something like Barbarians of Lemuria, which is far more accessible than 5e. One of the biggest draws of modern D&D is that a lot of people know how to play it, but if you're learning a game with your friends, that's much less of a consideration.

>5E is also the most newby friendly D&D edition.
Moldvay Basic is 128 pages in total. The core books for 5e come in at over 900. Now, 5e has much more mechanical character customization (you improvise that kind of thing in Basic) and does away with some of the wonkiness of old school D&D (a bunch of different subsystems that use different dice, some where you want to roll high, others where you want to roll low), but Moldvay Basic is still much simpler.

>5e is as simple as I would ever go.
5e is about as complicated as I would ever go. Wait, no. That's not strictly true. I've played plenty of more complicated games. 5e is about as complicated as I'd *want* to go.

Too many rules just get in the way, and something I've noticed about more complicated games is that GMs are constantly altering things and tweaking results so that they make sense. What's the point of having complicated formulas for everything if you're just going to default to common sense and GM fiat? The rules should provide a simple basis from which to judge things--a firm foundation on which to stand--but otherwise keep the hell out of the GM's way. RPGs are different from war games because you have a neutral arbiter. You don't need to tie him down with a bunch of rules. Also, cinematics and actual role-playing are important in RPGs, making them less strictly mechanical and more judgement-based than war games.

5e.

>Barbarians of Lemuria,Mythic Edition (current edition) -- mediafire.com/folder/7llc83r2xf8bg/Barbarians_of_Lemuria_-_Mythic_Edition

>Barbarians of Lemuria, Legendary Edition (earlier edition, fewer details & more minimalist presentation makes it even easier to learn, but the rules aren't as refined) -- mediafire.com/download/p5w885sa9a869ma/Barbarians Of Lemuria - Legendary Edition.pdf

>Barbarians of Lemuria, House Rules / Patches for Legendary Edition (if you want the bare bones minimalism of Legendary, but with the rules tightened up a bit) -- mega.co.nz/#F!CtQR2bST!y_awB-GHCiL3CdK4iLCV7A

D&D is foundational though. It was a trailblazer and pretty much the only game in town for a while. Olive Garden has no excuse. It's just terrible, over priced food, but for some reason people think it's cool to eat there.

Often, when people first want to get into role-playing, they ask about D&D because it's the only RPG they've really heard anything about. I doubt that Olive Garden is the only restaurant many people have heard about. I understand D&D's prominence, but Olive Garden's completely mystifies me.

I do get what you're saying though; I just really hate Olive Garden. Fuck that place. Fuck people for wanting to go there.

Just in case somebody wanted to look over it, here's Moldvay Basic (otherwise known as B/X). The Basic Set is 64 pages, covers levels 1-3, and is all you need to start playing. The Expert Set is another 64 pages and takes you the rest of the way, through 14th level.

Basic Set -- 4shared.com/office/T5OnHAlMce/1011b_dd_basic_rules__moldvay_.html
Expert Set -- 4shared.com/office/fCvOLachce/1012A_DD_Expert_Rules__Cook_.html

5e.

And when you realize there's no where to go with it, you switch to PF.

D&D was only a trailblazer for helping to start the genre, but it stopped being the only thing in the market since the mid 70s. Then after that there was a shitload of rpgs in the 80s which ended up getting crushed by D&D's brand recognition basically because of concerned parents alone.

If a child is playing a game of Traveller and the parent asks what the kid is doing, the kid will usually say "our crew is working hard to buy our spaceship, a few more trade runs and we'll almost have it". It'll sound a bit weird, but just your usual sci-fi make believe, and then even the most "shove a coal up their ass and you'll get a diamond" level of parent will go away.

If a child is playing the Ghostbusters RPG they can just say "we're playing Ghostbusters!". Some parents will get upset, but everyone knows that Ghostbusters is so it's hard to spread false information about Ghostbusters being a satanic film.

If a child is playing D&D and a parent asks they say "we're using magic to fight demons and slay dragons!". The parent will go "hold the fucking phone, did you just say you were using magic". Then they write a letter to an uptight organization, the uptight organization spreads shit that's not true, and since nobody had heard of D&D before they just assume all of the shit is true.

The controversy is what drove D&D's sales, not its innovation. TSR at the time had several other products that they had the capabilities to sell just as well as D&D, but D&D had magic and demons so it made people butthurt.

...

This.

Who the fuck actually likes Olive Garden?

REEEEE

nuh uh

...

we are going slightly off-topic

This user gets it. Rules should be there to facilitate play (so the GM doesn't have to judge everything on case by case basis), not an obstacle that needs to be bypassed for the game to proceed.

>it stopped being the only thing in the market since the mid 70s.
Access to games was comparatively limited in those days. At least where I lived, there wasn't anything around like the game shops you have today, and D&D was ubiquitous while other RPGs weren't.

>The controversy is what drove D&D's sales, not its innovation.
As somebody who lived (and gamed) through that era, I saw little evidence of that. And remember that D&D actually ran away from the controversy, dropping stuff that might "give people the wrong idea" from 2e (half orcs, demons, devils and so forth). Now, I'm not saying D&D was innovating much by that point (it was relatively stagnant while other games broke new ground), but I think the whole satanic scare was more a result of D&D's popularity than the other way around.

Okay, the controversy was not the biggest boost, but it definitely helped it stay into the public mind. TSR was really damn good at licensing out their product though.

The ideal situation is that the rules are so well-built that the game practically 'runs itself' just by everyone following the rules.

The DnD that came closest to this was 4e with the fixed monster math - if the GM set up their encounters (both combat and noncombat) right, then neither side had to guess or stumble, you were just guaranteed a good time.

From non-DnD games you get similar results from the good PbtA games (not Dungeon World or Monster of the Week).

>4e

So you have no idea what you're talking about. Why didn't you just say so?

I'm going to be another one of the faggots: have you thought about 13th Age? It's a much more rules-light, GM based game. What I love about it that you don't have static skills such as in 5th, but rather, you have an amount of points which you can distribute amongst any number of careers your character may have had in the past. When a skill check for anything is in order, you can try to convince the GM that one of your past careers helps you, so you get the bonus.

If you really want to decide between 5th and 3.5e, I'd totally go for fifth. It's much better from a player perspective, but for the GM too. Especially the rescaling of AC and other stats make it much easier to use higher/lower level monsters while still being fun to fight against. Furthermore: fuck the aforementioned Ivory Tower design of PF.

I love 13th Age but while it does work as a beginner's game for players, it's not for beginner GMs - even the combat chapter assumes you're somewhat familiar with 'standard' d20 combat.

It's absolutely a superior game to both Pathfinder and 5e, though.

Not the previous user but I know the satanic panic shit actually prevented one of my friends from playing D&D for the longest time.

Oddly his parents were fine with rifts and battletech, but went full kool aid drinker on believing that D&d was a gate way to the devil.

> The DnD that came closest to this was 4e with the fixed monster math - if the GM set up their encounters (both combat and noncombat) right, then neither side had to guess or stumble, you were just guaranteed a good time.

RAW 4e wasn't without its issues though. Monsters in the original book had way too high defenses to be fun, and even the errata for this had its issues: monsters have way too much effective HP. Encounters drag out way beyond any fun length with the rules as written and the entire system requires some heavy rebalancing to be truly fun.


>I love 13th Age but while it does work as a beginner's game for players, it's not for beginner GMs - even the combat chapter assumes you're somewhat familiar with 'standard' d20 combat.

I don't know. I may be one of those run before you can walk kind of people, but I think that starting with something like 13th Age over more hand-holding systems such as 4th can have its advantages. It's one of my favourite RPG books ever to read. Just the comments by the two authors, showing different interpretations of what it means to be a DM and how to use rules make the book worth the buy imho.

Nah, pathfinder beats dnd 5e out the door and down the street. 5e< PF.

Have you even read the book, much less played it?

Or are you that 3.PFag from the last few days who has everything to say about how 3.PF was influential and the best but was too chickenshit to even voice the merits he believed made it a good game?

4e needing heavy rebalancing? I got all your rebalancing right here.

(Or just use the MM3 and the Monster Vaults)

technically you never 'needed' the 'math fix feats' - it was assumed that player versatility and teamwork would make up for the 'numbers gap'. The developers didn't make this clear, so here we are.

Everything beats 3.5. But 4 doesn't beat it by much, let alone come anywhere near beating 5th.

What merits do you feel makes it a better game?

It does if we're talking about balancing and combat though.

Say what you will about 4e from a personal standpoint but it really did help make everyone in the party feel like a unit that contributed equally to the party's survival.

That and the way the monsters were designed helped in constructing encounters, especially once the math fixes were made and they learned how to go absolutely nuts with monster rules rather than playing it like 3.PF.

By the rules as written, DnD5e is a better experience than Pathfinder.

However, Pathfinder is a MUCH more fun experience if you limit it to tier 3 and 4 classes and include Path of War.
Of course, doing so makes it even less of a beginner's game. Although it's nice that the SRD makes doing that free and easy.

DnD5e is empty white bread.
Pathfinder is an overstuffed, unhealthy burger.
But if you take enough OUT of that burger, and put some cool new stuff in, it can be pretty good. Still unhealthy, but a good time.

That is some pretty heavy rebalancing though.

> technically you never 'needed' the 'math fix feats'

Please, it's not just about encounter balance, but also fun of encounters. Before the fix, encounters took way too long, which made them unfun.
An aside on 5th which I did not mention earlier and I didn't see mentioned elsewhere in the thread: I dislike the monster manual part. Monsters themselves are fine, but the diversity is way too low. One kind of goblin, really? It's not that I mind adding extra shit myself, but it makes it harder to do stuff on the fly.

My friend's parents are crazy religious and they actually burned his D&D stuff in the fireplace. So he and his brother just made up more free form games to play with each other.

How can a game be good if you must ignore most of the rules just to get a relatively pleasant experience?

I mean, wouldn't empty white bread be better since there's still room to put something into it, rather than it being overstuffed with grease that makes it taste awful and disgusting?

The "content" of the "burger" should be coming more from the GM's storytelling ability than anything. If you need to bloat a system with a ton of rules to have fun, then you're completely missing the point.

...

Let's be realistic here man.

You don't need a dozen recolors of the same monster when the only difference between, say, a red goblin and a green goblin are arbitrary.

Personally, I love what they did with the monster manual simply because they gave some monsters things like legendary actions and lair actions to make them feel less like mobs and more like supernatural juggernauts that were not to be fucked with on their home turf.

For example, how a kraken's lair action allowed it to alter the currents in the water so it could pull or push things away from it or how it can spend a legendary action to just grab something with its tentacles.

One other thing is that I'm not entirely convinced that letting the newcomers make their own characters is a good idea. The GM should instead ask them what kind of character they'd like to play, and whip up something for them. Regardless of the system used the odds are that they're nit going to manage a character that does what they want mechanics-wise and end up frustrated. Of course if the player doesn't have a strong concept but just like to browse and pick something from the book that looks cool then it's okay to let them.

In this particular case, I'm referring to the better, more interesting class design. Character building and advancement in Pathfinder can be entertaining, and is comparatively dull in DnD5e where you make your biggest choice at level 3.

>The "content" of the "burger" should be coming more from the GM's storytelling ability than anything.
This isn't how games work. The GM is like a waiter. I can have a shitty waiter or a good waiter, and maybe a shitty waiter will totally ruin my order, but my enjoyment comes from the food, not the waiter.
The waiter's job is to do the following things:
1. Prepare the table.
2. Take my order to the chef (take what I say, and apply it to the rules).
3. Give me the food I ordered (give me the result, as passed through the rules).

Wow... Pathfinder players really DON'T get it, huh?

I literally have no way to reply to that It's almost like trying to burn water.

>4e
>the game practically 'runs itself'

That's one of the many reasons people hate 4e. There's no need for creativity on either the players' or the DM's side. Everything is built for you.

The players are never really "challenged" since every single encounter is designed to be overcome by them.

You might as well just play WoW or Diablo.

> You don't need a dozen recolors of the same monster when the only difference between, say, a red goblin and a green goblin are arbitrary.

Totally true, but it'd have been handy for on-the-fly encounter creation to have some small templates with stuff like: "same goblin, but with a tower shield and spear" or "this goblin can do sneak attacks in situation X and has poison Y on their weapon". It doesn't take much space, no wasted extra space on huge blocks of stats, but it allows you to just grab a few of them to add some quick variation to an encounter.

> Personally, I love what they did with the monster manual simply because they gave some monsters things like legendary actions and lair actions to make them feel less like mobs and more like supernatural juggernauts that were not to be fucked with on their home turf.

Yeah, that was pretty cool. It reminded me of the the nasty abilities from 13th Age.

Actually, I've been playing DnD5e for the past two years ongoing, and have had a few sessions of Monsterhearts, and a short 13th Age campaign.

Although I'm hoping to get a game of Mage: the Awakening 2e going soon as a break from all the DnD I've been a player in. Been feeling pretty stale.

The point is - the GM is just a player, combined with a referee.
Do people rely on the referee to make football fun? No, of course not. The referee is there to keep things flowing.
The fun comes from the players interacting with the rules and the ball. If I really like kicking the ball in football, I'm not gonna switch to basketball just because the basketball referee has a louder whistle.

>Character building and advancement in Pathfinder can be entertaining, and is comparatively dull in DnD5e where you make your biggest choice at level 3.

It's only entertaining if you're willing to spend your free time "mastering" the system, at which point you realize that out of 20 options, 10 are traps, 3 are comparably weaker, 5 are relatively balanced, and 2 are broken in either they make other class options obsolete or are just poorly written/balanced and end up being unable to handle shit that's supposed to be weaker than them.

At least in 5e, they took at least some steps in reigning in the bullshit and they have added more character options as well with the addition of Sword Coast Adventures and the like.

We're still relatively early in 5e's lifespan and there's talk of them making a new book to address the few imbalance issues that 5e has, such as the beastmaster Ranger variant for example.

To get back to what I was saying before, the white bread can later be filled with anything you want it later but the burger will always be greasy and disgusting to most people who don't want a burger with a dozen ingredients thrown between some buns.

It's a roleplaying game. You exercise your creativity (just like any other RPG) by describing your actions creatively. Don't just say "I cast fireball", say some dumb magic words, or describe your cloak billowing in an invisible wind, or whatever.

This applies to every game, not even just DnD.
You have the rules, and then you follow the rules and describe it in a creative manner.

To be fair to 4e age: it explicitly mentions that same-level encounters are meant to be tough, but doable for a party of regular PCs. That means that more min-maxed parties will have an easy time if you throw those encounters at them. I regularly threw level + 4 encounters at my group back in the days, and they were no huge min-maxers.

A GM should generate encounters which are fun and creative, regardless of the system. This means thinking up cool and exiting locations, as well as making sure that combat is as tough as is required.

>The players are never really "challenged" since every single encounter is designed to be overcome by them.

What?

No seriously, what?

Are you saying that you shouldn't be able to use teamwork to make a fight easier?

I'm actually agreeing with you - Pathfinder is full of poorly balanced shit, but when you reduce it to the ten or so classes that are actually good, it becomes more fun than DnD5e.

DnD5e is also running on a skeleton crew and any more 'player option' books are unlikely to materialise satisfyingly. Things like the Purple Dragon Knight in the SCAG were embarrassingly poorly designed - I've seen better homebrew on reddit, and there you still find people who don't understand caster supremacy.

The system that had huge sections in the DMG about ideas for building a fun environment for a battle, not just the opposition had no creativity?

There's nothing necessarily stopping you from tweaking the monsters a bit if you want to make a goblin Fighter or a goblin rogue or whatever, it's just that we don't really need a dozen mild variants on the same creature if the only differences are things that basically come down to giving the creature class levels.

Plus, I'm pretty sure bugbears already corner the market on goblinoids that sneak attack. I could be wrong though, but I recall them getting something for ambushes.

>The GM is like a waiter. I can have a shitty waiter or a good waiter, and maybe a shitty waiter will totally ruin my order, but my enjoyment comes from the food, not the waiter.
That might be true for an arbitrated war game of some sort, but it's incredibly wrong for an RPG. Like, it's so wrong that it flips the scale, goes back to being right, then circles all the way back around to bury the needle in "wrong".

I will agree with you on the stuff outside of combat though: it was an overdesigned and still did not work. Two examples:
the rituals system: it made little sense, it was way underpowered at lower levels and there was never really a good reason to use it, since it was just underwhelming in general.
Non-combat encounters: why codify it in this stupid way? What would've been the harm in having a chapter basically saying: "look. Design an interesting problem. Then tell the players the problem and allow them to think up ways to solve it." The X strikes and you're out system doesn't work, feels way too clunky and doesn't add much. You're much better off ignoring that system alltogether.

I know. However, I try to spend less time preparing everything, especially random encounters. However, that also means that I have less time to think up alternative monsters like that. For this, some small templates would've been helpful. I'm sure that when I'm more knowledgable about the stats of different weapons and armours, it'll come easier, but as someone starting out with 5th, it feels a little bit annoying.

I pity how utterly terrible and boring your GM's must be.

The thing is though, people don't necessarily like having to remove options or add options just to make the game passable, especially when the "best" will usually come down to personal preference.

I've met hardcore casterfags who outright refused to play anything even resembling a martial and I've met martialfags who feel the same way about magic.

There isn't really a satisfying camp to satisfy both ends of the spectrum and honestly, it's just simpler to run 5e where most of the bullshit got cut down to a manageable degree.

Yeah for sure, the character creation process is one of the most tedious parts of any system if you don't know what you're doing, and especially if it's the first thing you do.
Most people don't want their board games to start out with homework.

But how does that work story-wise? Like, sure. If there's some system to procedurally generate content such as encounters, sure. However, for out of combat stuff, puzzles and the like, having the GM being a player makes little sense.

If you want to do stuff like that, you should look into games like Microscope though.

>Do people rely on the referee to make football fun? No, of course not. The referee is there to keep things flowing.
Because football is a game between two teams where the ref just serves to adjudicate. Role-playing games aren't at all the same thing. The GM builds and fleshes out the world. He interprets your actions, determines the results and brings everything to life. He is not a servant of the rules. The rules are just tools for him to use to provide consistency and make things easier for the players to grasp.

>by describing your actions creatively
Port stunting from Exalted then

To move away from DnD for a moment, consider Apocalypse World, which is more what I had in mind when I wrote that.

In session 0, you make characters, and the group as a whole talks about their backstory, and the setting they want to play in.
And the GM will set up some initial threats and situations to play off of.

And from then on, the whole game 'plays itself'. Of course everyone has to be creative - it's like improv! But the GM will never need to spend time prepping anything beyond maybe thinking of interesting NPCs or maybe thinking of a new potential threat.
The game is structured such that players and the GM play off each other, and keep the game rolling.

There's a similar thing going in Chronicles of Darkness (what was once nWoD). The new XP system means that players are encouraged to downgrade 'regular' failures into 'dramatic' failures, because that gives XP, and do similar things with bad Conditions that they gain.
You CAN do a very traditional 'GM describes everything' game with it, but it works much better as a whole with everyone reacting and responding to the failures and successes and snowballing off that.

It's not 'the GM' that makes those games fun. It's everyone following the rules and interacting with each other. The GM doesn't make the fun - everyone playing the GAME makes the fun.

Personally, from watching GM's who made characters for other people before, it turns into a crapshoot.

Even if the character is built correctly, it's like handing a pistol to a caveman. They won't understand what they can do and more often than not, you're going to end seeing them flounder simply because they don't know the full breadth of their character's actions.

At least if they build a character themselves, with someone around to ask questions and offer tips, they come out of it with some level of understanding as to what they can do as a player and as a character.

well that's nice, but it's not how the vast majority of DnD games are run, or how it is designed to be run
if you want dungeons to explore, plots to foil, and villains to defeat, you need a DM to design all that stuff for you (or at least read it from a book)

>Endless cascades of numbers are fun! I like having three different types of AC and three different skills for knowing about magic!
Balance is but one of Pathfinder's many issues.

So your favorite part of playing the game is not playing the game.

>The GM doesn't make the fun - everyone playing the GAME makes the fun.
But you're confusing "the game" with the "system of mechanics". Mechanics-wise, I could go off script one session, ignore all the rules, and just make shit up based on how high people roll, and everybody could still have a good time (assuming I don't screw it up). If I ever sink into the background and just become a rules arbiter, the RPG just becomes a war game. Role-playing is not a mechanical thing, and that's more important than what your attack bonus is, or how your skill check is mathematically affected by the fact that you're wearing armor.

My favourite part of playing the game is playing the game.
In the case of both Pathfinder and DnD5e, this means making interesting decisions about how my character acts, both tactically and theatrically, and describing that appropriately.

If I've just moving my character like a chess piece, I'm not playing an RPG, because I'm not describing shit or adding to the story.
If I'm just making shit up without rolling or reference to rules, I'm not playing an RPG, because there's no rules interface (although, of course, you can't have this constantly happening or else you could never have a conversation happen ever).

Between Pathfinder and DnD5e, Pathfinder is better in the 'make interesting tactical decisions' part, and I can be as pretentious and artfaggy in either one of them equally.
Pathfinder requires me to dig through a shitpile to find gold and other precious metals (or rely on other people's goldfinding).
DnD5e requires just being happy with some dull, but functional, rocks.

I would say 5e, but I feel like there isn't enough books to help the GM, but if the GM and the party are new, then full points to you all for 5e.

Personally I prefer Pathfinder as there are a shit tone of options my players can enjoy and I can add or deduct certain rules from the game if I so choose(as long as I am not disrupting my own game when I do it of course).

People keep saying that there is a shit ton of math involved with Pathfinder, yet all I see is basic arithmetic explained quite clearly.

5e is easy to get into, because it was made for retards and children.

> Mechanics-wise, I could go off script one session, ignore all the rules, and just make shit up based on how high people roll, and everybody could still have a good time (assuming I don't screw it up).

You had a good time, but you didn't play an RPG, you just had an improv session using the dice as an oracle.

In a mythical ideal RPG that doesn't exist, every time you do something important to the progression of the story:
1. It interacts with the rules
2. You're not bogged down keeping track of a billion things at once.

Explained clearly or not, it's not fun to pause the game every 30 seconds to search the wiki for the rules and math involved with almost every single action you take, and heavens forbid you try to play a spellcaster and keep a speedy game going.