D&D vs. Pathfinder

Which is better?

Pathfinder is D&D, just with a thin, rather unconvincing coat of paint. Also, your question is meaningless unless you specify an edition.

d&d 5e vs. newest pathfinder. i'm a casual player. i like lots of fluff and customization options.

I think D&D is an easy win when it's open to any edition like this.

2e>1e>Basic/Moldvay/whatever>5e>4e>3.0>Pathfinder>3.5

Pathfinder offers you more options, but most of those options are garbage and to find the good ones you need to follow community consensus and trawl through third party books.

5e has less options, but isn't as fundamentally broken and less of the options available are utterly worthless trash, meaning a higher proportion are actually worth using.

everyone likes 3.5e d&d?

Pfahahahahahahahaha. Great joke man, fucking nailed it.

Assuming you mean 5e, then 5e.

Pathfinder is a bloated mess of trap options and power creep overtop a system that was magical superheroes tier to begin with. Plus the community is.. special. Go hang out in pathfinder general for a bit. Start a game, even.

Pathfinder plus D&D 3.5 are a great combination. I've been playing 5e for a few years now and unfortunately with the lack of new player content a lot of the material feels very samey. The cleric class feels very samey in particular and if you've played one cleric in 5e you've pretty much played every cleric because of how minor the differences in domains do for the class.

5e is very good for being a lazy DM and for introducing newbies to tabletops but after playing D&D through previous editions 5e doesn't really bring anything new to the table so it feels bland or toned down. I also don't like how they nerfed some of the iconic monsters, such as the rustmonster only able to destroy mundane items not magical ones and the displacer beast losing it's displacement ability the moment it gets hit and a few others.

DMing for pathfinder and 3.5 is a bigger pain in the ass I admit and it's harder to balance some things but at the end of the day I would rather play in a pathfinder game then a 5e game if I was given the choice. The encounters feel more deadly compared to 5e with it's death save mechanic.

different editions of D&D play differently enough that there might be more difference between two D&D editions than between pathfinder and an edition of D&D
But, let's look at each edition of D&D in turn

>0ed D&D, AKA the little brown books
Really, these are incomplete texts, that assume you have chainmail or already know how the game works from playing already. Plus the writing style is far from clear. It's pretty arcane and hard to grok. Don't play it because it's not a finished game, play basic or AD&D for the same experience

>basic/bx/etc.
A rules-light (at least by modern standards) streamlined game, with a focus on player skill. Lethality is high, character customisation is low. Loads of fun. Way, way better than pathfinder.

>AD&D 1e
Like with Basic above, but with a bit more fiddly arcane rules. Needs houseruling to trim some of the silliness, but still a good game.

>AD&D 2e
Like 1e AD&D, but more so. By this point, you have the splat-bloat problem where the game is full of options for characters and alternate rules and settings. Needs significant trimming, or you could play basic of 1e. Still better than pathfinder.

This is the cutting off point in a lot of ways. After this, D&D stops being rules-light and becomes bogged down in options and specific rules.

>3rd, 3.5
Functionally the same as pathfinder. A bloated unbalanced mess. The differences are minor enough that they're about as good as each other, really. I prefer PF, though, since they have some cool setting stuff.

>4e
4e is an amazing skirmish wargame, or a decent rules-heavy crunchy combat rpg. It's got none of the balance issues pathfinder does, but suffers from rules-bloat and option-bloat. I'd say 4e is a better /game/ than pf, but it's also an acquired taste.

>5e
5e tones down the problems of 3.5, but still has them. The balance issues are there, but less so. The rules bloat is significantly trimmed, but the option-bloat remains. Mildly better than pathfinder.

5e gives you far less options, but is better balanced. Of course, balance is irrelevant with a good DM, they'll make it fun regardless.

So if you have a good DM, go with pathfinder and have fun. If you have a bad DM, well it's going to suck slightly less with 5e.

>i'm a casual player. i like lots of fluff and customization options.
Between the two, I'd recommend 5e. It is certainly more laid-back and accessible, and there are definitely customization and fluff options, although the variety pales in comparison next to Pathfinder--but you also don't have to worry about your character not being able to properly participate or work as intended. A little give-and-take that is beyond worth it.

A lot of the choice in Pathfinder is what I've seen described as 'artificial.' They stretch out single decisions to a handful of smaller pieces and many of those sorts of option packages are lackluster until you're able to actually bring several together or force the right scenario. Like they designed the volume of the game's choices to be mostly made up of growing pains and false starts.

If you want something like Pathfinder which avoids these particular problems, try Fantasy Craft. The book's layout is a bit all over the place, but the system is more flexible and compelling with more parity between all character types. Or, Mutants & Masterminds. It's ostensibly for superheroes but you can pretty trivially run it for any genre.
Those are about as hard to learn as Pathfinder, but with a little less guidance because they were never as big as Pathfinder, so it might seem harder to get a grip on some things.

I'd add that 'better' is a subjective thing, and you can have fun with a game if you understand it and its intended purpose well. A lot of supposedly 'bad' games are games that people didn't grok properly; 4e is a good example.

That said, the early editions (basic and 1e ad&d) have a much tighter, more coherent design. Systems are often minimalistic, modular, and easy to ignore or modify without ruining everything. The game is tightly focussed on exploration, high lethality, and recovering treasure in order to level up. It only supports one specific play-style, and not one that's common in modern game design, but it does so well.
2e AD&D is a lot like these predecessors, but you start to see precursers to the problems seen in 3e on.

From 3rd ed onwards, two major problems creep in.
The first is caster power. From 3rd onwards, a lot of the mechanisms that kept the power of spellcasters in check are removed, while giving casters a wider variety of spells that mean they can potentially do everything, often as well or better than a mundane character specialised in that area. This created a disparity in power between supposedly equally powerful PCs that can cause problems at the table. 4e avoids this problem beautifully, but in doing so hits the other problem hard:
These games have rules that are very complex, and building effective characters takes time and effort. In fact, creating an effective character and levelling them up is effectively a mini-game all of its own. This, combined with a detailed and prescriptive rules system can create an experience of play that can feel very restrictive, and much more focussed on a character's stats than what's going on IC.

Pathfinder, being basically the same as 3rd ed on a structural level, has both these problems in spades. Other editions (notably 4e and basic) avoid these problems, but are specialised enough that the style of play they're built for might not be your style of fun.

BECMI/RC>4e>2e>5e>1e>3e/3.5e>Oe

4e was best e.
Pathfinder is mostly cold shit.

I don't think complex and interesting character creation is a problem. In fact it's the main reason why I still like to play 3.PF from time to time

I love the character building minigame that is pathfinder, and it has a lot of fun ideas, but more and more I find myself wishing to return to AD&D 2e.

I like Pathfinder better but you need a GM who really knows what he's doing to make it work.

it can stop at this post
/ thread

also 5th ed is a breeze to DM and slap together characters and npcs for.

Found the WoW player.

>I don't think complex and interesting character creation is a problem
on it's own, it's not. For example, I fucking love WoD, and character gen there is just as involved as in 3.5. The problem is how the chargen interacts with the game's mechanics to produce a system that's, as I say, restrictive-feeling in play. Basically, there are enough flaws and glitches in the system that you're totally boned unless you've genned a character for a specific situation. It becomes much more about 'look at situation, see if there's a solution on your sheet, apply solution, see next situation', rather than more creative play.
I'm not articulating my point particularly well here. It's like 3am, in my defence.

Fuck off with the meme shit about WoW and 4e.

I feel like that problem is greater in other systems, like Shadowrun, than in 3.5. Where optimization is far narrower in scope

Not saying 3.5 is a better game than Shadowrun, I just don't think that particular problem is as big in D&D as you're making it out to be

the problem is big in 3.5. It is also a big problem in shadowrun. It can be a problem for both; indeed, it's a problem that's in many ways endemic to modern game design.
The customer wants a big book of cool rules, so the company gives it to them even if it results in a less elegant game.

Just play DCC RPG and enjoy a blending of 3.5 and my favorite version of D&D; B/X

Realistically speaking, it would be more beneficial for someone who is casual about playing to just pick 5e. It allows RP and is pretty easy to learn and run. Every Pathfinder game I've played in (running or playing) has eventually been a bogged down mess in combat. Combat being a huge part of either system. Plus if you're not afraid of Homebrew stuff, Wizards and RPG Now have created a pretty great platform for content with the DMs Guild.

Whatever your decision, just make sure you enjoy yourself. If you don't enjoy what your doing then it's not a game worth your time.

Well I'd rather that problem than the frustrating lack of options in 5e