Dungeons & Dragons Vs Pathfinder: Which TTRPG Is Right For You?

• Perfect For Experienced Players

  Pathfinder

  Original Release Date January 8, 2019 Player Count 2+ Franchise Name Pathfinder Brand Pathfinder Age Recommendation 14+ Publishing Co Pathfinder Inc

  
  Dungeons & Dragons continues to change the atmosphere of Tabletop RPGs. As popular as it's ever been, there are so many options and so much content to choose from that it's a wonder everyone isn't already playing this game.

  Pros & Cons
  • In-depth player and Game Master options
  • Adaptable and fluid, great for experiences players
  • A bit more difficult than D&D
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• Perfect For Beginners

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  Dungeons & Dragons

  Original Release Date 1974 Player Count 2+ Franchise Name Dungeons & Dragons Brand Dungeons & Dragons Age Recommendation 12+ (though younger can play and enjoy) Length per Game From 60 minutes to hours on end.

  Dungeons & Dragons continues to change the atmosphere of Tabletop RPGs. As popular as it's ever been, there are so many options and so much content to choose from that it's a wonder everyone isn't already playing this game.

  Pros & Cons
  • Brand Recognition
  • Ease of Use
  • Some players may have issue with Wizards of the Coast practices
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Quick Links

• Price

• Rules

• Gameplay

• Setting

• FAQ

Pathfinder and Dungeons & Dragons are the two most popular tabletop RPGs currently available. D&D is in its Fifth Edition, and Pathfinder is in its Second. They are quite similar, both being fantasy adventure games largely based on classic D&D. They're direct competitors, and every group should make an informed choice on which one to play at their table. Neither is without merit or without flaw.

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Every player prefers a different game style, and playing with the right group means you'll probably have fun no matter what. Given a choice, though, which of the two games will give you the most enjoyable experience? It depends on what your table is looking for. Let's break down the differences between D&D and Pathfinder to see which game is suitable for you.

Updated August 16, 2024 by Davis Collins: As actively supported TTRPGs, Pathfinder and D&D are both constantly expanding, with more options of all kinds increasingly available in all of them. We've come back to make this list reflect some new developments, and modify it to cover some of the games' traits in a more in-depth way.

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  Dungeons & DragonsPathfinderOriginal Release Date1974-00-0008-01-2019Player Count2+2+Franchise NameDungeons & DragonsPathfinderBrandDungeons & DragonsPathfinder

Price

Both Pathfinder and D&D will want you to buy a set of rulebooks to get the gist of how to play. Assuming you're a player and not a GM, there's only one book you really need, the basic player's handbook. The Pathfinder Player Core Book will cost you around $60 in theory, but it's usually on sale, marked down to $50 or lower. The D&D 5e Player's Handbook is similar. It's theoretically $50, but constantly on sale, so in practice it's more like $30, making it the cheaper option.

Both games also have sourcebooks in digital format. Pathfinder's digital sourcebooks are often offered at a dramatically reduced price compared to the physical copies, with the Player Core being as low as $20. D&D isn't quite as generous, with the PDF being closer to $30.

All of this is assuming you buy rulebooks before playing these games. While that may sound like a rather fair assumption, it's less so than you might think. For both games, it's shockingly easy to get away with buying zero books. A lot of the basic information you'll need on races, classes, backgrounds, feats, and the like are available for free online, either on D&D beyond for D&D or Archives of Nethys for Pathfinder. These searchable rules compendiums are both super useful, though Pathfinder's database is far more comprehensive, containing basically every game rule from every book. D&D's is more like a free trial, giving players the bare minimum they'll need to try the game out.

Overall, the buy-in price for both games is superficially similar. Pathfinder has far more content available for free online, and PDFs for its books are cheaper. Physical books are theoretically close to the same price for both, but D&D's are seemingly always on sale and therefore cheaper in practice.

Rules

Both systems use a d20 roll as their primary method of determining the success or failure of an action. If the result of your roll, plus the modifiers you get to add to it, which will come from a combination of your character's inherent traits and favorable circumstances, meets or exceeds the action's Difficulty Class, the action succeeds. Otherwise, it fails.

For example, a character climbing a cliff face might get a plus four bonus from a magic item designed specifically for that purpose but a minus two penalty from the rocks being wet and slippery - absent any other modifiers from skills and the like, the player gets plus two to the roll.

Proficiency

Both systems use a mechanic called Proficiency, which determines how competent a character is at a given task. Proficiency reflects the fact that a character is especially capable when attempting a specific task, be it because of training, natural aptitude, or tools. In D&D, every character is proficient in a handful of tasks. When benefiting from proficiency, they add a small bonus determined by their level to rolls related to that task.

Pathfinder complicates things by distinguishing multiple levels of proficiency. Characters proficient in a task will add their level, plus a bonus between two and eight, depending on how proficient they are, to a role. Increased levels of proficiency will also unlock other options for them. Higher levels of proficiency reflect superhuman ability and can allow PCs to do some pretty ridiculous, and awesome, things.

Bounded Accuracy

One of the most important differences between D&D and Pathfinder is a design principle that is core to D&D's identity, but absent from Pathfinder: Bounded Accuracy. Simply put, the bonuses you add to your die rolls in D&D never get all that high. This includes both the bonuses you automatically get from your proficiency and the ones you'll be able to scrape together from circumstances and equipment. This means that low-level characters have at least some chance of tackling all but the toughest of challenges, but also that high-level D&D characters can sometimes fail common tasks.

This is not the case in Pathfinder. Both the bonuses and the DCs in Pathfinder are much higher, and the main consequence of this is an extreme difference between the power levels of low-level Pathfinder and high-level Pathfinder. Low-level characters are totally incapable of meeting high-level challenges, and high-level characters are equally incapable of failing low-level tasks. High-level monsters can't be allowed near low-level players because they'll instantly kill them, while low-level monsters are likely to be completely incapable of harming high-level PCs.

Neither of these systems is necessarily better. Bounded Accuracy keeps D&D's tone grounded, while Pathfinder's lack of it maximizes its sense of progression and provides for an escapist power fantasy at high levels, where characters can do some absurd things.

Advantage And Disadvantage

Because D&D is so stingy with bonuses, players need more ways to nudge the odds in their favor, and that's where Advantage and Disadvantage come in. Whenever any roll is made in D&D, the DM determines on the spot whether a character has Advantage, Disadvantage, or neither. A character with Advantage rolls twice and chooses the better result, and a character with Disadvantage rolls twice and takes the worse result. If both Advantage and Disadvantage are applied to the situation, it becomes a regular roll.

In the cliff-climbing example above, the magic item could grant Advantage, but the Disadvantage from the slippery rocks might cancel it out. Unless the player or their party members can come up with some additional way to boost the character's chances, they'll be relying solely on their Athletics skill with one die roll, pass or fail.

Pathfinder largely lacks this feature. While there are some effects that can cause creatures to roll multiple times and take the higher or lower result, they're far rarer, and GMs are not encouraged to declare on the fly that a given roll is made with Advantage or Disadvantage.

Gameplay

Character Creation

Both games grew out of the same ruleset, so if you've played one, it will be easy to pick up the other. Each allows you to select a background and a class for your character and their fantasy species –or ancestry, as Pathfinder calls it. When it comes to their core player books alone, D&D has more playable species, including the popular Dragonborn and Tieflings. However, Pathfinder's Goblins are a mischievous delight; if you're a player who likes their character to get into trouble, give the Goblins a look.

D&D's plug-and-play approach to character creation makes it easy to whip up a new character quickly and introduce players to the game. Most of a character's starting abilities are determined by broad-stroke choices, with some embellishments here and there to give each character unique flavor. Those who dislike D&D sometimes remark that the only choice you make at character creation is your class, and, while that's not quite true, it's not outrageously far off either, especially for non-casters. Most character creation decisions in D&D are made at first level, with higher-levels not offering very many new decisions.

Pathfinder character creation takes far more time, but offers far, far, far more customization. Instead of a handful of choices made throughout the entire character creation process, there are dozens, with higher-level characters becoming exponentially more customized as they grow.

Feats

First introduced in Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition, Feats are character options that allow players to specialize or to access traits they might not otherwise be able to get. Feats are present in both games, but Pathfinder focuses on them much more heavily. Pathfinder characters pick at least one feat at every single level, and often more. A first-level pathfinder character will likely have four or five feats already.

In Dungeons & Dragons, Feats are optional - whenever your character would increase an Ability Score from leveling up, they can instead opt to take a Feat. Feats are much more limited in scope in D&D Fifth Edition, usually expanding the options available to a character in the long term. Most characters will never pick more than a few, and some will never even get a single one.

Both games shy away from having feats offer raw numerical bonuses. Taking a Feat is more about widening a character's power rather than heightening it. Because Pathfinder characters have so many more feats, they may seem at first to be far, far wider. This is somewhat true, but it's important to remember that Pathfinder characters need that extra width in a way that D&D characters don't, because Pathfinder characters are facing harsher challenges, and D&D characters often have Advantage to help them out.

Moment-to-Moment Gameplay

With TTRPGs, the moment-to-moment gameplay depends more on your group and GM than it does the game you're playing.

The differences between these games' moment to moment gameplay follow similar themes to their differences in character creation. Pathfinder is more complex, leading to greater freedom, but also more work. If all you want is to tell a story without worrying too much about crunch, D&D will serve you better. If you like some game in your role-playing game, Pathfinder will serve you better.

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Both games theoretically give you three actions to perform each turn, but D&D categorizes its actions into a hierarchy that, while it may look more complex at first glance, actually has the effect of simplifying play by harshly restricting how you can use your so-called "movement" and "bonus" actions. In D&D, players can move, perform an action, and a bonus action. Most of the things they're likely to want to do, like attack, are actions, so they only really do one significant thing per turn most of the time.

Pathfinder doesn't have the same categorization. Instead, players have three actions which they are free to use for anything, from movement to getting something out of your inventory to trying to seduce a dragon. Importantly, forgoing movement allows you to make extra attacks in Pathfinder, while it doesn't in D&D. Pathfinder's system offers more choices per turn, which is mostly good, but also creates more room for error if you aren't sure of the best way to spend your turn.

Because of this, combat in a D&D game tends to go faster than in a Pathfinder game. Players walk down the list of "Move - Action - Bonus Action - End" instead of weighing the pros and cons of everything they'd like to do with their suite of options.

Ultimately, gameplay speed will be decided more by the players and the GM than by the system. Experienced Pathfinder players will have little to no difficulty deciding how best to use their actions, while D&D newbies will spend more time thinking. If your games are agonizingly slow, that's probably a table problem more than a game system problem.

Setting

Both D&D and Pathfinder are full-on franchises, with many years of lore and external media accumulated around them. D&D is the origin of many of the most famous monsters in tabletop gaming. Creatures like the Demigorgon, Mind Flayers, Vecna, Lord Strahd, the Drow, the Owlbear, the Gelatinous Cube, and many, many others are only found in D&D. It's also the home of several iconic fantasy settings, like the Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, and Planescape.

Pathfinder is mostly focused on a single fantasy setting called Golarion. Golarion has been fleshed out extremely heavily, and is specifically designed to have different nations that suit different subgenres of fantasy. Players who want a dark and gothic experience should go to Ustalav. Alkenstar carries a Wild West vibe. The Shackles are for pirates. The fact that these elements are all on the same world allows them to interact with each other more easily.

Pathfinder is a much younger game, and, as a result, can't compete with D&D in terms of how much lore it's accumulated. However, what lore the games do have is of similar quality. Both feature interesting nations, interesting characters, and interesting gods.

FAQ

Is D&D Better Than Pathfinder?

No, while both games are similar, they offer different ways of playing. Neither is better, though one will certainly fit your playstyle more. Dungeons & Dragons has simpler, more streamlined rules, while Pathfinder is slightly more complex but allows for greater flexibility.

Is Pathfinder Harder Than D&D?

Pathfinder will be more detail-oriented and slightly more complex than D&D. Players just starting out with Tabletop RPGs will have an easier time with D&D and its simpler ruleset. More experienced players will enjoy the amount of detail that goes into Pathfinder and just how much you can delve into the minutiae of everything. If you enjoy digging into every aspect of gameplay and detail, Pathfinder will be a better choice.

Is It More Expensive To Get Into D&D Than Pathfinder?

Both D&D and Pathfinder have low barriers to entry when it comes to cost. Most resources you'd need are available for free online. As you grow more and more into your selected field, you may find yourself purchasing more accessories - dice in particular are a popular accessory.

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