When folks bring up Pathfinder in this kind of context, I always think of the blues brothers bit that goes “we’ve got both kinds of music: country and western”

I haven’t played or read Pathfinder 2nd edition in detail, so I can’t speak authoritatively about it. I’m told it does solve a lot of 5e’s problems, but it’s still a close relative. It keeps 1d20+stuff. I think the magic works basically the same, with better codification. My understanding is if you were going to pick just one, Pathfinder 2e is a better game in ways I care about.

Let me take a digression here to talk about what 5e actually does well. A lot of the stuff I complained about - the big random factor, the lack of choices, the missing rules systems - is a plus for some people.

The big random factor means if you build a weaker character, you’ll still succeed often. If you only have 14 strength on your fighter instead of 18, you’ll still do ok at fighter stuff because you can just roll a 15-20 and hit. A casual player isn’t really going to get that they’d be succeeding on a roll of 13, too, if their character was built better. In a deeper system, you might build a character that just isn’t competent. The decision space being so small that you can’t easily fuck up is a plus for some people.

The lack of choices also helps the player who doesn’t want to think or read much. That’s a lot of people. They just want to sit down and do fantasy things. If you say to them “what do you want for your first feat? Power attack is pretty good and opens up more options later, but expertise is good for being defensive. Combat reflexes is kind of useless but opens some great stuff later” their eyes are going to glaze over.

The spells being “just check the box” is a plus for the same kind of player. They don’t want to make tactical choices. They want to cast magic missile. Pew pew pew. That’s it. They don’t want to think very much about tactics. They may be overwhelmed if they have too many choices.

5e does a pretty okay job of removing choices and simplifying things so your drunk idiot friend and still succeed. If that is a requirement for you, Pathfinder 2e probably isn’t going to work as well. It has more choices to make. (Speaking second hand since I’ve only played 1e)

HOWEVER, there are other games. And what kind of game you want to do matters.

People try to cram 5e into any setting and any genre. It’s kind of annoying, honestly. It’s not good for social conflict, for example, but people try to use it for games of courtly intrigue.

Personally, my recommendation is Fate. It’s actually a generic system that’s intended to be used for any game from medieval fantasy to modern day occult to space opera. The rules are much simpler than DND. It feels more intuitive to me, and more like how I think new players imagine RPGs go.

If you want to play a “ex monk bodyguard” who’s “on tour with the band”, you can just write that down and it’s true. You don’t have to wait for five levels for your character to “come online”.

I forgot to mention in my previous post about how DND classes are very coarse. That often makes it hard to get exactly what concept you want into the game. Like if you want to be sneaky and a dirty fighter, but you also want to play music that inspires, you’re awkwardly between rogue and Bard. The system fights against you trying to do that. This just isn’t a problem in Fate or many other systems.

Fate does however require players that are engaged. If your players are wallflowers that phone it in, it’s not really going to sing. If they don’t have any creative input beyond “Dave the fighter”, it’s going to be a bit drab. This is true of many systems, but I feel like people put up with more “i move and attack” from DND.

Fate uses a dice pool, so you don’t have the flat probability problem.

It has degree of success.

It has a few ways to succeed at a cost.

It uses the same basic rules for social and physical conflict. You typically use Fight to hurt someone with your fist, and Provoke to hurt someone with your words. They go on different damage tracks. (Last night in my fate game, a heavy enemy was in a sword fight against an equally skilled swordsman. He switched tactics to attack him with words, and now he had the upper hand)

However, it doesn’t have a fully baked off the shelf magic system in the core srd. It explains some ways magic could work. My game has a mix of “magic via skills and aspects” and ritual (stolen from Unknown Armies). The players like it.

It’s also not a big numbers, levels, and power gaming system. But it’s not going to scratch the power gamer “if I combine wall of force and sickening radiance I can kill anything!” itch.

There are many other games. Blades in the Dark is very popular for heists. It’s close relative PbtA is also very popular. I don’t personally like them as much because they feel more failure and downward spiral than I like, but that’s a taste thing.

The world of darkness games I have a soft spot for. Especially the CofD 2e Games. I played them a lot in college. Dice pool, constrained numbers.

I really don’t like osr games. They tend to have things I don’t like in DND and not the things I do like.

Summary: it depends on what you want to play. Different games are different tools. You can use a hammer to put in screws, but that’s not really the best idea. You can use DND for horror games, but…

Anyway. Clearly I have a lot of opinions and a problem with being verbose. Ask me anything here or via dm.