Given all the recent upheaval in the tabletop community, more people than ever are looking at Pathfinder as an alternative to Dungeons & Dragons. While the two games share a common ancestry, there are enough differences between the two to make the transition over to Pathfinder a little daunting for those who have only ever played DnD 5th edition. That said, with the leak of Wizards of the Coast's new open gaming license (OGL 1.1) angering a lot of third-party TTRPG publishers, there had never been a better time for players to switch to another game system.Pathfinder was created by Paizo as a direct result of the change in the OGL for Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition. Instead of using the OGL, Wizards of the Coast switched to a proprietary license known as the GSL, which was poorly received by the TTRPG industry. Paizo instead used the existing OGL to publish its own set of 3.5 compatible content and released Pathfinder in 2009, thus creating one of the best physical and digital tabletop RPGs.
Why Are Players Moving From D&D To Pathfinder?
Back in the present and Wizards of the Coast is attempting to update the OGL and implement incredibly restrictive terms in an attempt to monetize Dungeons & Dragons in a similar way to video games. This has caused an outcry from fans, with many rushing to cancel their D&D Beyond subscriptions. However, it has also caused Paizo to announce via Twitter that it will be working on new gaming systems under a new Open RPG Creative License known as ORC.
Pathfinder's ORC System Differs From D&D's OGL
Pathfinder is a little different to play than Dungeons & Dragons, with more of an emphasis put on magic items, gear, and feats. Rather than just creating a character and moving forward with few choices afterward, like in DnD, Pathfinder offers much more choice to fully customize and optimize a character. With Pathfinder 2e, party members are able to choose additional feats at almost every level, with some being race-specific, some class-specific, and others being the more general and skill-based feats.
With new Pathfinder adventures, supplements, and other content schedules throughout 2023, it seems unlikely that a new edition of Pathfinder, or its science fiction sister RPG Starfinder, will be released under this new system-neutral open RPG license any time soon. In its statement, Paizo says that although Pathfinder 2e was published under the OGL, that was to allow other companies to use pathfinder expressions rather than for Paizo to continue to use Dungeons & Dragons' copyrighted expressions. In fact, Pathfinder 2e was written in such as way as to distance itself from the DnD tropes which had been used in its original creation.
The face of tabletop RPGs and game systems is set to change again in a big way, and hopefully, this change will be a positive one that benefits the community. Nevertheless, it will be a while yet before any content created under ORC is released. In the meantime, players can get stuck into Pathfinder either by joining friends who already play or by purchasing the Pathfinder Beginner Box and getting stuck in.
Source: Paizo/Twitter