The 8 Biggest Differences Between DnD 5e and Pathfinder 2e

hey how's it going where are the basic glitches today we're going to be going over eight major differences between Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition and Pathfinder's second edition these are the eight biggest differences that kamo and myself have come across as people that have primarily dealt with Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition as our primary system for the past six plus years or so this is what we've noticed about Pathfinder 2E we want to share those differences with you and let you know that if you're new to this system this is what you should be expecting DND 5e and Pathfinder 2E are both D20 systems which means they are closely related if you wanted to learn a different game that wasn't either of these two it might be more difficult I'm gonna get out of here and let kamo do his thing real quick but before I do I want to pass a question to you out there in the audience can you guess one of the things that we will not be talking about today something that is not a difference between these two systems stay to the end of the video and we'll let you know if you're correct the first most obvious difference between these two systems is the action economy which in Pathfinder is a three action economy system and in d d is an action type system DND 5e action types range from Attack actions bonus actions movement actions reactions Pathfinder also uses these action types but they more support the three-action economy of the main system so if you're going to take a move action in Dungeons and Dragons in Pathfinder it would look more like using one of the three actions of the three-action economy for example let's say that we wanted our character to move to a creature attack it and then move away in d d we would use a move action to move to the creature we'd use our attack action to attack it and then because we took our move action on this turn we could still use the rest of our remaining movement to move away from it in Pathfinder if we wanted to do this we would use one action to move to the Target one action to attack it and then another action to move away from it regardless of how much feet or Movement we had left another example for a casting class like a wizard Druid or a cleric is that in Dungeons and Dragons can't really cast two spells within one turn there are certain ways you can do this yes you could cast one spell and then the other spell can be a cantrip or because you can't do more than one attack action within that round right or if you have the twin spells as the sorcerer yes you can cast two spells within the same turn in Pathfinder you can pretty much cast however many spells you want to as long as it uses those three actions from the three action economy so if a spell took up two actions and you wanted to cast another spell that took up one action you can do those two spells in the same turn DND fifth edition gets bonus actions bonus actions sound like something you should get in addition to what you already have it sounds like everyone should get it right in fifth edition a bonus action really is given by either the class the race or a feature that you have chosen for your character Pathfinder kind of handles their attacks of opportunity just like Dandy handles their bonus actions a tax of opportunity again are when a creature is next to you and they leave your circle of range for attacking that even if it's not your turn you can use a reaction to attack them as they're leaving well in Pathfinder only certain classes ancestries Feats support this type of action and DND it's kind of a known thing that almost any character can do let's talk about character customizations one of the biggest differences between these two systems in Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition character customization is practically non-existent that doesn't mean that different character classes in different player characters don't feel different but you are relieved of choices in the matter your class and your subclass are going to determine almost all of the features and abilities that you're going to get from level one all the way to level 20. there is an optional rule which almost everybody plays with where you can use Feats where instead of taking an ability score increase you take an optional feat instead your other option for actually customizing your character in any sort of meaningful way is to dive down into multi-classing so if you're a barbarian and you want to learn to be sneaky you have to multi-class into the Rogue class which means you need to have a dexterity higher than 13 I believe there is not a lot of room for player creativity the outside of the Feats and multi-classing in Pathfinder 2E wow it is drastically different it is culture shock coming from fifth edition and busting into Pathfinder 2E you are customizing your character at level one the second you start creating your character Pathfinder has four different types of Feats that you can take ancestry Feats class Feats skill Feats and general Feats you are going to be choosing from a giant list of Feats even at level one at character creation this is going to make you immediately different from everybody else at the table you're going to be able to tailor your character to the vision you have in your head of how you want this thing to play unlike 5e there is tons more flexibility with these Feats and the direction that you want to take your character if you're in the middle of your Pathfinder campaign it gives you flexibility to do things like hey I've been hanging out with this Alchemist all this time maybe I can take it his feet that lets me start crafting things in alchemy you can do that in Pathfinder you're given quite literally an immense list of Feats so as long as you meet prerequisites you can sort of mold your character as you see fit coming over from fifth edition this is going to seem incredibly overwhelming but don't let it when you first create your character you have to pick a few Feats and then after that it's just once every single time that you level up you look at your feet so you're gonna probably be doing it in downtime it's not a big deal but it does give you lots more room for flexibility if you're into that thing one final difference with character creation and character customization is that Wizards of the Coast has not really given us a lot of new character classes in fact they've given us one since the birth of fifth edition the the officer paizo on the other hand loves to crank out new character classes with all of their new books and all of their new releases there are a ton of new character classes and that means there's lots more class Feats another critical difference between these two systems is criticals everyone's rolling on d20s and when we see a 20 we're going to be expecting results in D and D that D20 will be an automatic critical for a weapon attack and if it's a skill check some people house rule whether that's a critical or not per the rules it doesn't always mean that it is of what critical but the critical fails this works the same way rolling a one of the D20 critical failure for attack rolls not so much always automatically critical for skill checks with this system you could run into games where no critical failures or successes happen just because of pure luck you can just kind of be within the middle nebulous area where nothing exciting happens Pathfinder second edition offers more opportunities for criticals and more opportunities for critical fumbles you get this because you can also get criticals by getting 10 over the armor class or difficulty class that they're rolling against in Pathfinder you can critically hit and critically fumble without rolling 1 and 20. here's how we do it so if the check you needed to make was 17 and you rolled the dice you didn't get a net 20 but after all your modifiers it comes to 27. you can still change that success into a critical success and he's still critical I love that's my favorite part but that also means the opposite if you roll low and that same check was 17 but you rolled seven I could turn that failure into critical failure now what happens when we actually roll ones and twenties on our checks in Pathfinder when we rolled 20s we upgrade the level of success that we have had and we roll once we downgrade that success there's four levels of success that's critical fumble failure success critical success those four so let's say the difficulty check was really easy maybe the difficulty check for something we needed to do is five we rolled the dice we got a one and even after all the modifiers we have a seven that does not mean we succeed that means that that role would have succeeded but because we rolled a one it failed because there's more of these really great results and really terrible results it's going to result in a more swingier game where there's going to be a lot more variation between how combat is going the minute you bust out the Pathfinder beginner box you're going to notice that modifiers are a lot different in Pathfinder than they are in 5th edition how can modifiers be drastically different in one of these games versus the other well Dungeons and Dragons tries its hardest to keep the maths tight they never let the numbers get very high even if you're getting into like levels 10 or higher the main thing that's going to be bumping up your modifier in fifth edition is something called your proficiency bonus every single character gets this and it is a static increase from Level 1 to 20 and it is the same regardless of the character class that you're playing it starts off at a plus two and if you get to all the way to level 20 it's at a plus six so even at level 20 you're going to have a base of plus 11 at the highest level in DND and then if you're rolling your skill checks and you get Proficiency in those maybe if you're a rogue or a Bard and you have expertise you can bump it up a little bit more but for the most part those numbers are pretty tight not necessarily modifiers but your armor class in 5th edition never really increases all that much throughout your adventures either it sort of stays static unless you bump up your ability score and dexterity or you have magic items that are going to increase it this means that low-level creatures in D and D they can still hit you even though you're like level 10 like got like a pack of goblins you know they can still they can still Whittle away at you even though you can one shot them very easily which brings us to Pathfinder Where pretty much on the regular you're going to be rolling like plus 20 something in your best stats at level one it's kind of like culture shock you're like okay here we go Pathfinder does not shy away from high number modifiers getting 10 plus and much much more than that by the time you get to level 20 that is not uncommon that is what is going to happen we're still new to Pathfinder so we haven't hit higher levels but from what we've seen in red online the map behind this system is incredibly tight for you and the Monsters the reason that it's like this is so that it doesn't break that brand new fan fancy critical hit and critical fumble system that they cooked up for Pathfinder 2E part of the reason that your modifiers grow is because every single time you level up in Pathfinder a lot of your things are always going to be increasing by one like your proficiency bonuses your armor class goes up your spell checks your attack bonuses everything is going up constantly in Pathfinder 2E this means that low level scum and monsters and evil they're not going to be able to even touch you as you grow up certain levels another similar system we have between the two are advantage and disadvantage from 5th edition and bonuses and penalties from Pathfinder they work very similarly Advantage disadvantage bonuses penalties these are great tools for dams jams alike to work with their players if there's something that they feel a player should be really good at easy to do Advantage bonus if there's something that they think is difficult for this player to to do disadvantage penalties easiest example in DND is that a barbarian while raging has advantage on the strength checks in Pathfinder this would look more like plus five to athletic bonus in Pathfinder there are penalties to subsequent attacks so three actions you want to make an attack with every action it's going to be at a negative 5 on the second attack negative 10 on the third attack so by the third attack if you're using a plus eight Rapier that attack is going to be at negative two in D and D rolling disadvantage or advantage means you roll the 2d20s take the higher or lesser result on average this tends to be plus five or negative five plus five for Advantage negative five for disadvantage so if we wanted to really translate that into Pathfinder you could just do things like okay uh plus five on your next check uh negative five on your Athletics because that it's a really Rocky terrain alright let's talk about resting healing and dying in Dungeons and Dragons 5e and Pathfinder in D and D anytime you go to rest for eight hours you immediately heal up all of your hit points it doesn't matter if you were as close to death as humanly possible or if you only are missing one or two HP you go back to full you can also take a short rest which is one hour long and you can roll some hit dice which is based on your character class and your level and you can restore some hit points that way if you take a fetish strike and it brings you down to less than zero hit points you then have to start making death saves while you're unconscious death saves mechanically work that while it's your turn you can't do anything except make a death-saving throw you roll a D20 and this is a flat roll which means you do not add any modifiers you're trying to roll a 10 or higher you need to get three successes to come back to life if you roll three failures you're dead if you roll a critical success you get up immediately and you have one hit point you're heroically revived you're like I wasn't really dead just a flesh wound on the flip side of that deadly coin if you roll a critical fumble slash critical failure you are going to get two failures for those death saving throws and again all you need to do is roll three of them total and yet dad the other thing that can kill you outright is if you take like a shitload of damage and it brings you down to like negative what like your HP is your max HP so if you're at like 20 HP and you go to like negative 20 HP and one attack I think that just outright instantly kills you it's pretty rare in Pathfinder if you rest for eight hours you are going to regain hit points based on your Constitution modifier multiplied against your level so healing is going to happen a little bit slower in Pathfinder but if you have like a cleric or someone that can heal in the party they regain all of their lost spells and they can start healing the rest of the party during the day which I sort of like because at least in the fiction of it that's happening within the world you have the cleric that's doing lay on hands or whatever and they're healing you with magic whereas in Dungeons and Dragons you just are like stabbed up the Wazoo and you're just filled with holes and you go to bed for eight hours and you wake up and you're like I feel great they're like dude you were almost dead last night I could really go for some bangers and mash just uh we're point me to the nearest porridge I got to take a but I'm gonna be good I'm perfectly fine all right dying dying is drastically different in Pathfinder 2E it is a little bit cumbersome and a little bit weird the first time you read it do not get intimidated by it because I think it's really really well done and once you sort of experience it in Pathfinder 2E you're gonna be like I like it I like it a lot dying in Pathfinder 2E is all about the dying condition which you receive when your hit points drop below zero you get dying one as a condition and what you're trying to do is lower your dying condition to dying zero in which case you will then be given a wounded condition and then you can you can then be healed or you'll get a hit point after an hour or something but on the flip side of that you're going to be making recovery checks and the recovery checks are going to be either lowering your dying condition if you succeed at them or if you're failing at them they're going to be going up and if you ever reach dying for you are dead so let's sort of backtrack let's sort of figure this all out so you drop you have the dying one condition now you have to start making recovery checks on your turn plus you also have to move in turn order just before the creature that took you down to zero HP so a recovery check means you're rolling a D20 and it's a flat check which means there's no modifiers so you just roll it and you're hoping to roll higher than what you need to succeed at in this case if you have dying one it's going to be 10 plus your dying condition which means 10 plus 1 which is 11. so you need to roll an 11 or higher on a D20 with no modifiers if you get a critical success you lower your dying condition by two if you get a regular success you lower it by one if you get a failure it raises by one and if you get a fumble slash critical failure it raises by two so if you have dying one and you get a critical failure you roll a one you are now going to be at Dying Three you're following me you're still with me let's say you're able to lower your dying condition down to zero that means that you are you're just unconscious at this point people can heal you magically or if you wait a long enough time you'll regain one hit one I think it's like an hour or so but you get the wounded one condition what the hell does wounded one mean well if you drop down below zero hit points again in the same combat or in the same day I think you are going to add whatever your wound level is to your dying level so that means instead of starting off at dying one you're going to start off at dying two meaning that you're more likely to hit dying four and therefore die faster the other way that you can get out of dying immediately is that in Pathfinder 2E everybody gets what's called hero points when they start a session it sort of works like inspiration in D d5e except you can use a hero point to immediately get up and it's like a heroic thing that's happening it's like I'm Not Dead Rising up to slay these beasts I'm not gonna lie the very first time I read the dying rules for Pathfinder 2E my eyes crossed and I was like what am I reading but I read them again I digested them I watched the video it was probably like no Nat uh and it made perfect sense and it makes so much sense again when I think about the fiction of it I like how when you rest you're only recovering a little bit of HP you need magical healing if you want to recover faster with the dying condition and the wounded condition and how this all works it makes it so that you just can't keep dropping in combat with zero consequences that's something that can happen in 5th edition and it's pretty annoying as a dungeon master when people are just dropping and then go the bar goes by oh healing word he's back up oh he dropped again healing word he's back up oh cleric uh ooh Paladin walks by he dropped again lay on hands bring him back up there's so many ways to recover magically in fifth edition that death doesn't even seem like some something that could possibly happen in most games another pretty discernible difference are player roles players make all of their checks and make all of their checks out in the open for all to see in Pathfinder it's played a little differently there are roles there are checks called secret checks these checks are player checks that are made by the game master known only to the game master and not any other player these checks are checks that are made to conceal checks that are made to sense or recall information so if you wanted to conceal yourself or an object you wanted to sense the motives of a creature or an NPC or if you wanted to recall information recall knowledge any check that the player should not be aware of they succeeded or didn't succeed should be rolled by the game master the very last difference that kamo and I have noticed is that these two products are supported entirely differently by the companies that create them Dungeons and Dragons has an incredibly slow release of books you're going to get about four maybe five books throughout the entire year they almost come out quarterly and they all sort of follow the same release schedule every single year I think it used to be four books when 5V was was brand spanking new and they've upped it to like six books now they usually support the game each year with one giant campaign that's going to take you like three years to play through then they have a collection of Adventures like one shots that you can that you can drop into any campaign then they have something that's like player facing like fisbin's guide to dragons then they have like a campaign setting and usually a couple of other things that's kind of how the support has worked it's four or five books every single year for the entirety of the product line which will be coming to an end next year pizo on the other hand it's like they have so much Pathfinder content that they they can't contain themselves they're releasing stuff almost every single month instead of releasing these big Grand campaigns paizo releases Adventure paths these can be one three or six little books that they release once a month in consecutive months so that if you're playing every single week you should be able to sort of keep up with the adventure path as it comes out on top of that they release books about magic books about death books about the impossible lands books about campaign settings you got books about guns you have books about treasure they are cranking out books for Pathfinder like it's going out of style some people view this as a negative because it leads to the game master sort of having to keep up with with with bloat almost because there's like if they don't keep up with all the books they're like uh yeah I want to play a gunslinger from this book and if you don't have it you're like yeah sure play that but you know what all the rules are online for all these things so you should be able to figure out and the math in the way that Pathfinders balance you'll be fine the reason that fifth edition had such a slow trickle of products coming out to support the game was because Wizards felt that with fourth edition they inundated players with splat books and all of these different books there was almost like a monthly release of books this led to Quality Control issues and this led to people being just like there's too much of this and I'm not buying it and so and that led to a Low Book Sales but that had more to do probably with the system not selling well Piezo is amazing with their support you have like three bestiaries at this point they have an advanced players guide they have a advanced game Masters Guide they go above and beyond someone like me coming from Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition seeing all of this support it's like a kid in a candy store I'm like I don't know what to buy I there's still there's so much of this stuff I just want to get my hands on all of it it all looks so cool and it has amazing artwork and the the books I've only been playing for a little while but I've already purchased like six or seven Pathfinder books because that's how awesome they look I keep getting sucked in by them so yeah it's a noticeable difference just how much stuff paizo produces for Pathfinder compared to Wizards of the Coast it's a better supported system and that's it those are the eight biggest differences that as dungeon Masters we have noticed going into Pathfinder for the first time but we have one other Phantom difference and what is that not really a difference at all we have discovered that Pathfinder 2E and Dungeons and Dragons 5e are almost identical when it comes to difficulty of learning the systems I am being brought back to my first days of 5e and fumbling over a lot of things and getting a lot of things wrong if you can play 5e you can play Pathfinder 2E we are living proof of that if you can learn to play one you can also learn to play the other they are to run yes they are just as dense as one another the core cogs that make the engine run are similar enough to our brains it's just changing up a few different things here and there yeah we're not going from fifth edition to like Star Wars RPG yeah really have they own one of these guys what are these symbols I love this system myself but hey it took me a lot longer to learn that than to learn Pathfinder DND really gives you the basics and then suggests that you can add everything else to it to make a complex and Pathfinder gives you everything it front loads it and if you don't want to use everything you can remove it so they essentially become the same game yeah right you're not wrong but I do like that Pathfinder is front loading that um expectation expectation that those kinds of roles that the player wouldn't know the result of will only be seen by the GM made by the GM and if players really have a problem with that at the table then fine yeah don't need to use it I really like the way that Pathfinder 2E handles healing I like the way it handles resting and I like the way it handles dying I one of my favorite things in any tabletop role-playing game is the downtime between Adventures what your characters are getting up to while they're just hanging around a town rolling on like a carousing chart I love that stuff it's so it brings my characters to life and I love it when dungeon Masters and game Masters include that in fifth edition I've played through like the entire curse of straw campaign and because you heal so fast in that like it took us like two years to run through that campaign but in Raven Loft time I think we completed the whole thing in like 35 days or something so you were stabbed a total of 119 times you were eviscerated 22 times you have restuffed your guts into your body I was a war Forge Clare so it's okay okay no not not as much intestine no no my body some more oil and tubing yeah okay but so you've lost about 147 gallons of Pennzoil yeah but I but I again I'm always thinking about the fiction of what's happening at the table and the Pathfinder rules are like when I they're a little bit more realistic I mean not really but like I buy into them I love saying believable believable there you go yeah well the suspension of disbelief is is easier to swallow yes right so I like that and especially with the way dyeing works because you're not getting that that guy that's just dropping popping up dropping popping up and there's no consequences uh in fifth edition I always use the variant rule where if you drop multiple times in combat or if you get taken out with like a critical hit you're coming out of that thing with a permanent injury or something I always use that rule because there's not enough consequences in 5e for my for my tables me neither I don't like the party Dynamic when that is happening and it doesn't stop if you don't do something about it so I I do also love that variant role if someone is throwing their body at the danger and all the rest of the party can do is keep them alive right heal them back up and even the players that aren't healers are going over and trying to do medicine checks shoving a potion in his face yeah and sometimes it the easiest thing instead of taking the player aside and telling them to stop playing the way they're playing adding that role is just a better solution yeah for everyone so those are the differences that we've noticed we like a lot of the differences we don't necessarily think that like one system is like drastically better than the other they're just different but right now being new and this is the shiny ball that we're playing with we're digging a lot of the stuff that we're noticing I'm came on I'm wolf where two dungeon Masters learning to play Pathfinder join us on our journey we're basic glitches Please Subscribe till the dead for notifications we want to help out brand new Pathfinder players as much as possible go ahead and check out this video right here where we talk about online resources to help new players getting into Pathfinder 2E lateralicious bye

Channel: Basic Liches

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Id: 78G3z4UY70o

Length: 29min 51sec (1791 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 24 2023