huh, that’s news to me. what an odd thing to change.
I feel like I’m the only one who liked 3.5 a lot, but found Pathfinder very dull. I remember there being a ton of wacky options that interested me in 3.5. Things like the Thrallherd (who gets a steady stream of expendable minions) or the Binder (who can almost completely change ability sets regularly) or or that guy I made who was a pack of raptors. It was often wildly unbalanced and my characters always kinda sucked compared to the rest of the party, but there were always interesting things to build a character around. In Pathfinder, it felt like they sanded the edges off so much that the only thing I had to do was get my numbers as high as possible. Like, there’s the Alchemist guy who’s supposed to have these Jekyll & Hyde transformation potions, but all they really do is add a few stat points here or there. It just didn’t work for me.
What I’ve read of 5E sounds pretty great. I’m really hoping to get a chance to give it a try soon.
Huh–with due respect to the awesome weirdness of those characters, my experience is the opposite. I felt like Pathfinder made certain character types much more interesting to play. In 3.5, for example, I had little interest in playing any sort of melee warrior, because they did the same damned thing almost every round. In Pathfinder, the difference between the paladin (who makes the interesting choice whether to share her smite, where to place her companion animal, etc.) and the bloodrager (who’s busy deciding whether to take the extra intimidation attack at the risk of missing and ending the intimidation on the target, as well as whether shredding his own AC in order to get extra AoOs is worth it) is pretty significant, far more significant than I remember it being in 3.x.
The flip side is that, where in 3.x I could suggest a casual gamer play a fighter and stay away from the druid, in Pathfinder every character is complicated. I used to get frustrated with the person in our group who played a ranger and could never seem to remember what her attack bonus was, until I started playing a Pathfinder archer and realized how fiddly things are in the game.
It was fantastic that Pathfinder stepped in to become available during the era of 4th edition. If you’re not familiar with it, there was a bit of a controversy in that many of us felt like 4e felt more like a really involved board game than like an RPG. I don’t have all the Pathfinder materials (though I do believe I’ll invest in that Humble Bundle hoard) but it seemed like it quickly got as glutted with products as 3.5, and in fact blew away the memories I had of the class kits and Powers & Options from 2nd edition.
With the bundle, you can at least get into Pathfinder without having to drop a huge wad on all the supplements. Getting started in 5e, for a player, means about $50 for the Player’s Handbook. For the GM, $150 for the Player’s Handbook, DMG and Monster Manual. Then you may want to buy adventures.One of the nice things Paizo did with Pathfinder was produce a number of adventure lines, which I recall being well regarded, though I’ve only seen Rise of the Runelords. The Pathfinder Humble Bundle comes with three out of six parts of one adventure path. Wizards now seems to be concentrating on adventure paths over the traditional mostly-power-creep-manuals marketing strategy.
Pathfinder’s various supplements are actually not much derided for power creep. Often, it seems like the options they offer might as well have been reduced to a point system and been done with. It would be a less complicated way to tweak your numbers. Somebody has surely figured out how to abuse it, of course, but it’s mostly just lets you micromanage your build without a lot of power mad loopholes. 5e has a few customization options, but it’s actually quite simple and straightforward and you don’t need more than the Player’s Handbook to use all the options available to you.
If you go with Pathfinder, there’s a spreadsheet good for managing all your build options:
The core is based on my own sCoreGen which I made for the Pathfinder open beta test years ago, but Adam has done substantial work to keep up with all the supplements that started flooding out after the official release, and redesigning the interface to look more like the old 3e HeroForge.
If you want to try 5e, the best chargen I’ve seen is ForgedAnvil. They lock it so you can’t tweak the background, which is against my own philosophy of chargen spreadsheet design, but what the hell?
http://www.enworld.org/forum/rpgdownloads.php?do=download&downloadid=1234
I think it’s there probably exactly to PREVENT people from being able to use a first level spell to produce a 100% safe hiding place. But here’s the official text. (Pathfinder is handy for these sorts of discussions since all this stuff is online for free.)
I’d contest the idea that every character type in Pathfinder is complicated; The fighter is not appreciably changed from 3.X - they get a few more passive bonuses (Yay, +1 to will saves every few levels) but they’re still just the same bland guy with a big melee bonus and some extra feats that usually just mean that you build to do one type of thing (Power attack with 2H weapon, dual wield, or whatever) and do that thing every round.
Honestly, this is the biggest problem with all non-casters in 3Xfinder - the majority of the decision making is done during level up, and all you actually do during a fight is try to find the optimal way to do the Thing That Your Character Does.
That’s Tiny Hut, a third level spell. Rope trick is second level :). And yeah, I think they’re trying to make it a little harder: you at least have to find some out-of-the-way place to cast rope trick, or else you can be found.
It’s definitely true that casters are far more trouble in combat than fighter-types. I made the mistake last campaign of taking a wizard cohort for my cleric PC, because we had no arcane caster in the party. It was awful trying to figure out my actions each turn. Switched to an archer cohort, and no problem.
Fighter-types, it’s true, have more interesting choices at level-up than each round. But there are still choices (choosing to ready-to-disrupt saved our butts several times, and positioning can be key, and sometimes it’s important to turn off power attack or deadly aim or whatever). And the real fiddly thing with fighter types is figuring out attack and damage bonuses from attack to attack: they can change almost constantly. So you were knocked prone and grappled last round, you have power attack, prayer, and haste up, and you’re now using your less-advantageous small weapon; quick, what’s your attack and damage bonus for each iterative attack, plus haste?
Ay ay ay.
But none of this was changed from 3X to Pathfinder.
Actually, if you have problems with having to do lots of math to figure out whether you succeeded at something, I’d suggest you not play D&D at all. There are lots of games out there that will produce an entertaining RPG experience without you needing to calculate what your hasted, prone, off hand attack against flatfooted AC is.
Edit: Also, whoops, linked to the wrong spell. I’m sure everyone can find Rope Trick if they want. 
It’s been many years since I played 3.x but I remember the calculations being less onerous then, because there were fewer conditions. Not much less onerous, but somewhat less. The fiddliness of Pathfinder is a feature, not a bug.
5E is much more streamlined in this regard (from the little I’ve played of it). Most of the things that previously would grant a bonus or penalty instead grant advantage or disadvantage. You have your rare effect like Bless, but for the most part you’re not doing a bunch of addition and subtraction.
As for myself, I don’t have a problem anymore with being sure I include all the penalties and bonuses, because I’ve spent about an hour setting up a spreadsheet (someone else did the lion’s share of the work, but it still took me about an hour to customize the spreadsheet for myself), so I can activate and deactivate various effects and get the calculated bonuses done for me.
I greatly enjoy the fiddly aspect of Pathfinder, but it’s incredibly fiddly. Folks who don’t like that should look for a different game.
I question the value of any tabletop game that benefits from a spreadsheet. 
I’ve certainly not earned any money off of it, if that’s what you mean by “value.”
But if you’re asking if I had fun with it–well, I’ve created multiple documents about the character, including spreadsheets, to amuse myself. If spreadsheets aren’t your idea of fun, I can respect that, but leave me to my nerd joy :).
Pathfinder is sometimes like Edgar Rice Burroughs for accountants. If that doesn’t appeal, that’s fine.
There are no tabletop games that cannot benefit from a spreadsheet. Mind you, I have no idea how we managed to get by in 1st and 2nd Edition for so many years without a spreadsheet to keep track of all that crap. I mean, you could do without a spreadsheet, but I don’t really want to go back to scribbling in the margins of my character sheet.
My group plays 5th edition every week since it launched, and we are very happy with it. It has a very good balance between role playing and crunch.
It is very easy to run as a DM, and the investment is very small. PHB, DMG, MM is all you really need.
The modules they have released so far are quite good, and this month they release the new one which is set in Ravenloft.
Good characters need more than a sheet, to be sure. We had folders of material for 1st-2nd Ed. But most of it was role-playing and setting material, nothing that could benefit from a spreadsheet.
Some of our players didn’t really look at numbers or pay attention to game mechanics at all, beyond what they were told they needed on a roll.
On what do you base this assertion? Because stating it like that just makes it sound like you’ve played a bunch of complicated games (1st and 2nd edition AD&D were, in my opinion, overcomplicated).
Just in the D&D-Fantasy vein, a character in Dungeon World gets no benefit from being transformed into a spreadsheet, except that it becomes slightly more irritating to manage your inventory.
In fact, I can only think of one game that I play these days that receives any benefit from spreadsheet style calculations.
Yeah; Background and actual CHARACTER benefits from being written down, but not as a spreadsheet.
$90+ isn’t really a “small investment” unless you’ve become accustomed to paying hundreds of dollars for tons and tons of RPG books.
Agreed. I can’t imagine playing Dungeon World, Timewatch, White Wolf games, Paranoia, Dread, Fiasco, Savage Worlds, or any other system needing a spreadsheet like D&D/Pathfinder 3.x have. I enjoy that aspect of the game, but I certainly enjoy games without that aspect as well.
You mean, any GM who used to know the rules back in the days of 2nd edition, but hasn’t kept up with them since. There is no such rule in 3.x. There is one oblique reference to such a rule, but the rule itself is absent.
Yeah, nerfing a spell like Rope Trick is pointless, IMO. I find it a pretty weird spell anyway. Either you want to have a second level spell that lets people rest safely or you don’t. If you don’t, remove the spell entirely from the game. If you do, make it have a flat 8-hour duration, and make it very safe from detection.
Making it an hour per level makes it consistent with other spells, but useless to casters when they can first get it, and by the time they can use it effectively, they’re almost at the point where they can cast teleport instead. It’s not an entirely useless spell, but I think it’d be improved by simplification.
I dunno, hiding for an hour or two can calm things down or cause wandering monsters to wander off in boredom.
Hell, I’ve made a chargen spreadsheet for even Savage Worlds. Yes, you don’t get a million bonuses to keep track of, but when designing or leveling your character your options may be few and simple to work out, but it’s still useful to have the computer show you everything you’re eligible for and fill out the character sheet for you. Plus, I like to have it generate stat blocks that can be posted to various gaming BBSes.
Funny thing about Savage Worlds is that when you get down to dealing out and taking damage, the rules are muddiest where they are the most crucial. Even the healing rules need to be squinted at very carefully because you can kill the patient while trying to kill them. I’ve reduced the whole thing to flow charts, but it’s the kind of thing where a spreadsheet could help a lot with making sure you’re doing this tricky mechanic right.
I’m not familiar with Savage Worlds, but that doesn’t encourage me to try it.