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Gonna be honest, I consider myself pretty into TTRPGs and even I don’t know what the deal is with Pathfinder. I looked at it when the first edition came out and it seemed like “D&D 3.75” so I didn’t see a reason to bother with it when I already had so many books for 3.x. I have heard the current edition is doing its own thing but haven’t bought the book to see what that thing is.
As far as I know, Pathfinder 1E was a continuation of D&D 3.5 after they moved on to D&D 4E. I think Pathfinder 1E is compatible with D&D 3.5, but don’t quote me on that. Pathfinder 2E is a much more tightly balanced system, and is probably best for its 4 degrees of success, where 10 over a DC is a critical success and 10 under is a critical failure.
Also, Pathfinder has way more options to customize your character as you level up compared to D&D 5E.
That’s the whole point. Pathfinder’s origin is a collaboration of people looking at DnD4 and thinking “we can do better”… And for quite some time they were right as DnD’s 4th edition was really that unpopular.
Thats not quite right - PF as much originated in 4e existing at all, as 3.x was promised to be the definitive system you could use forever (admittedly this was never going to be true) and 4e dropped the OGL, so Paizo, which includes some of the original OGL writers and 3.x designers, could no longer produce materials for it.
It was only when they were designing 2e that they looked at 4e and decided they could do better, taking many of the underlying mechanics and combining them with 3.x’s range of choice.
Purely customization. Long-term players of 3.5 started doing wacky multi-class combos to make their character more unique. WOTC chose to keep it simple with 4th ed and i think successfully streamlined the rules in 5th. Pathfinder chose to add greater customization to each player class so that while multiclassing is still an option, a straight class PC can still be quite distinct.
