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Wizards of the Coast, who own Dungeons and Dragons, have been in the news lately because their OGL 1.1 was leaked. The OGL was an open source-like license, originally from 2000, which allowed people to create D&D-related works and which was supposed to not be revocable, as confirmed by its drafters. WOTC is trying to revoke it by using a clause referring to "authorized" versions of the license and claiming to have de-authorized the earlier license. The new replacement license requires giving 25% of your revenue to WOTC, makes you send a copy of your content to WOTC which they can then publish for free, and they can revoke it at any time making all your products instantly unsalable.
After backlash from fans, WOTC officially released a 1.2 license instead, which has similar problems, but worded a bit more subtly.
The culture war element comes from this clause:
I hope the problems with this are obvious to everyone here. I absolutely don't want a world where people with the wrong political beliefs can be barred from producing game materials. But every objection I've seen to this clause by fans has been a twenty Stalins objection: WOTC has produced discriminatory material in the past and can't be trusted to do this properly. There have been calls to have WOTC outsource this to an independent tribunal. Just, take it out because even people with unpopular opinions should be able to put them in games? No, nobody believes that.
(Links are trivial to google, but it's hard to find a site that has everything correct all at the same time, and is up to date as well, and also engages in trustworthy journalism in general. This EFF post at least covers part of the initial controversy, though you'll have to follow links to see what's in the license.)
I think it's a) coordination and b) indie game designers aren't very good at designing for a mass audience. Playing Dungeons and Dragons takes understanding a lot of rules, and while nerds are willing to learn lots of rules and may even have fun doing so, most people want to minimize their rule-learning. So they're inclined to learn the rules to the single most popular RPG and never bother spending five hours learning another system that ultimately still gives a similar experience to Dungeons and Dragons.
Secondly, I believe that for some reason Dungeons and Dragons is just more fun for casuals than other games like Pathfinder are. I don't know exactly why, although I can make guesses, but I'm pretty confident it's true. I think it might be that DnD is both decently structured while being easy to play, while most other RPGs are either very complex or very unstructured, either of which are unappealing to casuals. And it achieves this by putting a lot of work on the Dungeon Master and comparatively little on the regular players, so for a group with 1 nerd and 4 casuals, it's a fun experience for everyone.
I mean, Pathfinder is D&D. Pathfinder 1e is just a heavily house ruled version of D&D 3.5e.
I definitely think part of D&D 5e's success has been its relative simplicity, and accessibility compared to past versions of D&D. I'm playing 5e with a former English major, and when we tried to switch to Pathfinder 1e, the increased complexity during character creation was enough to get him to ask the group to just do a 5e campaign.
I have one friend who is a masseuse, who loved the concept of D&D but found the rules overwhelming. She's interested in doing micro-RPG one shots, but feels like she could never do D&D again.
I love Pathfinder but hate character creation. There's already a min-max template out there somewhere, and my gaming group has 1-2 people who have them already memorized. There's no point in bringing an suboptimal build to the table.
The result is I get this ugly mix of spending a couple hours stumbling through building something, doing an 80% good job because I'm not totally stupid but also we've never kept a campaign going past level 5 and the the gaps between each one are long enough that I forget some of the nuances.
Then we show up for our first session and we spend 2 hours adjusting it to one of the templates for the class anyway. Ugh.
Playing is a blast, but I hate the grind of using sub-optimal tools for creation beforehand.
I would say there's no point in min-maxing, and you should stop doing that. Doing that sucks the fun out of any game (not just Pathfinder), so of course you don't have fun with character creation. You can still have just as much fun, if not more fun, with a suboptimal character you built with a fun idea in mind.
I understand what you're saying here - I think it depends on the playgroup.
3 of the dudes in our group can GM reliably. 2 of them are very take-no-prisoners, to the point where we need one to be the player's advocate when the other is GM. You can't really survive in those games if you're doing C-level builds, and if you're B-level you'll spend a lot of time in combat taking cover and not doing much (to say nothing of having the non-combat skills to move things forward).
In a sense my attitude is a reflection of general problems with the group's ability to stick around with long campaigns. A mediocre build can be rectified over many levels and the "fun" element can be fleshed out. They're in a weird space where they get bored once they hit certain levels and so even if they do make the commitment for a long campaign they try to cut it off for something new! Unbelievably cool universes have been left on the table after just 10-15 sessions.
It's still an absolute blast, but it's made the character creation part of the equation the least fun.
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