The first reason should be enough

„There are ways to make it simpler” completely misses the point of something being simple.

That's... not the point of the meme though:-).

If you want simple, and have an entire IT staff backing you, get Windows.

If you want simple and want elegant, get Mac OSX.

Linux is not that simple (unless everything just happens to work), but it is nice for people to have choices:-).

Pro-Tip: don't do what others tell you - find what works best for you and enjoy it:-).
- And you just doubled down on missing the point.
Well, if you have a techy person take an hour to set it up for you, it can be simple for the end user, without them having to do anything technical themselves.
Welcome to this community in a nutshell. Any amount of friction is enough to lose significant portions of your audience

Just subjected my pathfinder group to this

You mean your mum and the goldfish? I don't know of any other people who play it.
- I play with a group now! All you have to do is become forever DM...

This is deadass making me reconsider dnd, thanks /gen

Also, with dnd, you buy a physical book and you own it forever right? Physical books don't have DRM, unless there's something I'm missing.

Correct about physical books, and I doubt physical books are going away. However, WotC has been leaning towards digital distribution, and hired on people with experience in software-as-a-service.

By all means, keep playing the version of the game you own! But it looks like the future of D&D might make a lot of content available to rent, not to own. Hopefully I'm wrong, but honestly, there are plenty of other games that let you own your stuff.
- It wouldn't bother me renting campaigns if it was much cheaper than the print version. It isnt like I am going to play it again or even DM an entire old campaign.
  
  But you know it will be the same price cause fuck us
From what I know, it's not an exact match, unless there's something going on with virtual tabletops.

The ownership difference I know of matters more for third party creators. Under D&D's OGL (at least the new versions,) Wizards can own anything created with it (or so I've heard.) Pathfinder's ORC (used for 2e at least) is explicitly unowned by Paizo so they couldn't even put such a clause in there if they wanted to.

Other than that, both licenses pretty much allow you to mod as you wish, and publish said mods for profit.
Correct and you can build an impressive collection.

I mean... no one can take my physical d&d books or pdfs or miniatures...? I'm sure I could 'buy' online copies of stuff but why would anyone?

True, but (a) IIRC, not all 5e books are even available as PDFs, and (b) D&D seems to be leaning towards a service business model. I doubt they'll get rid of books entirely, but still, Paizo has a more straightforward "buy the thing, own the thing" approach.

I don't know. I played 3.5 and 5e and I like the 5e rules way more than 3.5. Isn't PF very close to 3.5?

First edition Pathfinder was very close to 3.5. Many people called it 3.75e.

While some of the D&D bones are still there, Second edition Pathfinder is very much its own thing.

As D&D stands right now I am fine with their model. It just isn't that important to me that when I am crafting a one shot to sell that I have to slap a picture on the second page saying that I agree Wizards of the Coast owns D&D.

If they go back to that nightmare a year ago I will probably get into Pathfinder

I mean.. do you trust that they won’t?

They probably will as soon as they can without significant losses.
- No but this is the way the world is going to work. The company is awesome and then it gets shitty. Just got to keep on moving forward. Hopping from success to success.
What happened 1 year ago?
- The D&D Open Game License controversy, explained
- Basically they wanted to make it world of Warcraft
Nothing wrong with playing more DnD but Paizo jas definitely shown they care more about the community than Wizards. All the rules being free online is just absolutely banging and makes for better community built tools than DnD ever had

I mean, D&D 5th edition is licensed CC-BY, which is VERY open source.

The base ruleset (SRD) only. Everything else is OGL, which has proven to be as open as ~~Wizards~~ Hasbro wants to make it.
- Yeah. On the face of it, it's a good move, but the full story is far worse.
  
  They "updated" the OGL to be far more restrictive, impose unsustainable fees past a certain level of gross profit, and would grant WotC the full right to use, sell, and even license your work to others, irrevocably.
  
  They tried to de-authorize the original OGL retroactively, fully against the spirit and practice of the license, using some legal chicanery. While the OGL 1.0a was perpetual, it didn't use the word irrevocable. (WotC's rights to your content, of course, were clearly put in irrevocable terms).
  
  They only moved to CC-BY after public outcry. While the results were good, it was for PR, not out of the goodness of their hearts.
  
  There's a new edition coming anyway. Unless they surprise me and put it under CC-BY as well, I'm betting they'll try again to use a really restrictive license.
  
  Also, even though WotC walked back from de-authorizing the OGL 1.0a, the damage was done. Every publisher I'm aware of that had used it has since moved away from it entirely, with surprisingly little change to the product.

I'll stick with old-school DnD thanks

But otherwise sure

gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw